What is sensation? In modern human beings, sensation—for all its special phenomenal features—is still essentially the way in which you represent your interaction with the environmental stimuli that touch your body: red light at your eyes, sugar on your tongue, pressure on your skin, and so on. It is important to recognize that sensation is not the same thing as perception. Perception is the way you represent the objective world out there beyond your body: the chair in the kitchen, the tall tree in the garden, the thunder booming in the night sky. Sensation, by contrast, is always about what is happening to you and how you feel about it: “the pain is in my toe and horrible,” “the sweet taste is on my tongue and sickly,” “the red light is before my eyes and stirs me up.
— Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
