Perception of objects is indirect, mediated by ‘mental paint,’ or sense-data. Human beings possess five senses with which to perceive an object: hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling. Each of these five senses receives information in a very specific way, such as how ‘hearing’ involves the reception of vibrations in the immediate medium around one’s self by one’s ears and how ‘seeing’ involves the reception of wavelengths of light by one’s eyes. Whether it is one sense or another though, how this information is transmitted and processed all eventually involve the same system of the human body.
The nervous system, the collection and processes of the nerves within the body, is responsible for carrying the information received by those five senses and transmitting it to the brain. It carries this information via electrochemical signals to the brain, where the information is then processed. What this means, however, is that any object that is perceived by the brain, from any or all five senses, is actually just the electrochemical signals being received by the brain and converted in an appropriate fashion so as to be understood. Vibrations heard, for example, are not simply received and recognized as sound. They are received, converted, transmitted, and then processed as what the brain hears as sound. This multistep process is especially apparent when there is a problem within the nervous system. Such a problem might result in the externally testable flawed perception of objects, which would not occur with direct perception.
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