Ch 5 Sensation & Perception

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Read Ch 5 in your textbook. 

Your comments last week were much improved! Keep up the improvement by proofreading for errors and clarity, making sure you have asked all questions in narrative form, and that you have included your terms. 

While it is perfectly acceptable to read through other people's posts (in fact this is encouraged to some extent so that you can see the viewpoints of your peers, but also how your comment stacks up in terms of detail, argument, and length), you must of course do the assignment yourself. You should not rely on the content of other people's comments to get the content yourself. In other words, you still have to read or listen to the assignment on your own. 

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.

Write your response in Word or other word processor, and SAVE IT. Then, click on 'comments' right below the title of this blog post and above the picture. You will be prompted to log in. Once logged on, you can copy and paste your assignment into the box and submit. 

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134 Comments

From this chapter, the most interesting topic to me was sensation to perception, of which how our senses gather information and send it to our brain. A large amount of information is being sensed at any one time such as room temperature, brightness of the lights, someone talking, a distant train, or the smell of perfume. But we don't notice radio waves, x-rays, or the microscopic parasites crawling on our skin. We only sense those things we are able too since we don't have the sense of smell like a bloodhound or the sense of sight like a hawk; it is interesting of how our thresholds are different from these animals and often even from each other. So how do we sense things? Sensory receptors help us detect the physical stimulus and send it to our brain in a four step process. They are physical stimulus, sensation, transduction, and perception. However, transduction is most important step out of four steps, because it helps change the stimulus input to signals that our brain can understand. Without transduction, our brain could not get signal from sensation, therefore it could not process the action potentials. For example, if we are walking on a side walk and we see a mad dog standing in the middle of the street. The mad dog is our physical stimulus, and it is detected by our sensory receptors in our eyes. And then those information will be getting translated to our brain through transduction, and our neurons fire action potentials which will tell us that we’ll either turn back or go the other possible route. If the information was not getting translated to the brain through transduction, we will keep walking closer and closer to the dog, which is not a good idea. However, there are situations that is difficult to focus on any particular stimulus, like the conversation we are having with a friend. We are often faced with the daunting task of focusing our attention on certain things while at the same time attempting to ignore the flood of information entering our senses. And the most memorable topic to me was receptors in our skin detect temperature and pressure. Our skin has two specialized receptors detect temperature involving cold receptors and warm receptors. Which is really weird when I got to this section, I thought there is one receptors for the temperature. However, if the temperature is being extremely hot or extremely cold, it can trigger both receptors. Same as temperature, pressure receptors also surprised me in that they have 5 receptors, one is there to respond to the hair movement, and other 4 are capsules in the skin. These pressure receptors are there to respond to continuous vibration (light, fast or slow, stretch and steady). But if we got hit above the neck, the information is sent directly to our brain through cranial nerves, these are connected to our brain. If we got hit below the neck than information will be sent to the brain from spinal nerves. It is quite fascinating of how pressure receptors are not transducing those information, but the other parts. As well as there are pain receptors, and many other receptors that help us function each day as soon as we wake up and sense things.

From this chapter, the most interesting topic to me was sensation to perception, of which how our senses gather information and send it to our brain. A large amount of information is being sensed at any one time such as room temperature, brightness of the lights, someone talking, a distant train, or the smell of perfume. But we don't notice radio waves, x-rays, or the microscopic parasites crawling on our skin. We only sense those things we are able too since we don't have the sense of smell like a bloodhound or the sense of sight like a hawk; it is interesting of how our thresholds are different from these animals and often even from each other. So how do we sense things? Sensory receptors help us detect the physical stimulus and send it to our brain in a four step process. They are physical stimulus, sensation, transduction, and perception. However, transduction is most important step out of four steps, because it helps change the stimulus input to signals that our brain can understand. Without transduction, our brain could not get signal from sensation, therefore it could not process the action potentials. For example, if we are walking on a side walk and we see a mad dog standing in the middle of the street. The mad dog is our physical stimulus, and it is detected by our sensory receptors in our eyes. And then those information will be getting translated to our brain through transduction, and our neurons fire action potentials which will tell us that we’ll either turn back or go the other possible route. If the information was not getting translated to the brain through transduction, we will keep walking closer and closer to the dog, which is not a good idea. However, there are situations that is difficult to focus on any particular stimulus, like the conversation we are having with a friend. We are often faced with the daunting task of focusing our attention on certain things while at the same time attempting to ignore the flood of information entering our senses. And the most memorable topic to me was receptors in our skin detect temperature and pressure. Our skin has two specialized receptors detect temperature involving cold receptors and warm receptors. Which is really weird when I got to this section, I thought there is one receptors for the temperature. However, if the temperature is being extremely hot or extremely cold, it can trigger both receptors. Same as temperature, pressure receptors also surprised me in that they have 5 receptors, one is there to respond to the hair movement, and other 4 are capsules in the skin. These pressure receptors are there to respond to continuous vibration (light, fast or slow, stretch and steady). But if we got hit above the neck, the information is sent directly to our brain through cranial nerves, these are connected to our brain. If we got hit below the neck than information will be sent to the brain from spinal nerves. It is quite fascinating of how pressure receptors are not transducing those information, but the other parts. As well as there are pain receptors, and many other receptors that help us function each day as soon as we wake up and sense things.
Terms: receptors, spinal nerves, cranial nerves, sensory, sensation, perception, stimulus, transduction, action potential,

The topic that seemed most interesting to me was the idea of sensation to perception with transduction. I chose this because I never thought that everyday things that happen to us in our environment would have a multi-step process. Since it goes from the Physical stimulus, to sensation, to transduction, and ends in perception. It happens so fast that you never would guess that it would take that many steps to happen. Like when you notice that the stop light is green, for example, that process goes through your mind and goes through these steps, which I find is interesting since you notice that it is green the second that it changes.
Transduction is the process where sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. For example, when you touch a hot pan right after it comes out of the oven, so it goes from energy from the environment and turns into neural energy and becomes a “message” inside your body and tells you to move your hand off of the hot pan. Transduction is very important to psychological experiences because most of the time cells have to respond very quickly and rapidly to changes in their environment. So without the process of transduction, it would be a lot harder to react to what is going on around you in your environment.
The most surprising thing in this chapter was the fact that in addition to our five primary senses, we also have several internal sensory systems. There is one system called kinesthetic sense, where the sensations come from receptors in muscles, tendons, and in joints, and helps keep our body and limbs positioned in place. Another sense is called vestibular sense. This uses information from receptors in structures of the inner ear, which is called semicircular canals. The main job of the vestibular sense is that it allows us to maintain balance.
Psychological Terms: Physical stimulus, sensation, transduction, perception, stimuli, neural energy, kinesthetic sense, vestibular sense, semicircular canals

Synesthesia is what I found most interesting about this chapter. It is really difficult for me to imagine what it would be like to taste color or picture color whenever a certain word is said. Even stranger than that is tasting people’s names. That could greatly affect a person’s life. What if they fell in love with someone, but could not stand do be around them because their name tastes like dirt or earwax? That whole concept is amazing to me. The fact that synesthesia is pretty common also amazes me. I do not believe that I have ever known anyone with this condition (at least to my knowledge), yet the book says that it could occur from every 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 200 people. I also think it is interesting how everyone perceives sensory inputs differently. To one person, dark chocolate could be the best thing they ever tasted; to another, it could be one of the worst. Color perception also works in this way. One person could see a car as a lighter shade of blue, while another sees it as a darker or brighter shade. Another thing I found interesting in this chapter is the reversible image. I remember learning about these more in high school, how you can see it as a young woman (the example found in the book), but once you see it as an old woman, you switch back and forth between the two without really trying, and that is what happens to me when I look at that picture. I like looking at those kinds of pictures and comparing my first perception of it to other peoples’ perceptions of it. Transduction helps the sensory receptors communicate with the brain. It changes stimulus input from the receptors into signals that are better understood by the brain. Transduction is important because we would not be able to experience the senses without it. Not having any senses at all would be totally dangerous; we would probably not even last five minutes without at least getting severely injured. We would not be able to see potentially dangerous things; smell potentially dangerous chemicals, food. Most importantly, we would not be able to feel anything. At all. This is especially dangerous because it could lead to severe burns or chronic pain that could be because of a larger problem, such as cancer or a heart problem. The most memorable thing I learned from this reading is the example they gave about top-down processing. In my high school psych class, I had a hard time remembering the difference between top-down processing and bottom-up processing. After reading about the Flight 901 tragedy, I was able to understand the differences between the two better than I could before. Top-down processing has to do more with personal experiences and expectations, while bottom-up processing has to do more with the external world and sensory processing. The pilots of Flight 901 thought that they were in a different location, so they lowered their altitude so the passengers could observe the Antarctic scenery, but really, they were very off course and ended up crashing into a mountain. This will help me remember that top-down processing deals with personal experience.
Words used: Synesthesia, taste, smell, perception, sensory input, reversible images, transduction, sensory receptors, top-down processing, bottom-up processing

