Read Ch 5 in your textbook.
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From your reading, which topic(s) are most interesting to you?
What is transduction? Why is this process so fundamental to psychological experience?
What was the most surprising or memorable thing you learned about in this reading?
Provide a list of psychological terms that you used in your comment at the bottom of your post.
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Explore!
What Hurts Worse? Childbirth or Getting Kicked in the Balls?
Where Does the Smell of Rain Come From?
Is Your Red the Same as My Red?
How the Brain Gets Meaning From Sound
How Animals Hacked the Rainbow and Got Stumped on Blue
According to the textbook, transduction is “the process of converting a specific form of environmental stimuli into neural impulses.” This occurs when sensory receptor cells experience a stimulus and then takes the information to the brain to tell the body what to do about it. This process is very important to the psychological experience because each physical stimuli that you experience has to go through transduction for a response to the stimuli to happen. This happens in all of the sensory systems for all five of the senses. Without this process, none of the senses would work meaning that we would be unable to respond to any stimuli which would most likely mean that we would not be able to survive. For instance, if a person were to touch a hot stove and the process of transduction did not work in their somatosensory system, their brain would not be able to tell the body to remove the hand before damage was done. As you can see, this important process allows us to live our lives and experience the world around us.
One aspect of this chapter that I found to be very surprising was the portion about eating food. I knew that the senses of smell and taste are closely connected, but what I didn’t realize was that the tactile sense also plays a part in taste. The consistency, spiciness, and temperature of the food we eat is all sensed through tactile the tactile sense. I learned that there are touch receptors on the tongue that tell the brain information on what is in the mouth like whether it is slimy, hot, or spicy. This was surprising to me because I had always thought of my tongue as being in charge of just taste, not also sensing what the food in my mouth feels like. My sister is very picky about the consistency of her food and I am not so picky so this helps me to understand why she won’t eat some foods such as cottage cheese just because of the texture.
I also found the portion about disorders of the olfactory and gustatory senses to be very interesting. It has always fascinated me that food can taste like a smell. It is very hard to explain to someone in words why my poptart tastes like wood even though I’ve never eaten a piece of wood but for some reason everyone understands the meaning. This section on disorders helped me to understand the connection between taste and smell by explaining what happens when one of these senses is damaged. Ageusia occurs when someone has the inability to taste. This is very rare and when people come in complaining that they can’t taste, they usually have anosmia, the inability to smell. I think it’s very bizarre how not being able to smell could almost completely take away your ability to taste. I have a cousin who cannot taste because of a serious head injury he received that damaged his olfactory senses. Reading this section was very interesting to me because I could understand how the connection between these two senses affected each other when they became damaged.
Vocabulary: transduction, sensory receptor cell, somatosensory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, ageusia, anosmia
Looking back through the chapter, I realized that the part of the chapter that really caught my eye was when the author talked about the tactile senses. The pathway in which the information gets from the initial starting point to the somatosensory cortex was fascinating. I knew that the brain communicated with the body in lots of different ways but I had never really focused on how exactly each sense sends the information to the brain. One of the vocabulary words that really stuck out to me in this section was the Ruffini’s end-organs. I thought this vocabulary word was interesting because it is involved in registering heavy pressure and movement of joints. To me this vocabulary word is a great example of details that we often overlook that are crucial to our everyday lives. Within this section, the author talks about pain thresholds as well. This topic is one I believe most people have thought about at least a little bit, however, I really thought it was interesting that some scientists believe that women have two times the amount of pain receptors in our facial skin than men. All of these things were ideas and theories that I had not been exposed to before that really sparked my curiosity of the human mind and body even more.
Switching gears to another vocabulary word, transduction is the process of converting a stimulus to something that the brain can “comprehend.” This process in turn is so fundamental to psychological experience because it is the process in which the information our body is telling us gets organized and analyzed to form different emotions and actions that make us do what we do in response to these stimuli. Without this process our brain would not be able to communicate with the rest of our body. This makes me think of the movie robots where Fender is disconnected at his head and his body starts kicking his head down the street. In a sense, if transduction did not occur there would not be a way for our head and the rest of our body to communicate with one another just like Fender’s head and the rest of his body were literally disconnected.
