The Multisensory Handbook

This book is a practical guide to multisensory stimulation that will help children and adults with sensory perceptual issues or cognitive impairment. Underpinned by up-to-date research and theory, it contains ideas that can be applied to communication, play, leisure and recreation, therapy and education. This handbook will appeal to primary professionals from a wide range of disciplines including education, health and social care.

Research is suggesting that rather than our senses being independent, perception is fundamentally a multisensory experience. This handbook reviews the evidence and explores the theory of broad underlying principles that govern sensory interactions, regardless of the specific senses involved.

Synesthetic design strives to develop products that systematically incorporate all five senses. In future, the current wealth of medical technical insights in psychology, physiology, motor functions, and neurology and the development of innovative materials with astonishing new properties will open up almost unlimited opportunities for the designer’s creativity. Haverkamp brings together for the first time precisely those aspects of this fundamental knowledge that are specifically relevant for designers. The result is a book that offers designers of all schools a clear and well-organized practical handbook and a solid foundation for their own designs.

"In this book Kim Miller and the worship team of Ginghamsburg Church share what they've learned about how worship can touch and transform all of God's people, drawing them into a deepening experience of God's love, and setting them on the path of Christian service and discipleship. While many books have discussed why new worship styles are necessary if churches are to reach the pre-Christian population of North America, too few have provided solid, practical aids to planning and executing such worship. Here the reader will find inspiring calls to worship, amusing and illuminating dramas, meaningful corporate prayers, suggestions for uplifting music, and many other solid, practical ideas on preparing for and executing worship in a contemporary key." "The CD-ROM included with this book showcases a catalog of images that have been used as a part of the multi-sensory worship experience at Ginghamsburg, and includes a short introduction about how to incorporate visual images into a worship service."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The major reference work for a rapidly advancing field synthesizes central themes, reports on current findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. Scientists' attempts to understand the physiology underlying our apprehension of the physical world was long dominated by a focus on the individual senses. The 1980s saw the beginning of systematic efforts to examine interactions among different sensory modalities at the level of the single neuron. And by the end of the 1990s, a recognizable and multidisciplinary field of "multisensory processes" had emerged. More recently, studies involving both human and nonhuman subjects have focused on relationships among multisensory neuronal ensembles and their behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive correlates. The New Handbook of Multisensory Processing synthesizes the central themes in this rapidly developing area, reports on current findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. The contributions, all of them written for this volume by leading experts, reflect the evolution and current state of the field. This handbook does more than simply review the field. Each of the volume's eleven sections broadly surveys a major topic, and each begins with a substantive and thought-provoking commentary by the section editor that identifies the major issues being explored, describes their treatment in the chapters that follow, and sets these findings within the context of the existing body of knowledge. Together, the commentaries and chapters provide an invaluable guide to areas of general agreement, unresolved issues, and topics that remain to be explored in this fast-moving field.

It has become accepted in the neuroscience community that perception and performance are quintessentially multisensory by nature. Using the full palette of modern brain imaging and neuroscience methods, The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes details current understanding in the neural bases for these phenomena as studied across species, stages of development, and clinical statuses. Organized thematically into nine sub-sections, the book is a collection of contributions by leading scientists in the field. Chapters build generally from basic to applied, allowing readers to ascertain how fundamental science informs the clinical and applied sciences. Topics discussed include: Anatomy, essential for understanding the neural substrates of multisensory processing Neurophysiological bases and how multisensory stimuli can dramatically change the encoding processes for sensory information Combinatorial principles and modeling, focusing on efforts to gain a better mechanistic handle on multisensory operations and their network dynamics Development and plasticity Clinical manifestations and how perception and action are affected by altered sensory experience Attention and spatial representations The last sections of the book focus on naturalistic multisensory processes in three separate contexts: motion signals, multisensory contributions to the perception and generation of communication signals, and how the perception of flavor is generated. The text provides a solid introduction for newcomers and a strong overview of the current state of the field for experts.

We perceive and understand our environment using many sensory systems-vision, touch, hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception. These multiple sensory modalities give us complementary sources of information about the environment. This book explores how we develop the ability to integrate our senses.