Shinsuke Shimojo: Sensory substitution, and the third kind of “qualia”

Neuroaesthetics | Symposium


Symposium im ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie,
22.-24. November 2012
In Kooperation und mit Unterstützung der Gemeinnützigen
Hertie-Stiftung.


“Qualia” to some refers to the absolute, unique quality of a
conscious sensory
experience, which may not be “explained away” by neurophysiology.
Whereas
we do not endorse to the qualia as a “hard” (that is impossible
in principle)
problem for science, we still agree that the current sensory
sciences fail to
critically characterize such unique quality of sensory
experiences.
We aim to find insights in the latest progresses of sensory
substitution. The
“vOICe” is one of such devices translating visual into auditory
inputs for blind people. There are some superusers who claim
“visual” experiences. Moreover, some of them showed neural
activity in the visual cortical areas in fMRI, when engaged in a
variety of tasks relying on this type of device.
Our strategy is to come up with a brief list of psychophysical
and
neuroscientific criteria for “vision-like” processing, and to
search for empirical evidence,
including (1) cortical mapping of space via the device, (2)
accomplishment of
perceptual constancy, and (3) intrinsic (synesthesia-like)
crossmodal mapping.
The results suggest that “qualia”, if one still wants to use such
a word, should be understood with regard to adaptive behavior.
Moreover, what such
training/experience accomplishes should be characterized best as
the third kind of “qualia”. Enrichment of sensory experiences due
to intrinsic and associative
mapping provides scientists and artists with ample opportunities.


Prof. Dr. Shinsuke Shimojo is an experimental
psychologist/cognitive
neuroscientist, with long-standing interests in visual
psychophysics and their
applications to visual illusions, cross-modal plasticity, human
emotion, preferences, and decision-making.
He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University
of Tokyo (1978, 1980), and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (1985).
He is currently Gertrude Baltimore Professor in Experimental
Psychology in the division of Biology/Computation and Neural
Systems at the California Institute of Technology. His laboratory
at Caltech has been applying
quantitative psychophysical techniques to understand human
implicit
perception and social behaviors, with applications of eye
tracking, fMRI, EEG, TMS and tDCS, and other techniques. He has
approximately 150 publications, including multiple papers in
high-impact journals, such as Nature, Science, Nature
Neuro-science, and Neuron. He is also known for his
collaborations with artists, and a science column (ASAHI
WEBRONZA).