In the spirit of talking about our personality and why we do the things we do, the thing that I found most memorable about this reading was actually in a caption. There was a picture of a little three year old with her sister and the caption talked about how the three year old could not feel pain and how that was impacting her life. This really stuck out to me because I had thought about people with this condition before but only in the context of being careful around hot objects. I had no idea there were so many things that we do on a day to day basis that could be detrimental if we did not have this gift of being able to feel pain and discomfort. One of the examples they gave in the caption was the idea of not knowing when to stop rubbing your eyes. This three year old did not have the ability to know when to stop rubbing her eyes or chewing on her tongue. In turn, she had no idea she was hurting herself. This really opened my eyes to how much we take each and every one of our senses for granted.
Vocabulary: somatosensory cortex, Ruffini’s end-organs, pain thresholds, transduction
This chapter seemed a little dry in comparison to the ones prior to it, in my opinion. I felt like it didn't have as much to offer in terms of interesting facts and stories. While it did have a few interesting ones, I don't think it did as great a job. One thing from this chapter that I did find quite interesting however, was the section on sensory adaptation. In the back of my mind I always kind of knew that this was occurring. I have thought about it while daydreaming before. I always wondered why when I put a brand new hair tie on my wrist, it felt a lot tighter than one I had used numerous times already. I thought it must have had something to do with it getting stretched out as time went on and I used it more. In some regards, this is true. It is also true that my sensory receptor cells begin to adapt to the simple touch over time. When I first put the hair tie on my wrist, I notice the sensation right away. Over time though, that sensation is diminished and I no longer realize that it's on my wrist. This also happens with clothes such as jeans. How annoying would it be if we continued to feel every fiber of our clothing touching us throughout the day? Very. This adaptation occurs in all of the other four senses as well. It is beneficial to us because it allows us to adapt to sensations that do no harm to our bodies and only respond to those sensations in which could put us in danger.
When the sensory receptor cells are stimulated, they translate the physical stimuli into neural information that our brains can then interpret. This process of communication conversion is known as sensory transduction. It is important that this language transformation occurs so that our brain can understand the information being received from the environment around us. Each sensory system has its own way of translating the information due to the variation in sensations coming in. Sensory transduction can happen in a number of sequential steps. For example, the book relates it to a fly landing on your arm. When the fly lands, you immediately feel the sensation. Your sensory receptor cells begin to send neural impulses to the brain. Then you look at the fly, which activates another sensory system, therefore sending more neural impulses to the brain. Finally, you swat the fly away. This reaction occurs as a result of the two sensory systems taking part in sensory transduction. The process of sensory transduction is so critical to the psychological experience because without the language translation from the sensory receptor cells to the brain through neural impulses, we would be unable to detect things like odorants which could be harmful to our health.
Something that I found very unforgettable was the small blurb on the taste senses when you have a cold. Recently, I felt like I was getting a small cold. I was discussing this with my boyfriend and he asked how I knew I was getting a one. I told him I could tell because my food didn't taste as good as it normally did. Whenever I ate something, it seemed very bland and did not have as much flavor as usual. He said that never happened to him and that it could possibly just be my taste buds "out of whack". I argued that it had to happen to everyone. Afterall, I always have it happen to me when I get a cold. The cause of the decreased flavor in my food was as a result of mucus actually blocking the olfactory receptors which are located on the cilia in your nose. I had no idea that losing the sense of smell temporarily could be the problem to my lackluster food.