I have become increasingly convinced that human body is perfect biological system that represents the highest stage of evolution. Everyday our organism gets and processes a lot of information from our daily life. Light waves, food molecules, sound waves, temperature changes or odor molecules are physical stimuli that we get from the world around us. The process of detecting these physical stimuli and sending information from them to the brain called sensation. The next step is processing and interpreting of sensory information in the brain based on our experience of the world, which is perception. The interesting point is that the sensation is the same for people. However each individual has a unique perception of the sensory input. Both sensation and perception make up all of our individual experiences with the world.
One of the most important steps in the process from sensation to perception is transduction. Specialized sensory organs that detect physical stimulus called sensory receptors. These sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that brain can understand and eventually these signals will become neural signals. It is important because brain itself does not know what to do with the light and sound waves or odor molecules and transduction which is conversion physical stimuli into neural signals allows the specific parts of the brain to recognize and process the information it receives. Basically, without it we won’t be able to understand the information that we get through our senses. Thus transduction helps us to have experience from the world.
One of the most interesting parts from chapter was sensory adaptation which is a decrease in sensitivity to a constant level of stimulation. For example, during your studying time, loud and annoying sounds from outside your room can distract you. However our smart organism can decrease the sensitivity and if stimulus continuously presented the response of the sensory system tend to reduce over time. Eventually distracting noises will faded into the background. It shows how our organism can adapt to different environment. Also I have found interesting the bottom up and top-down processing. Perception includes two processes bottom-up and top-down processing. First the perception of the objects begins with analysis of environmental stimulus input by sensory receptors; it’s called bottom-up processing. Then the process continues with analysis of prior experiences and expectations in the brain. However sometimes faulty expectations can lead to faulty perceptions. For instance, the case of pilots on Air New Zeeland flight 901 who expected to see the flat terrain and were sure that there are no mountains. Based on pilots’ expectations they reduced attitude and failed to notice the 12,000-foot volcano directly in their flight path. Thus, faulty expectations led to tragic consequences.
For me the most memorable was part about how we can taste and our taste preferences. As all processes that we do every day, tasting food or fluid includes few steps. First, chemical molecules dissolve in saliva and then taste receptors detect these molecules. Taste receptors are located in the taste buds, then on the tongue the taste buds reside in structures called papillae and also spread throughout the mouth and throat. The memorable point is that one individual can have from 8000 to 10000 taste buds. Thus taste receptors convert chemical molecules into signals that will be sending to the brain. Also the interesting part was that mothers’ diet will affect infant taste preferences, so cultural influences on food preferences begin in the womb.
Thus, I never noticed in daily life how our organism works, but now I know that just smelling a flower or eating food involved different steps. We are not even think how these aspects of our daily life is important, because it is seems to be simple and ordinary. The process of detecting and interpreting physical stimulus occurs within a few milliseconds. However now we can understand how all the processes are complicated.
Terms used: Physical stimuli, sensation, perception, transduction, sensory receptors, neural signals, sensory adaptation, the bottom up and top-down processing, taste preference, taste receptors, taste buds, papillae, chemical molecules.


There were many interesting things that I learned in the chapter five reading. The first topic that stuck out to me was synesthesia. I think that it is so interesting that saying a name or a word can trigger a taste in some people’s mouths or that a color and a number are co closely related. I had never heard of synesthesia before, and did not realize how common it is. I think that it would be really interesting to have the opportunity to talk to someone who has this condition. Another topic that stuck out to me was the absolute threshold to detect input for each sense. I really liked the table that showed the minimum sensory input for the senses to detect it. I liked this topic because this is something that relates to my life every day, I just never think about it. I thought it was crazy that a person is only correct when identifying a stimulus fifty percent of the time. I think that, in general, people rely on what they detect strongly, and if we are only right half of the time we should reevaluate how we process stimuli. The last topic that I found interesting was the information presented about the five main tastes. I didn’t realize that taste is literally centered around five basic qualities. I was the most interested in umami. It stuck out to me because it was the only word that was not in English. I thought it was interesting how the other words (salty, sweet, bitter, and sour) were all simple words and then instead of using “savory” or “yummy”, umami was chosen as the fifth taste. Going along with taste, I thought all the details about taste buds were interesting, as well. I never think about them because they are so small and I can't see them, but they play such a huge role in my senses. I also learned about transduction in this chapter. Transduction is how stimulus input is translated to something that the brain can understand. This is really important because it is part of a cycle that controls our bodies and tells our brains to do tasks every day. The psychological experience would be nearly impossible without transduction because we would not be processing all of the information we are presented; therefore, walking around and doing whatever we wanted. Our perception would be very flawed and it would alter life dramatically. There were a few memorable topics in this chapter that stuck out to me, as well. I really liked reading about how an infant’s taste preferences are affected by what their mother eats and drinks, not only during pregnancy, but directly after. It makes sense that it is affected by what the baby eats in the womb, but it’s really crazy how even after the baby is born it can be a factor in preferences. I also thought it was interesting reading about pain. It’s logical that when you are trying to control pain that you should distract yourself from it, but I did not know that it was psychologically proven. I didn’t know that we have two different fibers that affect how quickly we feel pain, so that stuck out in the reading as well. Overall, this chapter was full of new information that was relatable and interesting because it was all relevant to daily senses.

Synesthesia, Absolute Threshold to Detect Input for Each Sense, Sensory Input, Stimulus, Five Main Tastes, Umami, Transduction, Perception, Pain

Chapter 5 Blog Response
9/21/14

What I found to be the most interesting in this chapter on sensation and perception is the whole perception side of it. I guess I found this to be so interesting because I obviously knew that everyone sees, hears, and tastes things a little differently from one another but I didn’t realize that people’s perceptions could vary so greatly. For example, on page 156 of our textbook they give an example of a car. At the bottom they give you a blue/ purple color pallet. The example shows how even if everyone is looking at the same car, the colors will be slightly different to everyone who looks at that car. Take myself as an example. I don’t think the color of the car matches any of the colors they have in the pallet, yet others might think one of them matches perfectly. I just find it interesting how even though the sensation is the same, everyone’s processing of that information is going to be different, because they are different physically and psychologically.

When dealing with sensation or perception, both deal with receptors and transduction. Sensory receptors are what detect the physical sensations from the world, and transform it into information. Transduction is the process by which the receptors do this. They change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. An example they give is a stoplight. The lights are the physical stimuli; the sensation in turn then is when your eyes detect the light waves. After that, we have transduction when you translate the stimuli (traffic light) into a signal that your brain can process. Next comes perception, where your brain will interpret the information to distinguish what it is sensing and how it should deal with it. Such as slow down, go, or stop. To make this possible though, you must experience a certain amount of stimulus, otherwise your receptors may not pick up on the stimulus. If the light isn’t bright enough for you to see, or someone is not talking loud enough for you to hear, then you never receive a sensation, which is the first process in interpreting physical stimuli. This is called absolute threshold. Similarly, there are many stimuli that are so similar to one another that you can’t tell the difference between them. The difference threshold is the minimum difference required to detect a difference between sensory inputs.

In this chapter what took me by surprise the most was in the auditory section where the author of the book asked the question “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” and gave us the answer no. After the explanation in the book, I understand why this is the answer, but it is just hard to wrap my head around the concept that everything we hear is changes in air pressure, and all the colors we see are not necessarily there. It’s just the way our mind perceives them.

Terms: Sensation, Perception, Receptors, Transduction, Stimuli, Absolute Threshold, Difference Threshold, Auditory

The topic that I found most interesting was the section about the sense of taste. Taste begins on the taste receptors which are located in the taste buds. There are about 9,000 taste buds in each person’s mouth. While these taste buds are small they have such a large impact on everything that we eat. Taste buds ultimately even impact how much we eat. Every taste is made up of five qualities which are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. I was fascinated to learn that two people can taste the exact same thing and it will taste different to them. That is because tastes can differ between people, a fact that can be linked to genetics. Supertasters can taste more intensely then most other people, this is also a trait that determined by genetics. Culture is something that can also influence taste preferences, most people gravitate to foods that are common within their own culture. This can start even before birth when in the womb babies are being introduced to the food their mother’s eat. Mothers pass their food preferences down to their children.
Transduction is when physical energy is changed into impulses in which are sent to and registered by the brain. This process is very important in psychology because we need to know how the mind works and everything that has to do with the process. Almost everything that we do is a result of transduction and it is a vital part of human existence everyday. An example of transduction is when your ears receive sound waves and change it into a message your brain can detect and you hear sound. An example of this is when we jump at a loud unexpected noise or make a disgusted face when confronted with an unpleasant odor. These sounds also become language and the way that humans communicate with each other. Transduction also works as a safety mechanism in our lives as discussed below regarding pain receptors.
The most surprising thing that I read was about the different types of pain receptors. Fast receptors can relay information to the brain very quickly. This type of receptor is for sharp, immediate pains. An example of this would be if you put your hand on something hot, the fast receptors would send the message to your brain. Your brain would detect the message and have you take your hand off fast so you do not get burned. This operates as a defense mechanism against injury. The other is slow fiber which carries information a lot slower to the brain and usually for steady and dull pain. The urgency is not the same in these situations and the message is transmitted to the brain more slowly. I was also interested to learn that pain itself is created by the brain, however, the brain has no pain receptors and can not feel pain. This was surprising to me because I never thought about the process of transmitting signals to the brain to create the feeling of pain.

Terms: taste buds, transduction, fast fibers, slow fibers

I thought that it was interesting reading about eating and the brain. I learned that everyone has around eight to ten thousand taste buds in their mouth and throats (I only thought that they were on your tongue). I also learned that there are things called papillae that are structures that have groups of taste buds inside of them. On page 180, it even gave a way to see if you are a supertaster. A supertaster, according to the book, is one who has more taste buds and is more so to not like bitter things such as broccoli, dark chocolate and coffee. The people who are supertasters makeup about twenty-five percent of our population!
According to the book, transduction is a process where sensory receptors change the physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. They change the stimulant signals so that the brain can understand them. It’s very important so that we can use perception in everyday life. Without transduction, we wouldn't be able to understand what the light waves that our sensory receptors mean or what they are telling us to do. Without transduction, humans wouldn't be able to do things like driving, taste thing, touch things or smell things!
One of the memorable things was about the rules on enjoying your music but at the same time, avoiding hearing loss. It gave three was on how to avoid hearing loss that I really need to consider!
Something else that I thought was surprising was the part about fast fibers. They are receptors on the skin, organs, membranes and bones and they send signals to the brain to identify sharp immediate pain. Slow fibers on the other had tell the brain about dull steady pains. This part made me think about some of my injuries and what kind of fiber was sent to my brain! For example, when I dislocated my knee, it probably started as a fast fiber but, since the pain lasted for a long period of time, it most likely became a slow fiber.

Terms: Brain, taste buds, papillae, transduction, sensory receptors, fast fibers and slow fibers.

