Quotes C.S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1906).
Description:

'Sherrington detailed how an organism's functioning involved the ceaseless transformation of perceptual information into purposeful action about within the world. His emphasis on the kineto-temporal character of perceptual experience effectively annuls the notion of seeing "images" of the world, and uses (as did [William] James) the word "stream" to describe how the flow and direction of energy within the nervous system change from instant to instant. At the same time he also employs the (Baudelairean) image of the kaleidescope and other nineteenth-century technological imagery to suggest how changes in the contents of a perceptual field are never just incremental alterations but involve a total reorganization of response:

As a tap to a kaleidescope, so a new stimulus that strikes the receptive surface causes in the central organ a shift of functional pattern at various synapses... The gray matter may be compared with a telephone exchange, where,  from moment to moment, though the end points of the system are fixed, the connections between starting points and terminal points are changed to suit passing requirements, as the functional points are shifted at a great railway junction. In order to realize the exchange at work, one must add to its purely spatial plan the temporal datum that within certain limits the connections of the lines shift from minute to minute.

This remarkable hybrid attempt to conjure a suitable four-dimensional image is meant to illustrate the uninterrupted modulation in which certain regions of the nervous system are "shut out" while "vast other regions" are called into play, all in the interest of maintaining the ongoing unity of the individual and of supporting what Sherrington refers to as "the great psychical process of attention." (349-350)

 

'Sherrington made the fundamental distinction between what he called "distance receptors," which included vision, hearing, and smell, and "immediate receptors," which were the senses of taste and touch. Vision, as part of the evolution of biological survival mechanisms, was the primary "distance receptor" which allowed an organism to extend the limits of its subjective experience beyond its physical boundaries.' (351)

 

'For Sherrington human vision could not be considered in isolation from the intricate relation of motor behaviour to the "137 million separate 'seeing' elements spread out in the sheet of the retina." The eye moving across a visual field was, he showed, dynamically interconnected "with wide tracts of the musculature as a whole."' (351)