Vocabulary terms: sensory receptor cells, sensory adaptation, sensation, sensory transduction, odorants, olfactory receptors, taste buds
Transduction, or sensory transduction, is, according to the textbook, “the process of converting a specific form of environmental stimuli into neural impulses.” So, more generally, it is a process that takes everything we see, touch, taste, hear, and feel and translates it into a language that our brain understands, thus giving this stimuli a meaning to us as the receiver. Sensory receptor cells are important in this process because with each sensory system having its own specialized cells, they are what physical convert the environmental stimuli into neural impulses, allowing the brain to then process that information. Transduction is so important and such a fundamental process to psychological experience because without it, we would not be able to experience anything in this world. We wouldn’t have the ability to taste our favorite food or listen to our favorite music. The environmental stimuli would be there, but our body would not process into something our brain could then understand, making the world a very boring place. Transduction also allows us to react to various stimuli. It keeps us safe in times of possible danger, such as being able to smell smoke and see fire and know that that means you must get yourself to safety. Without sensory transduction, our lives would not be anything like what they are now. This process allows us to really experience, enjoy, and respond to all the world has to offer.
The topics that I always find the most interesting in the past couple of chapters, and especially this chapter, is the explanation of when things go wrong. It is interesting to learn about how things work and how they enable us to do our everyday tasks, but what I find most compelling is what happens when things don’t work the way that are supposed to. I think in a way this always deepens my understanding of a topic. I can read about how a process works, but once an example is given on how that process is broken and what happens as a result, it tends to make the process itself more understandable to me. Two disorders explained in this chapter that I found most intriguing were anosmia and ageusia. I had no previous knowledge that these disorders even existed, so it was really fascinating to learn that they did. It is widely known that people often lose their sense of sight, or hearing, but the fact that people can lose their sense of smell and taste is not. I think I also found this especially intriguing because I love food and your sense of smell and taste are imperative to being able to enjoy it. Without those senses I would not be able to enjoy one of my favorite things!
The most memorable thing I learned in this chapter was how we recognize color and specifically a large range of colors. From my very limited science background, I was under the previous assumption that we saw different colors because of the light rays they either absorbed or reflected. For example, something appeared red because it absorbed every color except for red, which it reflected back us, giving that object its red color. However, this chapter explained our ability to perceive color is different than that and involves mainly three things: hue, saturation, and brightness. Combining these characteristics is what allows us to see a large variety of colors. How we perceive color can also be explained but two theories, the trichromatic theory and the opponent process theory. I found the opponent process theory the most interesting because it was something I had never heard of before. The fact that specific colors can have opposing colors, and they can never be seen in combination with each other was such an abstract and fascinating thought to me, though it makes perfect sense. It was also fun to know that this theory gives sense to weird quirks such as the afterimage effect. I never knew why if I stared at a white on black image for a long time, then looked elsewhere it would appear as now a black on white image. Now I know! I always find it fun and interesting to gain new knowledge on areas of my life I took for granted, and also to improve my knowledge on areas that I was otherwise under-educated on.
Terms: sensory transduction, sensory receptor cells, ageusia, anosmia, trichromatic theory, opponent processing theory
This chapter was really fun for me to read, because I’ve always been sort of fascinated with the human senses. When I was a kid in elementary school, my teachers and classmates were always talking about some or another example of one of these senses, and I was always fascinated. The most memorable (and probably my favorite) part of this chapter was probably the section on the gustatory sense, or taste. This is primarily due to the fact that Food Network is CONSTANTLY playing at my house. My dad has always loved to cook and he’s really great at it. More recently, my brother has decided to make his career path of a culinary nature, so his fascination with food is never ending (and I am treated to a lot of good food). Because of this, I found the taste sense section really fascinating, especially the part about humans only having 5 basic taste senses, because having been exposed to so much food, I have experienced a lot of flavor in my life, and I cannot imagine that all that flavor was based off a core 5 flavors, but I imagine each of those five has many tenets to it.
Transduction is very important to psychology because it is the whole base of how the body functions. Without the transportation of stimuli to neurons and the central nervous system the body wouldn’t have any instincts, nor would it be able to function, and humans would surely have died out ages ago. The function of stimuli is instrumental in the survival of any given human, and because humans wouldn’t be around without it, and psychology is centered around the human mind and how it functions, transduction and all it is associated with is absolutely necessary to the field.
The most interesting part of this chapter for me was actually two parts. I really enjoyed learning about the difference in peoples’ ability to handle pain because I have always had a really high pain threshold, and I think it’s an odd trait every time I stub my toe, or run into a door, because people always ask me if I’m alright and I always respond with: “Yeah…? Why?” Incidentally, I’m beginning to think my high tolerance of pain is due to the sheer number of times I have run into a door. Or a wall. I’m rather clumsy. The second part of the chapter that stood out to me as something I liked was the short mention of how if children are exposed to pure tones at an early age then they can develop perfect pitch, something that always eluded me in high school choir, and consequently frustrated me. This information really excited me, because it was like a cheat code to make someone a successful musician. And if you think for one second that I don’t intend to use this trick on my own children, then you are incorrect. The bragging rights this would give someone is phenomenal, and it would certainly be useful in practicality.
senses
gustatory
Transduction
stimuli
neurons
central nervous system
psychology
pain threshold
In this chapter, I was most interested in the section about hearing. As a music major, I believe it’s important to know and understand the way the brain processes sound. I was specifically interested in how adaptation allows us to drown out unimportant and unnecessary noises. I also was intrigued by the little box on synesthesia – I would love to be able to see, taste or smell my own compositions. I was surprised to learn that in tonal language cultures, absolute pitch is more prominent.
Transduction in psychology deals with the biological origin of the mind; transportation of stimuli to the CNS. Transduction is fundamental to psychology because understanding how the nervous system works helps to understand problems and processes of the brain. If we can understand how the brain works, we can use that information to try and cure brain disorders or maybe improve brain function.
The most memorable thing for me was the little paragraph about Synesthesia. When I was reading it, I just had to take a second and try to imagine what that would be like. I remember that I looked up a Beethoven piano sonata and tried to imagine what that would look like – it was actually very difficult for me to try and comprehend how someone could live like that.
Adaptation
Absolute pitch
Transduction
synesthesia
The textbook says sensory transduction is the process of converting specific form of environmental stimuli into neural impulses. This process is important to psychology because it is something that the brain needs because the body is telling us to get organized and is analyzing different emotions and actions that make us do things in response to stimuli. Without this process our brain would not be able to communicate with the rest of your body.
I found it interesting the portion about Migraines, Epilepsy, and the Sensory Systems. I would have liked it if they would have expanded a bit more on them. I also found it interesting that this was found under the section: The Chemical Senses: Smell and Taste. The section they have on this talks very little about migraines, epilepsy, and the sensory system, but more the rare chemical senses that can affect these disorders, at least the ones talked about for migraines are rare, that is the ones that I know for sure. Migraines are usually triggered by eating food that you are ‘allergic’ to meaning that they will trigger a migraine and stress. Migraines can affect 10-15% of the general population and can cause substantial burdens in personal, occupational, and social lives. I found that epilepsy is not really explained in detail except for reflex epilepsy and auras, so I thought I would explain it, epilepsy is a known seizure disorder that affects the neurological system and is diagnosed when a person has had at least two seizures that cannot be explained by a medical condition. 65 million people in the world have epilepsy and has seizure management to control the frequency of seizures without interfering with the normal activities of their daily lives. To this day the only person I have heard of who has has auras during their migraines is Hildegard of Bingen.
I also found it interesting that scientists believe that women have twice as many pain receptors as men, though I can believe that considering I have a very low pain threshold. I found it cute that they wrote about quick ways to reduce acute pain. It reminded me of when I was a kid and I would fall down and scrape my knee, my mom would tell me to think about something else to help reduce the pain, and take deep breaths if i was crying.
