HSCI-224: (Un) Common Sense

Sound. Sight. Touch. Smell. Taste. These are the means we use to perceive and understand our world. How can we push the limits of our senses to gain knowledge and advance ourselves as human beings? What other modes of perception are out there? As humans, the amount of information we can take in with our physiological sensors (our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin) is relatively limited. For example, dogs can travel through time with their nose, using smell to pick up past information and predict disease long before we can. Bats can use sound as sight by echolocation. Dragonflies can see perfectly in low light and over 5 times as fast. Advances in science and technology have allowed us to move well beyond our bodily limitations to gain a greater understanding of the material world from the atomic scale to the universal scale. How do these sense mechanisms work? What perceptual devices have we come up with to push each of these senses to their limits? How does this knowledge transform human progress? Can we gain a higher state of consciousness? What happens when our senses get mixed up? How do we make up for an absence of sense? This class will use lectures, discussion, and hands-on experimental work to develop a holistic scientific understanding of how the senses work and advanced sensing technology (i.e. microscopes, transducers, etc) with no need for prior high-level scientific knowledge or mathematics.