<p>I was just thinking that it seems like the most immediately accessible way to try to observe in greater detail how the electrical flows across synaptic connections constitute qualitative experience itself (color, sound, feelings) would basically be to follow them as far as we can. We probably already have a pretty good medical understanding of the eyes and ears. What is the furthest people have gone into the immediate neural circuitry connected to these organs or organs of a similar nature? I think I read the visual system is the single best understood system in modern neuroscience. Do we have anything close to comprehensive knowledge of where the electricity in the optic nerve travels to next, in/across the brain? And can we explore where/when qualia seem to arise by intervening at points in that structure? For example, if we send red light into the pupil, a human sees red. Could we feasibly try to stimulate the outermost part of the optic nerve at the identical frequency of red light, but just with electricity, to see if a human still sees “red”? And to keep going inwards to try to see if maybe we can stimulate the overall experience into distinct neural subchannels, seeing what each one does as we stimulate it in isolation? Surely at some point, we might get to the source point of qualia - the place where we realize a “signal” at that location creates the qualia “red”, somehow more internal in the brain.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-11-29T08:19:44.650Z
By the looks of it you could benefit a lot from introductory texts on sensory Neuroscience. For one, although sensory neurons are excitable by light, different populations of optic nerve fibers are not sensitive to different wavelengths. The photoreceptors are responsible for that. And how colors are perceived requires quite a long text in itself. And how these neurophysiological mechanisms of sensation translate to perception is yet another arena of intense research. In a nutshell, this question is too broad. Please familiarize yourself with the basics.
AliceD
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-11-29T08:20:48.063Z
A good place to start is the freely accessible [Neuroscience textbook from Purves](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470478509.neubb001012)
AliceD
<neuroscience><qualia>
What experiments have explored qualia by pursuing neural channels from their sensory inputs?
Julius Hamilton
# What experiments have explored qualia by pursuing neural channels from their sensory inputs?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2022-11-28)

I was just thinking that it seems like the most immediately accessible way to try to observe in greater detail how the electrical flows across synaptic connections constitute qualitative experience itself (color, sound, feelings) would basically be to follow them as far as we can. We probably already have a pretty good medical understanding of the eyes and ears. What is the furthest people have gone into the immediate neural circuitry connected to these organs or organs of a similar nature? I think I read the visual system is the single best understood system in modern neuroscience. Do we have anything close to comprehensive knowledge of where the electricity in the optic nerve travels to next, in/across the brain? And can we explore where/when qualia seem to arise by intervening at points in that structure? For example, if we send red light into the pupil, a human sees red. Could we feasibly try to stimulate the outermost part of the optic nerve at the identical frequency of red light, but just with electricity, to see if a human still sees “red”? And to keep going inwards to try to see if maybe we can stimulate the overall experience into distinct neural subchannels, seeing what each one does as we stimulate it in isolation? Surely at some point, we might get to the source point of qualia - the place where we realize a “signal” at that location creates the qualia “red”, somehow more internal in the brain.

**Tags:** neuroscience, qualia

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: By the looks of it you could benefit a lot from introductory texts on sensory Neuroscience. For one, although sensory neurons are excitable by light, different populations of optic nerve fibers are not sensitive to different wavelengths. The photoreceptors are responsible for that. And how colors are perceived requires quite a long text in itself. And how these neurophysiological mechanisms of sensation translate to perception is yet another arena of intense research. In a nutshell, this question is too broad. Please familiarize yourself with the basics.  
> **username_1**: A good place to start is the freely accessible [Neuroscience textbook from Purves](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470478509.neubb001012)  

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## 0 answers