The most memorable thing I learned from the reading was smell and taste. I found it so interesting to learn why food did not taste good when I’m sick, which happens to be because of mucus blocking the olfactory receptor neurons in your nose. The flavor suffers because taste and smell work together to make food taste good. As well as learning why I experience the sensations that I do when I eat the food I eat is because of my tactile senses. I may be more adventurous when it comes to eating new foods, but even now I still do not like the bitter taste of some foods as stated in the text.
Vocabulary:sensory transduction, olfactory receptor neurons, tactile
Transduction, according to the book, is “the process of converting a specific form of environmental stimuli into neural impulses”. This is fundamental because without the ability to turn stimuli into neural impulses, we would not be able to react to the world around us. Everything we do is so heavily influenced by these stimuli that we would not be able to function if we didn’t have the ability to process and react to them.
This chapter is definitely my favorite thus far. One of the topics that was super interesting to me was the section on gustatory (taste) section. I was a really picky eater growing up, and in some ways I still am. Some foods have been ruined for me forever (tomatoes being one of them) due to the texture. It was interesting to me how our sense of touch is so incredibly important to our sense of taste, because texture is a huge thing for me. As a little kid, especially being a picky eater, I used to wonder if adults actually even liked bitter or sour or spicy or exotic foods, or if they all just pretended to in order to fit in with other adults. I found myself liking more and more things as I grew up, especially sour things, but my tolerance for different textures grew as well. About a month ago, I was on a cruise and I tried a lot of things I wouldn’t have a year or two ago, including frog legs, lobster, snails, and a variety of sushi. Surprisingly, I really liked all of them. I guess I figured out for myself that human tastes change and mature as they grow, but it was really interesting to experience it firsthand.
I was really excited to look through the explore links and find the one called “Is your red the same as mine?” because I had this exact thought while reading even just the first few pages of this chapter. This is also a question I have pondered several times throughout the years, and one that seems especially pertinent now because I’m a graphic design major. I want to know if everyone sees the world the way I do, or if theirs is completely different. It would make sense to me, colorblindness and other disorders aside, that our vision would be at least somewhat different when it came to interpreting colors. Perhaps that’s why people have different favorite colors. For example, if someone says their favorite color is a certain shade of green and another person says theirs is a type of purple, they may be referring to very similar colors, but they would never know it because their perceptions are different. It’s so frustrating to me that the explanatory gap exists, because I would love to see exactly how my work looks to another human, but unfortunately I’ll never be able to do that.
Gustatory, transduction, stimuli, explanatory gap
This may just be the fact that I’m a music major and music is a big part of my life, but I was really interested in reading about the absolute pitch part of the reading. I found it very interesting to know how musical training at around critical points such as the ages of three to six has affected people in their ability to determine pitches in any musical scale. I also never knew that there was such a thing as tonal languages where how you say a phrase affects what it means. I had no idea that Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese were both tonal languages. I also found the inner workings of how your ear picks up sound to be really incredible and fascinating. I didn’t know how much of a process it required to be able to hear sound. Their are so many parts to it not including your eardrum, but also including the ossicles that vibrate because of your eardrum. They continue the vibration to the cochlea where a wave is formed and that is finally where receptors on the basilar membrane pick up the waves and turn them into electrical activity for the brain. I just think it’s fascinating how intricate this whole system is and that is why it’s not hard to create hearing damage from even minor trauma in the right place.
Transduction is basically where the sensory information you gather from the world around you, such as sound waves, light waves, or chemicals, are taken in by sensory receptors of the particular sense they emulate, and the info is transcribed into neural impulses that are sent to the brain for analysis. They are key to our psychological experience because they act as translators of the outside world to our body. Without them we would not be able to tell where we are, what we are doing, or basically know anything except that we are living. They are the starting point of the somatosensory system which helps us to gather and determine information of the world around us that we need to survive and thrive within the world. Take touch for example. Without the transduction that occurs within the sensory receptors throughout our entire body, we would not be able to know if something is hurting us or if something is helping us. We wouldn’t be able to tell if something was painful or pleasurable and this is an important skill to know so that we are able to tell if something is wrong with our bodies.
