Binding, spatial attention and perceptual awareness.

The world is experienced as a unified whole, but sensory systems do not deliver it to the brain in this way. Signals from different sensory modalities are initially registered in separate brain areas —even within a modality, features of the sensory mosaic such as colour, size, shape and motion are fragmented and registered in specialized areas of the cortex. How does this information become bound together in experience? Findings from the study of abnormal binding — for example, after stroke — and unusual binding — as in synaesthesia — might help us to understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms that contribute to solving this ‘binding problem’.