Essay Questions
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1. Compare the human visual and auditory systems. What are their relative strengths and weaknesses?
2. Imagine that you had to engineer from scratch an organism for optimal survival in the natural world. With respect to all the different sensory systems considered in this chapter, how would you design such an organism so that it functioned optimally? Do you think that engineering an organism in this manner results in a more effective solution than evolution via natural selection?
3. What is the ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon? How can it best be characterized in terms of our knowledge of body physiology and individual psychology?