Chapter 5 Review
This chapter was all about our five senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. It would be basically impossible for us to have any of these senses if it wasn’t for transduction. Transduction is process in which the stimuli for a sense is converted into a chemical message that is eventually interpreted by the brain. If there was no transduction to occur; our brains would be essentially worthless. We wouldn’t be able to interpret any of the things around us. This is important to psychology because we tend to have signals that help the brain respond to a stimuli. That means that someone could have a different signal for the same stimuli and that is what makes us unique. From the reading I was interested most in the smelling and taste senses. These are the two senses that stuck out to me the most because they are very strong senses to me. I found it interesting that there are only five tastes; sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. With all of the different tastes in the world who would have thought they came from just FIVE basic tastes! I also found it unique that a mother can pass on her “tastes” in food to her child. Another thing that was interesting in this chapter about smell was that we can smell over 10,000 smells! And if we can smell that many and a dog smells 100,000 to one million times more than us; imagine what their everyday life is like! You would be smelling things that you weren’t even close to! Along with taste and smell I found the section about touch to be just as fascinating. The skin is our biggest organ and we have millions of receptors waiting to be stimulated at every moment. We can tell the differences in temperatures by our warm receptors and cold receptors. But if they are both stimulated at the same time a very unusual thing happens; a false feeling of wetness. And sometimes when something is so hot it gives us the sense that it is cold; and I think we have all experienced that with hot water at some time in our lives. Along with the warm and cold receptors our skin has pain receptors. There are two types of pain receptors; fast fibers and slow fibers. Fast fibers are basically the ones that tell us something should not be touched such as a hot pan. Slow fibers are the ones that everyone hates; the ones that make us have long, dull pain from touching the hot pan. Now all of these things are interesting but the most memorable thing that I will take away from this reading is about the ear. This is the most fascinating for me because this is where our balance comes into play; and being a huge fan of sports, balance is important to me. Balance is maintained by a small cochlea. The cochlea is filled with fluid and has hair cells inside it. When we move the fluid moves and the hair cells are bent. This is why we get sea sick. The movement of the fluid across the hair cells are unable to be correctly interpreted by the brain resulting in sickness. Another memorable thing from this chapter was about synesthesia. Synesthesia is when a person experience a sensory stimulation in a different form than which it should be interpreted. An example of this would be seeing a number as a color. Scientists have found that people with synesthesia have the same occurring senses.
The psychological terms I used were; cochlea, hair cells, touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight, warm receptors, cold receptors, pain receptors, fast fibers, slow fibers, transduction, and synesthesia

Jacob Clark
Psych
9-21-14
Chpt 5
From your reading, which topic(s) are most interesting to you?
If i am being honest, it is the topic as a whole that has always been fascinating to me. Ive always had a guilty curiosity with perception and the philosophy behind it. Yes, we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel a certain way. But, is that the way things actually are? are we seeing our surroundings in unveiled reality? Or is this just how we interpret them? Who really has the authority define what we see as reality. Just saying.
What is transduction? Why is this process so fundamental to psychological experience?
Transduction is the process of taking raw information and translating it into something the brain can read. For example our eyes see a stop sign. It gets transduced so that we understand what it is. Now, it is perception that allows us to think, “oh, thats a stop sign. Stop signs mean stop.” So we stop. Transduction is crucial in the development and use of our senses.
What was the most surprising or memorable thing you learned about in this reading?
Id give it to the electromagnetic scale. Again, having a natural fascination with physics, i find it interesting. On the subject, i would rather like to understand why it is so impossible to imagine another color. The colors we know and understand are such a miniscule part of the spectrum. What would it be like to see the other wavelengths i wonder. Could we even comprehend them the way we are now? I have a heard of some animals that have an immense range of the scale that is visible to them.
Provide a list of psychological terms that you used in your comment at the bottom of your post.
sensation, perception, transduction, electromagnetic scale,

The most interesting information I read in this chapter to me was how we feel touch and pain. For example, it thought it was very interesting how we have different receptors, such as warm and cold receptors, to feel temperature. Also, I did not know there were two different pain receptors. Learning about how there are slow fibers that carry out dull, steady pain and fast fibers that carry out sharp immediate pain was interesting because it explains why bruises usually end up hurting later on.
Transduction are signals that are sent to the brain by sensory receptors changing physical stimuli. It also results in neuron’s firing action potentials, which happens with hearing, taste, smell, hearing, and touch. Without this, our brain would not be able to process the information we receive. Also, our sense of perception, or the processing of sensory information, would not work and we would not be able to do a simple task such as seeing a green light and your brain telling you to start driving. This is so important for psychology because without it, it would be difficult to study the brain and the sensations we are having, or the physical stimuli from the world around us that the brain is receiving.
While reading, the most surprising thing to me was how to control pain. By distracting yourself if you are in pain is the best way for you not to notice or feel it. Also, it mentioned how Swedish researchers found that listening to music was another great way to distract yourself from the pain you are feeling. But we tend to mostly notice pain while we are trying to sleep because our body is trying to relax and avoid all distractions. What I also thought was surprising was how a person can have up to 8000 to 10000 taste buds. Taste buds are located in your mouth and in the papillae of the tongue, which contains the groupings of them. There the taste buds contain sensory receptors for taste.
Key words: warm and cold receptors, transduction, perception, slow and fast fibers, taste buds, papillae, sensation

When reading the chapter, there was one thing that stood out to me. When I read the portion about how eyes receive light and make images for us to see. The eyes and the brain go through so much for me to see. When light from the object goes in through the lens, then the whole process starts. Even the lens is a part of the process because it helps focus the light that goes into the eye. Just outside of the lens is the iris, this helps reduce or increase the amount of light into the eye so that we don’t burn our rods and cones or let enough light in so that we can see. After entering the eye, the light hits the back of the eye on the retina. From there the rods and cones detect the light waves and turn them into signals that our brain can process. Then it goes through the optic nerve into the thalamus which in turn goes into the right or left visual cortexes. This is happening constantly as long our eyes are open and we aren’t blind. The image is almost instantly put into our heads when we look at something so that there isn’t a delay in something happening and our brain knowing what is happening. It is also surprising that our eyes have different ways of seeing different colors and different details. The rods take in the black and white where as the cones take in the color. Our eyes are amazing organs that allow for us to see. Transduction is when there is a change and our brain senses that change and turns it into an action or order. An example is like when you are at a stop light and you have a red light. When the light changes from red to green our eyes send the change in color to the brain telling our brain that we can then drive. A memorable part of this chapter was that there are so many different frequencies in light. In a way I wonder what it would be like if people could see every color and every light ray. I have a feeling that it would be impossible to see even a mile outside because of all the interferences that would come up while you are looking.

Lens, iris, rods, cones, optic nerve, thalamus, transduction

After reading this chapter, I had learned many new things and many things that I had learned about surprised me. The sense that I found most interesting was the topic of taste. One topic that I had found interesting was when the book had discussed the relationship between taste and smell. I had already known some of the information that the book had given but that was many new things that I had learned as well. When the book had discussed taste buds and how they reside in tiny mushroom-shaped structures called papillae I had found that extremely interesting because I didn’t know that the taste buds were actually in a structure, I thought they were just on your tongue. And, if you have more than the average papillae then you could be a supertaster which means that you are hypersensitive and hyperaware to taste and the flavors in food. Another thing that I found interesting was that there is a taste that I didn’t even know existed, the taste is called umami. I was blown away that this taste was just recently discovered as well. I also found that subject of taste preference interesting as well, especially when it talked about how food preferences begin in the womb with what the mother eats and continues to influence the child even after birth. Not only did I find the topic of taste interesting, the topic of sight was interesting in a number of ways as well. One thing that was new to me was the opponent-process theory and how creating the perception that some colors are opposites which was pretty interesting. Another interesting thing about sight was that when mixing red, green, and blue light are mixed, the combination looks white which normally you think that it would be the opposite. Also, when psychologist James Enns said that little of what we call “seeing” takes place in the eyes but actually it’s the result from processing in the brain.
Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. Basically it means how things from the outside world are transferred to our brains and how our brain interprets it. This process is fundamental to psychological experience because its how our outside experience is transferred to our internal experience. We are able to gather what’s going on around us and internally process what’s happening and how it’s affecting you. Transduction is extremely important because it’s how we understand the world around us and how we’re able to function and interact with others around us and the world around us.
There were many surprising things I learned in this chapter and a few trippy things as well. One sentence in the book that really stuck with me was, “Objects in the physical don’t actually have color.” After reading that I literally sat there and looked at everything around us and was completely dumbfounded. It kind of changes how you view the things around you. Another thing that I found memorable was when the book said, “Just as objects in the world have no essential color, these changes in air pressure have no sound.” This chapter was just trippy because it made you rethink the world around you and what have previous learned. At the end of this chapter, I was extremely mind blown with all the new information that I had learned.
Terms: taste buds, papillae, umami, supertaster, taste preference, transduction, opponent-process theory

This chapter over Sensation and Perception was very interesting to me but a little overwhelming. There were a lot of new terms and new ideas but they were all very helpful to learn about for our everyday experiences. For example, the most interesting topic to me was about Binocular Depth Perception.
In Binocular Depth Perception, the key term is Binocular Disparity, which the book describes as how we use both eyes to perceive depth, and each retina has a slightly different view of the world. I view this as one retina having a different view of an object than the other because of the way we're looking at an object, almost like two separate vantage points. To test this term, I put my hand on the table in front of me and started consistently blinking one eye at a time like the book instructed. After awhile I started to notice that it seemed like I was moving my hand from right to left, when I knew I wasn’t moving my hand at all. It was very interesting to actually think about why that happens instead of just knowing that it happens.
Another memorable topic was how our ears detect sound waves. The infamous question “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” was brought up, and the answer was different than what I always thought to be true. The answer is no. The reason being, since no one is around to process the vibrations the tree makes when it falls the perception of sound is not there. The sound waves that allow us to actually hear the sound won’t go through to our eardrum that allows them to vibrate, the vibrations won’t make it to the oval window where enhanced vibrates are located in the membrane, and won’t allow the hair cells to bend and product sensory detectors for auditory contribution. There are a lot of steps that go into actually “hearing” a sound, but without actually processing the original vibrations, there is no sound to be heard.
Transduction is described as a process where sensory receptors (specialized cells that detect physical stimulation), change physical stimuli into signals that are later sent to the brain. Transduction is an important process because once the physical stimuli changes to neural signals, perception tells us how to react to the certain stimuli. For example, as we are driving there are signals everywhere. A physical stimulus would be seeing a red light at an intersection. Those sensory receptors go through transduction and are turned into neural signals to help our brain interpret that the red light means to stop the car.
The psychological terms I used were: Sensation, Perception, Binocular Depth Perception, Binocular Disparity, retina, sound waves, eardrum, oval window, hair cells, sensory detectors, transduction, physical stimuli, neural signals

