ABSTRACT
All sensory systems face the same challenge: how to extract salience, or meaning, from afferent input. The potential complexity of sensory processing, however, varies across organisms. That is, while simple animals can only react to simple stimulation, higher animals like humans produce elaborate neural representations of the external world that require the integration of inputs that give higher animals more information about the world they live in and thus enhance their chances for survival. Thus, organisms that can extract more information from afferent inputs than simply “an event occurred at a particular location on my body” have a better chance of greeting another day.
