This book investigates the fundamental nature of sensory mental representation and proposes a unified framework for understanding how organisms perceive their environment. Austen Clark, a philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, synthesizes contemporary neuroscientific data to argue for the "feature-placing" hypothesis. He posits that all sensory modalities function by identifying specific place-times relative to the organism and assigning qualitative features to those coordinates, thereby providing a systematic account of how sensory experience is structured.

Experts in philosophy of mind and cognitive science recognize this work as a rigorous contribution to the study of perception. Readers frequently note the technical density of the prose, which requires a strong background in analytical philosophy and neuroscience to fully grasp the author's arguments.