This chapter really shows how complex the human body is. One of the most interesting topics to me was how we feel touch and pain. I never knew there were two kinds of nerve fibers that carry pain information to the brain. Fast fibers, which carry information that is perceived as sharp, immediate pains and slow fibers, which carry information about chronic, dull, stead pains. A painful touch, such as a burn, creates these two types of pain, perception of intense pain from the fast fibers and the perception of a throbbing pain from the slow fibers. However, there are ways to control pain. Keeping yourself distracted is a key way to help reduce pain perception, such as watching an entertaining movie. Another interesting topic I read about was how we perceive objects by organizing visual information. The example in the book was about the reversible figure. Some people see the face of a younger woman, while others see the face of an older woman. Gestalt psychology holds that our brains use a number of build-in principles to organize sensory information. These principles explain why we perceive a car as opposed to metal, tires, glass, hubcaps, fenders, and so on. These are principles of object perception.
Perception and sensation work together. Sensation is the detection of light, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Perception is how the brain interprets this information. Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This process is fundamental to psychological experience, because psychology is the study of mental activity and behavior. An example on how all these work together is defined well by how the brain reacts to a traffic light. When a traffic light turns green (the green light is a physical stimulus), the light waves are detected by sensory receptors in the driver’s eyes in the sensation stage. Then in the transduction stage, the sensory receptors translate the physical stimulus into signals. Those signals will become neural signals. Finally in the perception stage, neural signals travel along nerve fibers to the thalamus. Then cortical areas in the brain process the signals and construct a representation of a green light. The brain interprets the light as indication to start driving.
The most memorable thing I learned about in this reading was how infants’ taste preferences were affected by mothers diet. They tested this by having pregnant women assigned at random one of four groups. They were instructed to drink a certain beverage everyday for two months before the baby’s birth and two months after the baby’s birth. Their result was that babies whose mother’s drank carrot juice preferred the taste of carrot juice to mother’s who did not drink carrot juice. They concluded that babies become familiar with taste of foods their mothers consume around the time of their birth, and they prefer familiar tastes. I found this interesting because many people think that babies only carry their mother’s genes, but this study shows how big an impact a mother can have on her baby all the way down to their taste buds.

Psychological terms: perception, sensation, transduction, sensory receptors, stimuli, neural signals, nerve fibers, thalamus, cortical areas, fast fibers, slow fivers, object perception

The most interesting topics in this chapter for me are the ones I am already familiar with and have amused me several times in the past, but I have not had the pleasure of knowing by name. These concepts being 'difference threshold', the minimum stimulus required to notice a difference in something (such as pitch), and the 'opponent-process theory', which suggests that excitatory and inhibitory input from cones in the retina causes us to experience the phenomenon of color opposites. I recall books I read as a child that had many examples of opponent-process theory similar to figure 5.11 in the textbook. I'm all too familiar with the situation in the 'HAS IT HAPPENED TO YOU?' section on page 159, as there has been many a time when I have been continuously subjected to loud music with minimal irritation, only to turn it on later and be stricken deaf by the sudden burst of sound. The story that came with the explanation of top-down processing was also pretty interesting, mostly because it seems to me like it is a very dangerous, and close-minded method to experience the world around you since you'd be limited by your own prior experiences, as opposed to simply relying on your ability to analyze stimuli. The story of the plane hitting Mount Erebus seemed to illustrate that point adequately enough.

Transduction, the process of converting physical stimuli into information that is sent on to the brain, is essential to the field of psychology because it answers a big 'how' question in terms of how sensation leads to perception. We experience the world through our senses and perceptions, so knowing the process of how it happens is pretty important and helps us to answer questions about how certain stimuli cause us to respond, and how our perceptions can be subtly, or wildly different from person to person.

One thing that amused me was the concept of synesthesia, the sensing of stimuli in one form but perceiving it as another. Not only that it showcases almost comical perceptual experiences in certain individuals but that it is not all that rare. According to the text, as many as 1 in 2000 people have this condition. I find that to be incredible, and personally I wish I knew someone who could perceive the world in that manner. Names having a smell? Numbers having a color? Colors having a sound? It's difficult, probably impossible, to fathom.

The keywords are: difference threshold, stimulus, opponent-process theory, excitatory input, inhibitory input, cones, retina, top-down processing, transduction, sensation, perception, and synesthesia.

Ricardo Garza
The topic that I found most interesting while reading this chapter was the topic called, Sensory Receptors in Our Eyes Detect Light. I found this topic interesting because I learned about how light enters the eye through light waves and pass through the cornea of the eye then to the pupil. When the light passes though the pupil the iris, which gives the eye color, determines how much light should enter the eye. Once this happens, a muscle that is located behind the iris changes the shape of the lens which turns the light into an image. I thought this was interesting because I had initially thought that our pupils did everything on its own. I had no idea that lenses, retinas and corneas were all involved in the process of turning light into an actual image. From this particular topic, I also learned about rods and cones. I learned that both rods and cones are contained in the retina and they both allow the sensation of light waves.
Transduction, according to the book, is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. Transduction is important because this process translates actual objects and images into signals to the brain. Without transduction it would be impossible for us to see images for what they are.
The most memorable thing that I experienced while reading this chapter was the short portion that explained wavelengths. I thought this to be “memorable” because it definitely caught my attention and made me think of how we as human beings see colors and why it is we see a particular color. Some examples of the wavelengths are, short wavelengths, long wavelengths, high amplitude, and low amplitude. With these wavelengths we can perceive blue, red, brightness of a color, and darkness of a color.
Overall, the chapter was very interesting. I learned how the eyes work and use different parts to see objects and visualize the world. I also learned about wavelengths and how they work and why we need them. With this knowledge we have a better understanding of the world around us and why our bodies do the things that it does.
Terms: Wavelengths, visualize, signals, transduction, light waves, retina, image, rods, cones, lenses, cornea, eye, pupil, short wavelengths, long wavelengths, high amplitude, and low amplitude.

In this chapter I found a lot of things interesting. The contrast between sensation and perception was one of the things I found interesting. We can all experience the same sensation but our brains analyze things in different ways so we all judge that experience differently. For example, If I really liked a movie and told somebody they had to watch it. They could watch that movie and see the same things as I did, but they could think the movie was lame and never watch it again. Next I thought the section about our eyes was very interesting. It’s amazing how many parts of our eye we have that all work together to make seeing possible for us. The lens which focus with the retina which contains the sensory receptors. The rods and cones then take the sensory receptors from the retina to detect light waves to be processed in the brain as what we call our vision or eye sight. One thing I read I actually noticed was I experience sensory adaption on a daily basis. Sensory adaptation is a decrease in sensitivity to a constant level of stimulation. If i'm studying and theres noise in the background, I soon drown it out. But as soon as the noise stops I suddenly realize how quiet it got. Lastly I thought that the trichromatic theory was interesting to learn about. It explains how the cones of our eyes react to short wavelengths and long wavelengths to see colors such as red and blue. Transduction is taking things we see, taste, hear, feel, touch, smell, and experience and sending them to the brain to be put into better ways for us to understand.The sensory information we are experiencing gets sent to the a certain part of the brain where the brain will then interpret the information. It is important because with transduction we can react to things in an appropriate way. For instance, if you are driving a car and suddenly another car pulls out in front of you, your brain will react by telling you to stop the car and move out of the way. There were a few things that surprised me in this chapter. One of the first ones being supertasters. They are people that have almost six times as many taste buds as any other normal person, they develop this through genetics for the most part. They experience taste intensely and find eating to be un enjoyable because of it. I couldn't imagine not enjoying eating. The next thing I found surprising was that synesthesia was as common as 1 in 200 people. I have never even heard of this condition before and could not imagine what it would be like to live a life where you cross experience sensory input. What if you had a friend who’s name just tasted like something terrible.
Terms: sensation, perception, lens, retina, rods, cones, sensory adaptation, transduction, trichromatic theory, short wavelengths, long wavelengths

From the reading of chapter 5 the topic that is most interesting for me is how we perceive objects by organizing visual information. If two people were focusing on the same object they might perceive it in different ways depend on each person’s sensory input. My friend I tried to look at the figure 5.12 all I see is a young woman but to my friend perceived is as an old woman. It took me a while to realize that the jaw like of a young woman can form into an old woman’s nose. Transduction involves the study of five senses, sight, hear, smell, taste, and touch. It is a process by sensory receptors of transformation of something put into signals and sent to the brain so that brain can understand, except for the smell. For example, when you are holding a burning candle, the flame melts the wax, and the wax gets to your hand. Instantly, your brain get the signal and your brain will sends you a message to tilt the candle to a side so the wax will not get to your hand. That is the neurological responses sending from your brain give the meaning of transduction. Or when we accidentally take a bit of our food, and our tongue is burning because the pepper seed were in it, the pain signal will gets transferred to the brain and you will run around to find water to ease the pain. Our brain will not be able to get the signal from the sensation, and it would not be easy for us to take action to avoid ourselves getting to a worst situation without transduction, therefore it is very important. The most memorable in this chapter was how sensory receptors in our eyes detect light and to see an actual image of an object we have to go through 4 stages: physical stimulus which is the light waves from the image go through the pupil, second stage is sensation when the rods and cones detect light, third stage is known as transduction when the lights transform into a signal and sent to the brain, finally come the perception the signal from left and right eye are processed, they go through the thalamus and processed in the visual cortex that is opposite to visual field. The most surprising topic was in the beginning of the chapter, I was shocked when the book said object in the physical world don’t actually have a color I could barely believe it. Each object reflect light waves of particular lengths. And our visual systems interpret those waves as different colors. This shows how awesome our brain is.
Terms: visual, Transduction, sensory receptors, neurological responses, physical stimulus, sensation, perception, rods, cones

