Here we are, still learning about body parts. Gah it's gross. The reason i didn't take a science/anatomy class this year is so i could try to avoid this topic, but here we are. Learned about the brain in C3, but it gets more gruesome now that we've reached the eyeballs. Thankfully, C4 doesn't open with diagrams of body parts just yet.
We have our 2 founders of C4: Sensation & Perception. Sensation is our senses taking in the stimulus and perception is our brain decipering the stimulus. An illusion is our incorrect perception of the stimulus. Put into psych terms, transduction is merely what we're seeing and the action that happens because of the stimulus inside our head among the neurons' activities. The Just Ntoicable Difference is the lowest point in which we can acknowledge a stimulus. Ok you get it, lots of vocab initally. Sorry, we'll move on to the cool stuff.
Synesthesia is pretty neat. You've probably heard of variations of this. It's when a person has a cross modal experience--a.e. hearing colors in music, tasting colors, whatever, it's crazy but totally real!
A lot of this chapter tests our own vision and brainpower. Like lengths of lines in comparison to seemingly longer ones, optical illusions essentially. A good way to prove to the readers that our own perception isnt always right.
Aha, persuasion! Subliminal persuasion/perception. Messages that are so subtle that we ourselves don't necessarily pick up on, however our brains subconciously process the information. One of the examples in the book is a total scandal, a gin bottle advertisement spells the words "SEX" in ice cubes. Clever, i must admit. Other examples exist during commercials with quick, lightning-fast images that influence our moods and desires.
Ok, gonna pick this up here. Eyes: Because we rely on it so much, it's the most common way we are fooled by our own perception. We have rods and cones. Rods allow us to see shapes and differentiate different objects from others. Cones add color to our vision. Humans have 3, most mammals have 2, and some freakishly perceptive people have 4 cones. The difference? Mammals, like cats and dogs, are colorblind to red, humans can see the ROYGBIV spectrum, and some can even see more intense shades and hues of red. This kind of bedazzled me. Insects being able to see ultra-violet, aka sun rays, but i'm not sure how many rods or cones they have. Light is divided into three colors. Red, blue, and not yellow but green lights all make up what we see. Colors work by, and i'm sure you've already heard this from your mothers, every color making it up and creating that specific hue. The absence of the color itself creates that color. funky, huh? The Gestalt Principles seemed important so i'm going to tackle these. They're like the rules of objecs in space. 1.) Proximity acknowledges that objects bunched together "appear" as one, unfied whole. 2.) Similarity has to do with order of objects. Does one side compliment another, is there a pattern that we can decipher, is this pattern important? 3.) Continuity of objects seems like proximity but isn't. We close objects, make shapes connect in our heads, almost like forcing proximity. For instance the shape in the book shows + sign. Yet we percieve an | and __ overlapping eachother, yeah? well, why couldn't it be four halves connected as one single +? We see things as one. That's what Gestalt means in German, "whole". 4.) Closure implies that when we see objects that appear to have a corner block, our memory serves us by "filling in the blank" so that we can make sense of the partially blocked image. 5.) Symmetry appears similar to similarity but describes 2 halves creating a single unit rather than a grouping of multiple shapes mirroring one another. 6.) Figure-ground has to do with those silly optical illusions. Why they fools us? Because we initally look at the image that's in plain sight, we percieve it, but then after a while our perceptions expand to the backround and we see that the shape itself is being composed of another image. Like the old woman in a hood or a young woman in a hat picture. Google it if you have no idea what i'm talking about. Gestalt princples overlay the rules our vision abides to and the way we percieve objects.
Ok, that seems pretty solid. I'm going to let my peers tell you about the rest of the senses. Thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment