Jeremy M. Wolfe Books
Jeremy M. Wolfe is a cognitive neuroscientist and professor at Harvard Medical School, known for his research on visual attention and perception.
Known for: Sensation and Perception
Books by Jeremy M. Wolfe
Sensation and Perception
Jeremy M. Wolfe’s Sensation and Perception is a clear, wide-ranging guide to one of psychology’s most fascinating questions: how do brains turn physical energy from the world into meaningful experience? The book traces that transformation from the first contact between stimulus and sensory receptor to the rich perceptions that shape thought, emotion, action, and survival. Along the way, it explores vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, multisensory integration, attention, and the many ways perception can succeed, fail, or be fooled. What makes this book especially valuable is its ability to connect biology, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology without losing sight of everyday life. Wolfe shows that perception is not passive recording but active interpretation. Seeing a face, recognizing a voice, reaching for a cup, or avoiding danger all depend on systems that select, organize, and predict. Wolfe is exceptionally qualified to tell this story. A leading cognitive neuroscientist and professor at Harvard Medical School, he is best known for influential research on visual attention and search. His expertise gives the book both scientific depth and practical clarity, making it an essential resource for students, curious general readers, and anyone interested in how minds make worlds.
Read SummaryKey Insights from Jeremy M. Wolfe
Sensation Begins, Perception Constructs Meaning
We do not experience the world directly; we experience the brain’s best interpretation of incoming information. That distinction lies at the heart of sensation and perception. Sensation refers to the initial detection of energy by sensory receptors: photons striking the retina, air pressure changes ...
From Sensation and Perception
Vision Is an Active Neural Achievement
Seeing feels effortless, but vision is one of the brain’s greatest engineering feats. Light enters the eye through the cornea and lens, which focus an image onto the retina. There, rods and cones convert light into neural signals. Rods support vision in dim light, while cones help us perceive fine d...
From Sensation and Perception
Color, Depth, and Motion Are Inferences
The world does not arrive labeled with colors, distances, or motion; the brain has to infer all three from patterns of stimulation. Color perception begins with different cone types responding to different wavelengths, but the experience of color depends on comparison, context, and opponent processi...
From Sensation and Perception
Hearing Organizes Sound Into Meaningful Events
Sound is invisible, fleeting, and often overlapping, yet the auditory system can separate, identify, and localize astonishingly complex acoustic patterns. Hearing begins when sound waves enter the ear canal and vibrate the eardrum. These vibrations pass through the middle ear bones to the cochlea, w...
From Sensation and Perception
Speech Perception Links Sound and Knowledge
Understanding speech feels automatic, but it requires one of the most sophisticated forms of perceptual inference humans perform. Spoken language unfolds rapidly, varies across speakers, and is often distorted by accent, emotion, speed, and background noise. Yet listeners typically recover words and...
From Sensation and Perception
The Body Senses Contact, Damage, and Position
Touch is not one sense but a family of systems that tells us about pressure, vibration, temperature, pain, and the position of our body parts. Wolfe shows that somatosensation is essential not only for comfort and survival but also for identity and action. Mechanoreceptors in the skin respond to dif...
From Sensation and Perception
About Jeremy M. Wolfe
Jeremy M. Wolfe is a cognitive neuroscientist and professor at Harvard Medical School, known for his research on visual attention and perception. He has authored numerous scientific papers and textbooks in the field of cognitive psychology and visual cognition.
Frequently Asked Questions
Jeremy M. Wolfe is a cognitive neuroscientist and professor at Harvard Medical School, known for his research on visual attention and perception.
Read Jeremy M. Wolfe's books in 15 minutes
Get AI-powered summaries with key insights from 1 book by Jeremy M. Wolfe.