I think the most surprising topic I learned about during this reading was the hallucinations that people may have because of abnormalities in their brain, whether it is seizure-induced or from somewhere else. I never thought about how what we experience in our lives always gets turned into electronic impulses in our brain and therefore if something misfires within our brain, we may be able to experience that again even though it is not physically there for us to hear, smell, see, taste, or feel.
Terms - abnormalities, electronic impulses, sensory receptors, somatosensory system, transduction, psychological experience, neural impulses, basilar membrane, ossicles, cochlea, absolute pitch, tonal language
Transduction or the transfer of stimulation to the central nervous system from the sensory systems, is how we experience the world around us. Our brain receives information from our sensory neurons in the form of electronic neurological signals. Smell, sight, touch, sound and taste all are comprehended and are translated by different types of sensory receptor cells. Without transduction, our psyche would be completely isolated from the outside world.
Our senses can be rather easily tricked though. The brain uses a lot of short cuts for sight and these short cuts can be manipulated and they can cause us to wrongfully perceive things that we see. Optical illusions are one example of this and they are something of great interest to me. Illusions are really cool to me. The ability to trick people into seeing things that aren’t there or seeing things in a way that isn’t truthful.
The discussion of tinnitus will be something that will stay in my memory for a while. My roommate is a big fan of a TV show called Archer where the main character suffers from tinnitus or at least claims to. It is a running joke throughout the show and my roommate makes it very often. It may not be a text related reason but I will always remember learning about that now.
stimulation, central nervous system, sensory neurons, electronic neurological signals, sensory receptor cells, tinnitus
Transduction is how the brain process and interprets what happens to the body. The body has five senses: olfactory sense (sense of smell), gustatory sense (sense of taste), the tactile senses (touch), the auditory sense (hearing), and the visual sense. These are specialized cells that translate stimuli from the outside world into impulses, which is what the brain uses to communicate with cells. Once something happens that triggers those cells, they send the impulses to the brain, and the brain then determines how the body will react.
The body doesn’t react to just any impulse, however. The impulses have to reach a certain level of stimulation for the sensory receptor cells to produce impulses. This level is known as the absolute threshold. The threshold differs for every person.
Psychologically, the way we respond to stimuli is basically the way we think. Each person has a different threshold, and this explains the differences in behavior. Everyone also differs on their sensitivity to tastes, smells, pain, and sounds, and everyone sees the world in a different way. This does a lot to explain differences in behavior.
The most interesting topic to me was how our brain perceives taste. I’ve always heard about taste buds, but I’d never had them explained. The tongue is covered in little bumps called papillae that contain taste buds. The taste buds are full of sensory receptor cells, ready to convert the different chemicals in our food into impulses to send our brains. The taste buds come in five different types. There’s a type for sour tastes, salty tastes, bitter tastes, and sweet tastes, and there’s even a type for foods with MSG in them called umami. I also found it interesting that eating doesn’t just involve the sense of taste. I knew that it also involved the sense of smell. Flavor is the combination of the smell and the taste of a food. Eating also involves the tactile senses. The texture of a food also tells the brain to interpret it. Some foods even activate the pain receptors, such as hot or spicy foods.
The most surprising thing to me in this reading was the section about how sight differs from person to person. I had read that we all perceive colors differently, but I didn’t know if that was scientifically accurate. In the reading, they referenced an exhibit at MIT in which two people are able to trade viewpoints and see the world literally through each other’s eyes.
I also learned that not only does the perception of sight vary from person to person, but even from eye to eye! Retinal disparity is the slight difference in images processed by the retinas of the two eyes, and the brain actually uses this difference to perceive distance.
Terms: sensory receptor cells, transduction, absolute threshold, olfactory sense, gustatory sense, taste buds, papillae, retinal disparity