*Anyway*… and then there’s synasthesia… which I think might be a naturally occurring, mild, wiring problem. Isn’t it the case that people who’ve suffered brain injuries, or bodily injuries, can end up feeling (tactile) sensations in the wrong places? If you could mischievously rewire someone’s head and send incoming signals from the ear, into the visual cortex instead of the appropriate sound-processing centres, presumably the visual cortex would interprate this as relevant incoming information and pass it on to the concious brain in visual form. I know less about how the signal gets started in the ear, but presumably there are cells which convert the energy from vibrations (‘sound’) into electrical signals, in the same way that the rhodopsin transmits the energy of the photon. The input device differs according to the sensory apparatus in question - in the eye, it’s photons hitting rhodopsin molecules and causing them to buckle*. All the brain is getting, after the initial input, is electrical potential changes travelling along axons and jumping across synapses, and frequency of signal is the only variable. (Nor suggesting this as a serious project!) I’m looking at it like this: the sensory apparatus converts a particular stimulus into a signal, and then it sends the signals along the neurons to the relevant processing centres. Yeh, but I’m not talking about *where* the neural programming is done.
