Foreign Perspectives

It’s billed as the science of the senses and that’s what’s behind it all though the emphasis on the various senses changes as you move through the course.

Each of the study guides starts with a pointer to what you’ll need to know to understand each section of the course. For instance, for vision you need to know the physics behind how light works as well as bits of biology to understand how the receptors in the eye work and some psychology to understand how the image on your retina is interpreted as a scene. For taste and smell you need quite a bit of chemistry to understand what all the chemicals that they discuss are. Overall, it’s mainly biology and psychology that you need but at times there’s quite a bit of physics and chemistry so, depending on your scientific background, you’ll find that the difficulty in following the course varies quite a bit along the way.

One consistent hassle is that the assignments are far from clear in what they’re asking for. I basically muddled along never being able to predict what my results would be with anything like the accuracy that I usually can. That’s not just me either as a number of comments on the course mention that aspect of the course. I’m not sure why that should be but perhaps it’s an aspect of it being an inter-disciplinary course and maybe they should be more explicit about saying that “the question is on biology” or something like that although even that would be quite difficult as a number of the questions run across more than one discipline.

It’s quite a large course though you wouldn’t necessarily think that from the volume of books that it’s made up from. Where the problem arises from is that there’s a fair chunk of stuff on the DVD and the reader is very, very variable in readability as it’s written by lots of different authors. The study guide points out a number of chapters in it that are particularly difficult. It’s not really that clear why the reader is there as most of the time it covers much the same ground as you’d have already read in the course text, sometimes in more detail but sometimes not. As became clear in my revision, it’s not particularly well integrated with the rest of the course.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about the course. It was in a little more detail than I’d covered in previous biology courses but I didn’t feel that it added an awful lot to that existing knowledge so it didn’t come across as fascinating as I’d expected it would be. For instance, prerequisite courses had already covered vision in almost the same amount of detail and proprioception which was new to me wasn’t really covered in a great deal of detail. On the whole, I wouldn’t really recommend it if you’ve done human biology courses before as there’s not an awful lot of truly new material.