Compare and contrast (rather than simply describe the reception and processing of visual and auditory stimuli by the brain beginning with the organization and functioning of the receptor organs involved in these two functions and ending with the extraction of behaviorally relevant information from such stimuli in cortical areas of the brain.
Visual processing is retinotopic - the mapping of what the eyes see to the primary visual cortex preserves the spatial information. Aural processing is tonotopic - the way the cochlea breaks down response into frequency is preserved, so that high tones are dealt with at one end, low at the other.
So neurons are general components, and the processing in the brain physically preserves some of the felt structure of the stimulus, which is at least a start on explaining why similar components can generate different experiences.
Then each stream of sensory processing actually involves hierarchies of "processing modules". For vision, you have at least 30 doing things like representing motion, colour, etc. For hearing, there are far fewer. And so vision feels like a richer experience than hearing. There is more kinds of analysis going on.
Where do I go from here?? I'm lost.
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