| How We Became Sensorimotor : Movement, Measurement, Sensation An engrossing history of the century that transformed our knowledge of the body's inner senses Each chapter of How We Became Sensorimotor takes a particular sense and historicizes its formation by means of recent scientific studies, case studies, or coverage in the media. Ranging among a diverse array of sensations, including balance, fatigue, pain, the "muscle sense," and what Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed "motricity," Paterson's analysis moves outward from the familiar confines of the laboratory to those of the industrial world and even to wild animals and their habitats. He uncovers important stories, such as how forgotten pain-measurement schemes transformed criminology, or how Penfield's outmoded concepts of the sensory and motor homunculi of the brain still mar psychology textbooks. Complete with original archival research featuring illustrations and correspondence, How We Became Sensorimotor shows how the shifting and sometimes contested historical background to our understandings of the senses are being extended even today. Mark Paterson is associate professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies and Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch after Descartes , as well as coeditor of Touching Space, Placing Touch . |