Citation

Author Website

https://vivo.brown.edu/display/jsimmons

Thread

Carolyn A. Ristau, Précis of: "Birds, Bats and Minds: Tales of a Revolutionary Scientist, Donald R. Griffin"

Abstract

Donald Griffin, who discovered that bats use echolocation to orient in the dark, also reintroduced to scientific consideration the question of whether animals are consciously aware of their worlds. What bats perceive by echolocation has become an important variant of the question. Bats sense the surrounding scene but use intrinsically auditory representations in which the timing of neural responses to their broadcasts and echoes directly affects what they perceive. They do not seem to transpose pulses and echoes entirely into vision-like spatial neural displays, but instead retain the timing of responses as a cause of perception.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License

Author Biography

James Simmons is a professor of Neuroscience at Brown University. He has been studying echolocation in bats from his graduate student time in E. G. Wever’s laboratory at Princeton University beginning in 1965, and has been at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Oregon before Brown. Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1862