A topic that interests me is how the world is basically colorless and rods and cones work together with the brain to make you see colors. It is strange how everything is in color but it truly is all black and white. Another interesting topic was all the things that can harm your hearing in just a short amount a time. How using ear buds, to mowing the lawn, to traffic can hurt your hearing. It is interesting how things of everyday life have such high decibels, but were so use to it we think it cannot hurt our ears.
Transduction is a process when receptors change physical stimuli into signals sent to the brain. This is so important because it makes our brains work. Transduction is used in hearing, sight, taste and smell. It is how our brains knows what we are hearing, smelling, tasting or seeing. It is the process in which it has all the information gathered and the information has to get to our brain to be able to do those things. It is a very important process that gets things from sensation to perception. It is the middle man that takes the things we see, feel, hear or taste and send signals to our brain so we know what we are hearing, tasting, smelling or seeing. For sight transduction helps the cones and rods convert light waves into signals, and the signals are processed by ganglion cells, then it generate the action potential and the information is sent to the brain through the optic nerve. Transductions is used in hearing when the hair cells bend and the pressure waves turn into signals that are then sent to the brain by the auditory nerve. For taste and smell the taste receptors become chemical molecules then the chemical molecules turn into signals that go to the brain through the facial nerve. Transduction is a very big reason that we can taste, hear, smell and see.
One thing that interested me was that different senses have the same parts: a physical stimulus then leads into sensation, transduction then perception is where it ends but how each sense it very different, but they all follow the same path from outside the body into the brain. Another interesting topic was how some people cannot feel anything at all. Which then leads into not being able to feel pain and it can really harm someone to the point of death. One last thing that was interesting was the absolute threshold to detect an input for each sense. How we can hear, taste, smell or see the littlest things in the world. It amazing how strong our sense truly are.

Absolute Threshold, Action Potential, Auditory Nerve, Receptors, Transduction, Perception, Sensation, Physical Stimulus, Hearing, Tasting, Smelling, Seeing, Cones, Rods, Ganglion Cells, Optic Nerve, Facial Nerve

Synesthesia was definitely the most interesting thing to read about for me. I’d heard about it before in high school, but each time I hear about it I can’t get over how incredibly odd it would be to think of someone and have a taste come about, or see numbers and have colors come to mind.
It’s also interesting that even though we all have the same senses and experience sensation and perception, everyone perceives things differently, and someone’s favorite smell or taste can be someone’s absolute least favorite.
Transduction is the key factor that makes all of our senses “make sense” of things. After we see something, hear something, feel something, or taste/smell something (sensation) the physical factor goes through specified receptors that then turn those into signals that are processed in the brain and have meaning assigned to them. (Perception)
Terms: synesthesia, perception, sensation, senses, transduction

While reading Chapter 5 the thing that I found to be most interesting was the intro at the very beginning of the chapter talking about synesthesia. I have never experienced it before, so I’m going to assume that I don’t have it, but I found it super interesting that people would see numbers and their brains would start to show activity in the part of the brain that coincides with color. I found this so interesting that I actually went online to find out what other types of synesthesia there were, and I found an article written by Dr. Jeremy Dean called “6 Types of Intriguing Synesthesia: Tasting Words, Seeing Sounds, Hearing Colours And More.” Out of all six that he went over, the one that I found the most interesting was Hearing Colors. While I would find this to be very distracting during everyday life I think it would be great if I were to be listening to music, and being able to close my eyes and have a sort of light show going on.
Transduction is the process of turning sensation into perception. During this process the sensory receptors turn the stimuli that they have gathered into signals that the brain is able to understand and elaborate on. This process can happen directly, like when you taste something. Or it can take multiple steps, such as the steps it takes for you to see something and for your brain to process and make sense of what it is that you are seeing. In the case of all your sense there are specialized sensory receptors that transduce the physical stimuli into action potentials that your neurons will fire. The reason that this process is so fundamental to Psychology is because without it your brain would not process individual stimuli uniquely, and allow to have the individual experience that you have when you see something that you like, or you smell something that is unpleasant to you. All of these things would not be possible without the process of transduction.
The thing that I found to be most surprising is how the eye works and how it is the we are actually able to see colors. Just sitting and think it is hard to believe that everything doesn’t actually have color and that it is actually just the light waves that are being reflected off of the object and into the retinas to be interpreted by the cones and then sent to the brain to be processed as a certain color. It seems like a bunch of steps because we don’t really think about what we are seeing, and instead just see the colors as how they are.

Terms: Synesthesia, Transduction, sensation, perception, sensory receptors, stimuli, action potentials, neurons, retinas, cones.

I was most interested by sensation to perception. I was very interested in how our sensory receptors detect the change or stimulus. how your brain processes the action in just a split second is actually amazing. A good example of this that the book used is when a stoplight turns from red to green your mind knows that you need to go. Even though it only consists of four steps, It is still remarkable how well our brain can perceive something and then perform an action immediately. The four steps consist of: detecting the stimulus, sensory receptors transduce the stimulus information, and then your neurons fire action potentials. All of these actions put together is what your brain takes to realize the light has changed and tell you to go. Transduction is when the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand, which is basically the whole process that I just explained. The most surprising thing that I read in the chapter was the different types of pain receptors and how you can control them. I was surprised how there are actually different receptors for the different types of pain. I thought of a great example of how being distracted can make the pain seem not nearly as bad. My example was that when I used to play football if I rolled my ankle or had a head to head hit in practice it would hurt and I would notice it, but in a game if this were to happen I was so focused I would just keep playing and not even notice it until the play was over. I remember a couple times where I would go in as hard as I could for a tackle then everything would go black for a few seconds. I wasn’t unconscious because I would stand up while still in this haze and was still fully functioning, i don’t know how I would do it but I could completely block out the pain and would only notice how it was affecting my vision. Im sure that this was not a good thing for my body, but I don’t really care, I was doing something that I loved and that was all that mattered to me. The brain really is remarkable in so many ways on how it functions and does every little task.
Key terms- stimulus, sensory receptors, transduction, neurons, sensation, perception.

Reading in chapter 5, about the trichromatic theory was the most interesting topic that I read about. This is all about the color perceptions relating to the cone receptors. I had no idea that trichromatic means three colors and that is what the theory is all about. The receptors respond differently to different light wavelengths. Three different kind of cones are S, M, and L. S cones are sensitive to short lengths, and this results in the sight of blue. M cones are sensitive to medium lengths, and this results in the sight of green. L cones are sensitive to long lengths, and this results in the sight of red. What we all see is determined by the different wavelengths we receive.
Transduction is the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. However, it’s only one step out of the four. The four steps in order are Physical stimulus, Sensation, Transduction, and Perception. Transduction is very important process for our psychological experience. It is because; it turns the signals into neural signals leading to the last part perception. If we didn’t have Transduction than we couldn’t a signal from sensation, and from that we couldn’t process the actions. A good example of this would be if we are standing in the middle of the road and a semi is coming straight for us. We look at the semi and realize that we need to get out of the way. If we didn’t have transduction we would not move and be killed. This is why transduction is by far the most important step out of the four.
The most surprising thing or just straight out neatest thing I read, was reading about sounds going from your ear to the brain. The sound waves you hear such as beats are sensory input. This is a long process and begins when the sound waves arrive at your outer ear. The sound waves travel down the auditory canal and into the eardrum. The eardrum is a membrane that is located in the middle of the ear. When sound waves arrive it causes the eardrum to vibrate. The vibrations of the eardrum are than moved to bones called the Ossicles. They strengthen the vibrations even more than the eardrum. The stronger than before vibrations than move to the oval window. This is another membrane located inside the cochlea. The cochlea is a bony tube filled with fluid in the inner ear that controls the sensory receptors. The oval window vibrations puts pressure in the cochlear fluid that makes it move in a wave. The basilar membrane movement moves or causes bending of hair cells. Hair cells are sensory receptors which are in the cochlea that get or can feel the sound waves and transduce or tranducts them into signals that are processed by the brain. This long and crazy process is what surprised me the most. It’s truly amazing how much goes into just hearing one wave starting from the outer ear and ends up getting processed by the brain. We tend to appreciate the little things and this is one of those things I never really understood until now.

Terms: Trichromatic Theory, Receptors, Wavelengths, Cones, Transduction, Physical Stimulus, Sensation, Neural Signals, Perception, Sensory Input, Eardrum, Sensory Receptors, Cochlea, Hair Cells, Ossicles.

An interesting topic to me was in section four in the book where it talked about how we can taste and smell all sorts of different items and objects. In this section, it talks about the five main tastes including; sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umani (yummy). In this section, it mentioned scientists believed our tongue had different spots where the tongue was sensitive to one certain taste. Now, however, it is proven different taste buds are scattered throughout the tongue. I remember when I was in middle school and we did a lab in which we tasted the different kinds of food that were salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. From my results, at the time, I learned the tongue did have separate parts in which certain foods were sensitive to it. This observation, however, was not necessarily true. I wouldn’t have known this new information without reading the chapter. Another interesting fact I learned in the ‘How Can We Taste and Smell’ section was the same type of food can taste different to people. This is because the sensation with that certain food differs in everyone’s mouth. This explains why some people for example like fruit instead of vegetables. Also in this section, I found out when a pregnant woman eats certain foods often her offspring more than likely will enjoy those types of food because the mother consumed it so much. Another interesting fact I learned about had to deal with smells. According to the book, humans can notice ten thousand smells. This is actually a higher number than I thought. It’s amazing how the nose is so powerful that it can detect that much. Transduction, according to the reading, is “the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand.” One section in the book that surprised me was when it talked about kinesthetic sense. Before reading the chapter, I had no idea what kinesthetic was and what it did. The kinesthetic sensation are developed from receptors in the tendons, joints, and in muscles. This helps us to coordinate movement that is voluntary. One interesting part and one that surprised me was how we perceive sound. When we hear noises, the sound frequencies notify hair cells. I also was surprised on what I learned about the temporal and place coding. Temporal coding processes the low frequencies. Temporal coding uses cochlear hair cells that fire at the same frequency as the sound waves. Place coding processes higher frequencies. Another interesting and surprising fact was in localization, the hair cells cannot tell where the events are happening. I was also surprised on how we have five types of pressure receptors. These receptors are located in the nerve fibers and capsules of the skin. These two kinds of receptors have different jobs. The nerve fibers respond to hair movement. The capsules of the skin receptors respond to vibration, light, and fast pressure.
Terms- Temporal coding, Place coding, receptors, kinesthetic sensation, transduction

On of the most interesting things from this chapter was the section on how much stimulus it took for us to actually be able to detect it. I found it interesting that we have an absolute threshold, which is the smallest amount of physical stimulation required for us to detect a sensory input half the time it is present. I also learned that when we tune loud and distracting things out that is actually our sensory adaptation taking over to due to the stimulus being continuously present but yet we can tell when the stimulus stops and can make not that it is gone. I also found the idea of a difference threshold to be interesting as well because it allows us to notice small differences between the volume on the TV if we are not paying attention to it and being able to tell weight differences between objects. All these topics are extremely interesting because they happen almost all the time in our everyday lives and we never realize it.

