Foreword

Summary

What are the commonalities of information gathering and processing in all living creatures? This is the implicit question that underpins Terry Bossomaier's ambitious book The Senses. His is a Herculean task and one to be greatly applauded.

Bossomaier addresses the senses using the tools of contemporary information science, in an attempt to provide a unifying perspective, one that allows for quantitative comparison of senses between the species.

This fascinates me. It is now nearly 35 years since Simon Laughlin, Doekele Stavenga and I introduced information theory to understand the design of eyes, both compound eyes of insects as well as the simple eyes of humans. We recognised that the fundamental limitations to resolving the power of eyes are the wave (diffraction) and particle (photon noise) nature of light. By appreciating their interrelation we derived insight into the design and limitations of eyes, especially between the optical image quality and the visual photoreceptor mosaic. The capacity of the eye to perceive its spatial environment was quantified by determining the number of different pictures that can be reconstructed by its array of visual cells. We were then able to decide on the best compromise between an animal's capacity for fine detail and contrast sensitivity. In a series of papers, including those with Bossomaier and A. Hughes, we went on to use the tools of information theory to study various aspects of eye design. It was a rewarding and rich endeavour, but one at that time limited to vision.