Hello,
Sensation and perception involves our five senses; vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Sensation refers to the process of sensing our environment, basically bringing information in from the outside world. We do not have to be conscious to engage in this. The information we receive is sent to our brain and then perception comes to play. Our perception is the way we interpret, organize, and select the senses and figure them out.
The most interesting thing I learned in this chapter was that taste doesn't exist just for our pleasure but it attracted our ancestors to energy or protein-rich foods that enabled their survival. Without taste I probably wouldn't be here because my ancestors would not have gotten the appropriate food to survive. There are five survival functions of basic tastes and they include: sweet-energy source, salty-sodium essential to phsyiological processes, sour-potentiall toxic acid, bitter-potential poisons, and umami-proteins to grow and repair tissue. Taste is a chemical sense and each of our 200 or more taste buds on our tongue catches those food chemicals. Our taste receptors reproduce themselves every week or two, so if you burn your tongue you don't have to worry because they'll grow back. When we get older our taste buds lose sensitivity. That explains why adults like stronger tasting foods while children do not.
I read the article "Best Optical Illusions Online". It started with a man and a woman argueing about weither a illusion was real or not. The woman explained that she should not trust her brain because she could get hit by a car that she thinks is driving away from her but is actually coming towards her. He explained that she was taking it to literal and even though everything we see is an illusion it would not occur in our environment. Our brain works hard to combine all the colors, motion, and lines in order to give us the big picture. At the bottom of the article the author states several optical illusion sites to check out.
I thought this article was interesting because it provides a common example between two people. The illusions we can see can fool us but overall it can not naturally occur. It doesn't change anything except that I know my brain works very hard to make me understand things better. I can apply this in my life by explaining to others who have questions or don't know about sensation and perception.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I thought the the section on taste was also interesting. I didn't know that taste was used to attract our ancestors to food that enabled them to survive. I agree with your point about us not being here without taste. I'm glad our taste buds grow back and replace each other, because I always burn my tongue whenever I eat something hot. The bit on the differing tastes in adults and children was also interesting.
ReplyDeleteI agree that perception is the way we interpret all the sensations we receive from our senses. Our sense for taste is crazy interesting. It is so interesting that our ancestors had a sense for the foods they needed to survive. I really doesn't feel like we have 200 or more taste buds. It hurts really bad when you get an enflamed taste bud or when you burn them. The article seems really interesting and I can see where some people would think some illusions are real and arent.
ReplyDelete