Another thing from this chapter that I found interesting was the section about how we can detect temperature and pressure on our skin. For detecting temperature I found it interesting that we have warm receptors and cold receptors embedded in our skin. For sensing pressure we have five different pressure receptors at the base of our hair follicles and in our skin as small capsules. I found this really interesting that this allows us to feel pressure and vibrations in our environment. I have always wondered how our sense of touch really work was fascinated at how many specialized cells our body has to allow us to have this sense.

From the reading I learned that transduction is how sensory receptors change the physical stimulus input to signals that the brain is able to understand. This is important to the psychological experience because in nature our bodies need to respond quickly to the stimulus around us in order to be safe in some instances such as touching something extremely hot. Transduction allows us to send a signal that we are touching something hot and allows our brain to interpret that almost immediately and pull our hand off of it before we get hurt/burned.

For me the most memorable part of this chapter was at the beginning where it discusses synesthesia. I just found it so interesting that people with this disorder have a mixing of their senses. The fact that they can taste names, colors, and visual perceptions would make life very unique but yet difficult depending on the tastes. Before reading that section of the chapter I really had no idea that something like that had even existed.

Terms used: Synesthesia, warm receptors, cold receptors, pressure receptors, transduction, Difference threshold, absolute threshold, and sensory adaptation.

The term Transduction is the process that occurs when sensory receptors change any stimulus into signals that the brain can understand. Each receptor may need different amounts of time in order to recognize the new information that is being transmitted, things like taste and touch are immediately recognized in the brain but things like sight need to go through a few more receptors before it is picked up and received. This is important because it gives us what we experience in the world and what makes us what we are. This is important because through our life our neurons are what tell us what is happening in the world and what could cause us harm if it not recognized. There are even some medical complications that are traced to sensory neurons that can effect a person’s life because of the different receptors that are going off at the time, with some of these complications people believe that some of their senses are mixed up or combined together believing that words have taste or that you can see smells.
I believe that the most interesting thing about this chapter is all of the different uses that our eyes give us when it comes to seeing the world and making sure that it is seen in the right ways as they are intended to. There are many ways that our eyes filter things that we see into our brains and it is somewhat frightening to know that if anyone of these parts is damaged or stops working it will drastically change what we see in the world and how it looks to us. All of the information that we get from our eyes starts with the stimuli in the world and what we see is the result of many different factors that take place in our eye and brain. Starting with being able to see in color, the trichromatic theory believes that the colors we see are brought on by three different types of cone receptors; these receptors are split into identifying the wavelengths of the colors red, blue, and green and these colors mix with each other for the rest of the colors that we see in day to day life. There are times though when the colors we see should not match up because of the complex nature of the brain, the book explains the opponent-process theory and how different colors can be seen after we look away, i.e. staring at something blue and looking away quickly leaves a yellow afterimage and vice versa. Even though it is important for us to be able to see in color our brains sometimes have trouble distinguishing what it is supposed to be. Another easily distinguishable part of our eyes is the ability to perceive motion and the problem we sometime have when it looks like something is moving when it really is not after staring at a moving object for a period of time, the motion aftereffects many people experience is when it seems like a new scene is moving backwards, the easiest example of this is moving cars and their tires. Overall I found out how much our eyes do for us when it comes to being able to observe the outside world and how it has to connect to the brain for many things in order to have a working body and perception of the world around us. Terms used: Transduction, Sensory receptors, Cones, Trichromatic theory, opponent-process theory, Motion afterimage

see these colors and variations of them and nothing else (besides black and white of course).
When it comes to hearing, there is only one kind of sensory receptor: the hair cells. Hair cells detect sound waves and transduce them into sounds that our brain can understand. In order to taste things, our brains rely on sensory receptors in both the mouth and nose. Surprisingly, our taste comes more from smell than anything else. The sensory receptors in the nose are contained within the olfactory epithelium. In the mouth, sensory receptors are held within the taste buds. Other things can affect taste as well, like texture or consistency.
Last but not least is the skin. The skin is our largest sensory organ and is responsible for processing touch. There are various types of receptors in the skin that process different kinds of physical sensations. The warm receptors process warmth, the cold receptors process cold, and the pressure receptors pick up on stimuli when pressure is applied to the skin. As for pain, there are fast and slow fibers. Fast fibers are responsible for sharp and immediate pain while slow fibers make us feel a dull, chronic pain. These fibers are immensely important as they keep us from harming ourselves and aid in healing when we do get hurt.
Of all of the things I read in chapter five, I found a lot of the illusory tricks to be the most interesting. The concept of opposite colors was one of my favorite to look at. It is really strange that when I stared at the American flag in a negative color scheme for thirty seconds and then focused on the other dot, my mind imprinted an image of a red, white and blue flag right on the page. Not only that, but the fact that movement is nothing more than a bunch of different images. Movies and everything are basically just really fast stop motion. It is interesting to see how easily our superior human brains can be tricked by simple things.

Terms: transduction, sensory receptors, rods, cones, hair cells, taste buds, olfactory epithelium, warm receptors, cold receptors, pressure receptors, fast fibers, slow fibers, opposite colors

I’ve always wondered exactly how the vision and they eyes actually work. This is why I found the section explaining the eyes and vision the most interesting. Since I have arrived at college, I am finding it harder to see power points from a good distance away, so I was actually interested in this topic. I was aware of the rods and cones; however, I learned about many other aspects of the eyes. I found it interesting learning about the tragedy of flight 901 and how their top-down expectations influenced their bottom-up processing, causing them to crash into Mount Erebus. Another thing I found interesting in the vision section of chapter five was the motion aftereffects. Motion aftereffects occur when you stare at a moving image for a long period of time and then look at a stationary image. The stationary image appears to, for a moment, move in the same direction that the moving image. I have seen many of these optical illusions before and now I know exactly why the eye acts the way that it does.
Transduction is a process where the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. In the process of sensation to perception, there are four steps. Physical stimulus, sensation, transduction and perception are those four steps, but without a doubt, transduction is the most important. Transduction is essentially the ‘transfer’ from sensation to perception. Without transduction, your eyes would not be able to transfer what they see into signals and eventually dent them to the brain. In a simpler form, transduction is basically just the senses communicating with the brain. For example, shivering when cold or jumping when being startled are both good examples of transduction in action. Transduction is so fundamental to psychological experience because without it, we wouldn’t be able to process simple sensations in life.
I actually found learning about the transduction process in all of the different senses the most memorable. It was actually pretty interesting learning how this process is so similar, but also differs throughout all the senses. Another memorable thing I read was about how the infant taste preferences are affected by the mother’s diet when she was pregnant. I know that my mom drank a lot of apple juice when she was pregnant with me, and I still love apple juice to this day. The final memorable thing I learned about how humans can detect roughly 10,000 smells. Just thinking that a human is able to register 10,000 separate smells is mind blowing. Where does the brain have enough room to store all of that information, along with millions of other aspects of information? The brain is definitely amazing.
Terms: rods, cones, top-down expectations, bottom-up processing, motion aftereffects, optical illusions, transduction, stimulus input, sensory receptors, sensation, perception,

I thought that the sight portion of the chapter was most interesting. Your eyes work just like a camera lens would to focus something so you can see it clearly. This is a job that is carried out by the cornea and lens of the eye. The rods and cones in the back of the eye change the different lightwaves into things certain signals that are then prepared to be sent to the brain in the ganglion cells. This process is called the transduction which can be defined as the process in which something is changed into signals that the brain can understand. Different colors are dependant on their wavelengths and amplitude. Without a basic understanding of physics, this can be confusing. Transduction is necessary to understand things, because without it the brain would never be able to translate the input information from our sensory receptors. This process depends a lot on past experiences and what you certain things you relate to each other. The exaple that the book gave was a green light on a traffic light means go. We are taught to believe this and that we accept this as true. It was not exactly surprising, but I think that perception of different colors is different. For example, one person's blue may differ from another. No two people are alike and nobody experiences anything in the same way. This is how sensation and perception affect us each and every day. Sensation is when a sense organ recieves stimuli that is external and physical, and that information being sent to the brain. Perception is how you organize/interprets things for the brain to understand. This has many different influences such as past experiences and opinions on things.

