In class on tuesday, you said (roughly) that if we plug the sensory output from the eyes into the input for auditory processing, we would "hear the lightning..." I think I understand your drift, but am getting caught up on the neurological details, and my fuzzy recollection of visual processing. The point you are making, as I see it, is that neurons all communicate using the same language moreorless regardless of the origin. The notion of sound comes from the fact that input from the ears goes to a certain area of the brain that has evolved to recognize its input as correlating with rarefactions and compressions in the air (i.e. the physical manifestation of sound) So the answer to what happens when a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, is that the tree causes compression and rarefaction in the air that vibrate out in all directions, but no "sound" is "heard", because hearing is that act of the brain interpreting input (action potentials and partial depolarizations) from the ear as sound. Sound is the word used to laebel the brain interpretation... IS this pretty much waht you are driving at? That we can change a sound into a sight just by changing which part of the brain receives the input?

Yep. Pretty much. Exactly, in fact. With the resulting implication that to understand behavior one has to worry not only about action potentials but also how neurons are connected to one another. PG