Sense Modalities

Our sense organs give us first-hand information about the world outside us as well as about our own internal body. The very first, elementary experience of a stimulus or object, as registered by a particular sense organ, is called sensation -- it is the process through which we detect and encode a wide range of physical stimuli. Sensation also refers to the immediate, basic experiences of a stimulus's qualities, such as "hard", "warm", "loud", or "blue", which arise directly from the appropriate stimulation of a sense organ. Different sense organs are built to deal with different forms of stimuli and serve different purposes; because each sense organ is highly specialised for handling one particular kind of information, each one is referred to as a sense modality. Before looking more closely at the individual sense organs, it is worth …