Terms used: cornea, lens, rods, cones, lightwaves, ganglion cells, transduction, wavelengths, amplitude, brain, sensory receptors, sensation, and perception

The most interesting topic for me in this chapter was to learn about, the synesthesia. I was just fascinated to learn about how you hear a number or someone's name and you get to taste that. I have never heard of synesthesia before, and had no idea how common is it. I would love to meet someone who has that condition and would love to know what my name tastes like. The sensory receptor in our eyes also for me was very interesting. It was fun to read about the different parts of our eyes like the cornea which is the eye's thickest outer layer. In it you have the pupil where the light passes through. Then your have the iris which determines the color of your eyes. Behind the iris you the the muscles that changes the shape of the lens. The cornea and the lens work together to focus light on the retina. The retina has the rods and the cones which allows the sensation of the light waves. They transformed the light waves into signals. It was interesting how they all work together, so we can see. I also like how it discussed about glasses and because I have glasses. I like the part where they explained, if you wear contacts or glasses how they work with your eyes and help you see, I always wondered how they it all work together.
Transduction involves five senses and the brain's reaction to stimuli. It allows your brain to receive information and translate the information in order for your brain to understand. An example for this could be that your hear a sound it makes it's way to the brain and your brain processes the sound in order for you to understand, what that sound is. Transduction helps sensory receptors communicate with the brain. Without transduction we would not be able to experience the five senses without it.
The most memorable thing for me was about the five senses, touch, hear, smell, taste, fell and see. I found it incomparable how a mother can pass on her taste in food to her child. For example there is a vegetable that my brother and I do not eat because my mom do not like it, but my dad loves it.
Another memorable thing for me was how we can smell 10,000 smells.

Psychological terms- Synesthesia, five senses, stimulus, cornea, pupil, iris, lens, rods, cones. Retina.

From this assignment I thought the topics of sensation and perception were extremely interesting I think it is very interesting how we detect physical stimuli and how our brains process the perception of those stimuli. Sensation is the detection of physical stimuli from the world around us and the sending of that information to the brain. Perception is how the brain further processes this sensory information. The fact that each person has a different perception of something is very interesting. Depending on what types of experiences we have with certain things, our brain remembers the sensation we got from that object. Some people might enjoy the smell of something because it reminds them of a happy thought or good memory. Another person might smell the exact same thing and dislike it very much due to bad experiences with the sensation of that object at one time in their life.
Transduction is a process in which the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. Basically, transduction is summed up by describing the huge range of perceptions we have. Transduction is the result of having an experience with a type of stimuli. A traffic light is a great example that the book uses. The traffic light turning green is actually the physical stimulus in the form of light waves. Our brains our taught that when we see green on a traffic light, we should accelerate. Further examples may be something as simple as the word go. When we hear the word go, usually in some type of competition, we are trained to begin doing the task at hand.
The most surprising thing from this chapter was definitely the way we see things. I thought it was interesting how the pupil changes size depending on the amount of light in the room. Also, pupils dilate when they see something they like. The anatomy and function of the eye is quite fascinating. Behind the iris, muscles are capable of changing the shape of the lens. Your lens will flatten if you look at something far away while the lens will thicken as you are looking at something very close. The cornea is actually responsible for focusing more light than the lens though. The cornea and the lens work to focus light on the retina, which contains the rods and cones. Rods and cones allow sensation of the light waves. I think that the structure and function of the eye is very amazing and I learned a lot from reading this chapter. As the different parts of the eye work together to collect light and images, the brain is perceiving that material. The most interesting part about vision is the way our brain perceives it in my opinion. There are two factors why a particular color appears to be the way it is: the wavelengths of light that the object reflects and how the receptors in the eye process the light. According to the trichromatic theory, color perception and cone receptors are related. It states that color perception results from activity across three different types of cone receptors.
Terms: sensation, perception, stimuli, transduction, sensory receptors, pupil, iris, lens, cornea, retina, rods, cones, trichromatic theory

I found the concept of sensation and perception very interesting. Sensation is our body detecting physical stimuli from the world around us and sending that information to the brain. We use our senses for sensation for example sensation could be us smelling, hearing, or feeling something. Perception is when our brain processes the sensory information. This step is us taking what we sensed and translating it into information that we can use. Our sensation and perception work hard together to help us understand what is going on around us, even if we can’t see it right away. Along with sensation and perception comes transduction. Transduction is the sensory receptors changing the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. Transduction and the sensation to perception process are very important to psychology because if we didn’t have these functions we wouldn’t be as quick to recognize things, and they wouldn’t become habit. For example; us seeing a green light wouldn’t automatically trigger our brain that it means “go” and we might have some pretty upset people behind us at stop lights. These functions are very important in our every day lives. While I am talking about the traffic light example, I found it very interesting that the lights aren’t actually green, red, or yellow. It is actually our eyes and brain allowing us to see those colors of light. And that objects in our very colorful, beautiful world don’t actually have color it is the object reflecting waves of light. This concept is very hard to understand, but so interesting. I often do not think about how things work and I definitely never would have guessed how much of a process goes into something that we do every second of the day.

Light was a big topic in this chapter because it has a huge influence on how were see things. When you walk into a room and you see a couch or a chair the first thing that happens is light bounces off that object and enters your eye. While I read that something that made it easier for me to understand was thinking about when it’s dark outside and there is no light, or not a lot you can’t see objects around you as well.

The most memorable thing to me that I learned in chapter 5 was how the mouth transfers information to the brain, mostly because I love to eat. I found it so surprising that most of us have about 8,000 to 10,000 taste buds, papillae, in our mouths! Papillae are structures on the tongue that contain groupings of taste buds, in our taste buds we have taste receptors. After we taste something the taste information is sent to the brain. We have five main tastes sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (meaning savory or yummy). When we eat meats that have been grilled and seasoned so perfectly that they burst with flavor we experience umami. The way we taste is influenced by genetics; which surprised me. Looking at my family my dad will eat absolutely ANYTHING and my mom isn’t afraid to try new things, but me on the other hand I am a very picky eater and once I find something I really like I won’t try anything new. I may be a supertaster, they have liked this to picky eaters, supertasters are people who taste things much more intensely for example spicy foods are incredibly spicy to them and maybe not to someone else. These people have six times the amount of taste buds as the normal tasters.

Words used: Sensation, perception, transduction, taste buds, papillae, taste, smell, stimulus

From my readings in chapter five the most interesting thing that I thought I read was how auditory receptors in our ears detect sound waves. First what happens when you hear a sound, for example, when you hear a dog bark the sound travels to our shell-shaped ears and actually that structure of our outer ear helps the sounds we hear travel better. After arriving to your outer shell-shaped ear it travels down the auditory canal to the eardrum. The eardrum is a tightly stretched membrane that marks the beginning of the middle ear. At this point the barking sound hits the eardrum making vibrations which travel to three tiny bones which are referred as the ossicles. The ossicles job is to amplify the noise that the eardrum is vibrating. From this point the amplified vibrations reach the oval window which is just another membrane that is located in within the cochlea. The cochlea is a fluid-filled tube that curls up in a snail-like shape. Running through the center of the cochlea is the basilar membrane which when it is moved by the vibration pressure creates the bending of the hair cells. These cells are the sensory receptors for detecting auditory input. The bending of the hair cells then causes them to transduce the auditory information into signals that are finally sent to the brain and as a result, you hearing the dog barking. The reason why I found this so interesting is because we hear sounds so quickly. I wouldn’t have thought that there would be such a process to getting one sound all the way up to our brains!
Transduction has different definitions for various fields but for psychology transduction is defined as what takes place when many sensors in the body convert physical signals from the environment into encoded neural signals sent to the central nervous system. This process is so fundamental to psychological experience because to know and understand why our body reacts to certain things, we need to understand how bodies take in different types of information and how it translates it.
The most surprising/most memorable thing I read in chapter five was the reversible figure picture on page 167 with the paragraph about how we perceive objects by organizing visual information. The picture looked like a young woman with a fancy hat with her back to you; at least it did for me. The paragraph goes on to explain that if you look at the picture more closely that some people will actually see an older woman with a fat nose and mouth. Once I took a second look I watched as the picture of what I thought to be a young woman turn into an older one. It’s pretty amazing to think that how I see things might not be the same for someone else who is right next to me. But also at the same time my visual perception and brain can be persuaded to see things in a different way. Like how at first I was seeing the young woman but could change it to the older woman and just go back and forth.
Terms: auditory receptors, sound waves, auditory canal, eardrum, membrane, ossicles, oval window, cochlea, basilar membrane, hair cells, sensory receptors, transduction, physical signals, neural signals, central nervous system, psychological, visual perception.

The most interesting topic to me was about synesthesia. It’s crazy to think that people can taste a word, or that a color and number can be so closely related. I didn’t realize how common it was to have it either, considering I’ve never heard of it before. Another topic I found interesting was on sensation and perception. I knew that everyone saw, tasted, and heard things differently but I didn’t realize it varied so greatly. Take for instance the ‘try it yourself’ on page 156. I think the color of the car is lighter than any of the colors on the pallet, but when I asked some of my roommates they thought some of the colors matched perfectly.
Transduction is a process where sensory receptors change the physical stimuli into signals that are sent to the brain. They change the stimulant signals so that the brain can understand them. This is important so we can know how the mind works and the process. For example, when we hear a loud noise we jump. Without it we wouldn’t be able to do things like touch things, taste things, or smell things. These also work as a safety mechanism.
The most surprising things to me was about kinesthetic, where the sensations comes from receptors in our muscles, tendons, and joints, and help keep our body and limbs in place. I didn’t realize we had several internal sensory systems. Or another sense called the vestibular sense that allows us to maintain balance, that’s located in our inner ear called the semicircular canal. Another surprising topic was when the author asked the question “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it made a sound?” and gave the answer no. It was hard to understand why that would be the case but after reading what the book said I understand why this is true. It was hard to wrap my head around the fact that everything we hear is changed in air pressure.
Terms: synesthesia, sensation, perception, transduction, sensory receptors, stimuli, stimulant, kinesthetic sense, vestibular sense, semicircular canal

In Chapter 5 it talked about all of our senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and seeing. Each section made me more observant of the sense they were talking about in the book while I was reading. It made me more conscience of my surrounding, and it made me really connect with what I was reading. First, they talked about hearing. The started with explain how the eye works. You see something and then it goes through your cornea and your pupil. Then your lens adjusts the light and is displayed on rods and cones in the back of your eye. This gets sent to your brain where it is perceived. When it is in the brain and you perceive it is where I found it the most interesting. The way colors are that the light that the object doesn’t absorb is the one you see. This was kind of crazy to think about how there are light waves all around and they are being absorbed by everything that we see. Also how we group objects based on how close they are together and if they look the same. We do this without thinking about it, but when we are tested it really opens your eyes.
Next, they talked about hearing. They explained how the air pressure change and sound waves go into your ear and then vibrate your ear drum, then adapted to make sound. You never think about how hearing changes your perception on things. Hearing can put you in a good mood, but it can also influence how you act. You can locate things by hearing them and you are more receptive to different frequencies. The most interesting part of this section for me was when the book talked about how we associate sounds with things. They used an example of driving down the road and not paying much attention to what is behind you, but when you hear a siren you immediately decide to pull over.
After that the book talked about taste. They didn’t talk much about taste, but the thing I was always taught was how our tongue has different sections where we pick up different flavors better was wrong. I was surprised to find out the taste buds are evenly dispersed. Also that the mother has a large impact on her child’s taste preference. The child will have a similar taste presence to the mom because the babies will get used to the foods the mom eat around pregnancy.
Next they talked about smelling. The book said smell was very important to us, but we know the least about it. Smell perception is different through person, but most people cannot name smells. It is very confusing. The most interesting part of this section was how we can correlate smells with memories. This is very interesting and it is because we perceive smell in the same place in the brain as we store memories. It is weird how we have evolved to do that. It had to have helped us survive when we were less evolved.
Finally the last section was about touch. Touch is arguably the most important senses. We must feel pain and hot and cold to help us survive. The most interesting part of this section for me was when the book talked about fast and slow fibers. Fast fibers induce sharp pain and slow fibers induce slow elongated pain. The fast fibers are myelinated, and the slow fibers are not, which explains the slow pain.
Key words:
Fast fibers, slow fibers, myelinated, smell perception, taste buds, taste preference, sound waves, ear drum, frequencies, cornea, pupil, lens, rods, cones, light waves.


From your reading, which topic(s) are most interesting to you?
I found the topic about taste interesting. Taste and smell produce to the experience of flavor. Flavor is based more on smell than taste. Before I read this section, I naturally thought that taste takes place with the nose and the mouth. However, after reading this section, I learned that it takes place in the brain. Taste is also called gustation. Gustation helps us respond to the different tastes. For example, if we eat something bad, gustation helps us realize that we need to remove the item from our mouths. We have approximately 8,000 to 10,000 taste buds. A taste bud are structures located in the papillae on the tongue. Every taste experience is composed of a mixture of five basic qualities: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Umami is Japanese for “savory” or “yummy”. It is the more recently recognized taste sensation. Supertasters have nearly six times as many taste buds as normal people.


What is transduction?
The definition of transduction from the book states that it is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain.


Why is this process so fundamental to psychological experience?
Transduction is on the most important steps in the process from sensation to perception. Sensation is the sense organs’ detection of external physical stimulus and the transmission of information about this stimulus to the brain. Perception is the processing, organization, and interpretation of sensory signals in the brain; these processes result in an internal neural representation of the physical stimulus. Without it, we would not be able to experience our senses. Why is this? Specialized sensory organs that detect physical stimulus called sensory receptors. Sensory receptors are sensory organs that detect physical stimulation from the external world and change that stimulation into information that can be processed by the brain. The brain itself does not know what to do with the light and sound waves or odor molecules. transduction which is conversion physical stimuli into neural signals allows the specific parts of the brain to recognize and process the information it receives.


An example of transduction that I found on the internet is when you touch a hot pan, that environmental energy is then converted to neural and electrical energy in your body as the "message" and then the reaction to pull your hand back.


What was the most surprising or memorable thing you learned about in this reading?

The two different kind of pain receptors. The fast fiber carry information that we perceive as sharp, immediate pain. However, the slow fibers carry information that we perceive as dull, steady pain.


Another thing I found surprising, was that humans can detect over 10,000 smells. Each receptor is uniquely associated with a specific odor. An example would be one type of receptor would encode only the scent of a rose.


List of psychological terms:
Transduction, sensory receptors, physical stimuli, perception, sensation, fast fibers, slow fibers, flavor, gustation, papillae, taste buds

We all perceive the world in different ways and something I have always found particularly interesting is color blindness and the concept of color perception in general. I didn’t notice the text discuss color blindness directly in this section, but I still feel it is relevant to the subject of sensation and perception. I find it fascinating that people can sense the same color stimulants as me, but translate it and perceive it as a completely different color entirely. In relation to this, I have long pondered how different people can be living fairly similar lives simultaneously, but experience and perceive their realities in ways that are distinctly unique on an individual basis. So I guess, if I had to choose a topic that most interests me, I would agree with most of my peers’ comments I’ve glanced at so far in that it deals with the relation between sensation and perception, but my mind likes to think of it more as a concept of reality.
Transduction is the process by which physical stimulus that our sensory receptors pick up on are translated into neural signals that the brain can understand. This is fundamental to the psychological experience because once stimuli is converted into neural signals and sent to the brain the stimuli can then be interpreted into a perception of our environment. Once we perceive our environment in a certain way we can then react accordingly. Perception is a key part of the mind and psychological experience and is unique to the individual because not everyone perceives stimuli in the sane manor.
Something from this reading that really caught my attention was when the question, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound?” was brought up and the author said no, it would not make a sound if no was around since sound is a concept based on our perception. The tree falling cause vibrations in the air and if our ears are near to process this stimuli “sound” can be perceived.

Psychological Terms: sensation, perception, stimulus, sensory receptors, neural signals, transduction, color blindness


I found a lot of the information in this chapter very interesting. What in this chapter did I find the most interesting? The most interesting part of this chapter had to do with tastes. I think that it is very interesting that we all have such different taste preferences partially based on the number of taste receptors we have. It is also very interesting that we get a lot of our eating habits from our mothers based on what they eat while we are in the womb. When I look back on the things that I enjoy the most this starts to make since as to why I like them so much. I also believe that I might be a “supertaster” based on what I read on that. I am not really a big fan of dark chocolate that is why I believe I might be. I plan on doing the test of counting the papillae on my tongue later tonight to find out.
What is transduction? Transduction is the process that the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. This is very important to the fundamental of psychological experience because this leads to the perception of things in the brain. This process is a direct action to neurons firing potentials. The brain process these potentials and you recognize it as something like a green light.
The reading that was assigned today had lot of factual information that is hard to remember. What is the most memorable thing from the chapter? The most memorable thing from the chapter is motion aftereffects. This has to with seeing one thing for a long period of time like a moving object and then when you look at something else it looks like that object may be moving in the opposite direction even if it is still. I relate this to when you drive down the high way for an extended amount of time and then you get to the town you are going to usually when you pull up to the first stop light in town and there is a car next to you it feels like you are still moving and you get the illusion that the care next to you is still moving.
Key terms: taste preferences, receptors, papillae, transduction, sensory receptors, stimulus input, perception, neurons, and motion aftereffects.

Something that was interesting to me and has been for awhile is how the eye works. I’ve had some idea of how it works, but this chapter has gone into more detail and I learned more about it. It all starts with light. Light is the most important factor in seeing because the light waves that shine on an object you see reflect through the cornea, the outer layer of an eye sort of like a contact lens. The light then passes through the pupil and reaches the iris. The iris is important because it gives us our eye color but it also controls our pupils so a certain amount of light will pass through. What is interesting to me is figure 5.6. It shows how we interpret images through all the steps. One step that I think is the most important is transduction. This is when cones and rods take the light waves and turn them into signals. Once turned into signals they travel through the optic nerve and deliver the message to the brain. Once the message is received to the brain the images gather into bundles knows as optic nerves. This is when the image will appear in color. I find all this interesting due to the fact that we see something and can interpret what it is in a fraction of a second, meaning that this entire process has to be very fast. Even though sometimes the images are blurred or distorted could mean that they were in our blind spot.
Transduction is when sensory receptors turn physical objects into signals that are sent to the brain. This is fundamental to the process because without this step the image wouldn’t be processed to the brain, without the sensors going to the brain we could never interpret what we see. Yes there are blind people who will never get to have this sense of the process but those who can see should know that transduction is important due to the simple fact that without nothing would register.
Something that is surprising to me is the sensitivity of our ears. I found that figure 5.18 was related to sensitivity and shows some examples of the duration we can listen to certain things until damage will occur to hair cells. A couple examples that I found interesting were the gas lawnmower is about 90 decibels. This could add up for those who mow lawns for a living and don’t wear ear plugs. According to the chart it takes around 2 hours until some damage will occur to the hair cells. Over a long summer of mowing this could add up and diminish cells that are crucial in hearing. But the most interesting one I think is listening to music with earbuds on maximum volume. It is a terrible idea because it is about 120 decibels loud, and the listening time before damage occurs is 15 seconds. I believe it is that short of time because since earbuds are directing in your ear sound waves don’t have as far to travel to the brain and are basically right on the ear drum.
Terms: light waves, cornea, pupil, iris, transduction, cones, rods, optic nerve, blind spot, transduction, decibels, sound waves, ear drum

Probably the most interesting thing I read about in chapter 5 was the notion of Sensation and Perception. How we gather outside information about the world from our sensory receptors, touch, smell, taste all these can be classified as Physical Stimuli. Our brain takes all that information and processes it so we can understand and comprehend it this is called Transduction. What is amazing to me is the rate on how it works our brain is consistently taking in information, everything we see, the temperature that our skin feels, how much our eyes have to adjust to how dark or bright it is outside.

Things I found memorable that I learned about in this reading of chapter 5 are how our bodies react to pain we respond to pain two different ways. we have the fast fibers to send direct message to our brain as something being hot, sharp, things that incur instant pain an example is putting your hand on a stove. Your nervous system goes into a over-drive and you instantly remove you hand from it this would be an example of Transduction we instantly convert information from the outside world and transform it into a electrical signal. and then their is slow fibers where we perceive a type of pain as constant, but not as sharp as a pain our nervous system does not react as serve in this case.

Terms used: Sensation, Perception, Transduction, Physical stimuli, Sensory Receptors,

The section that I found the most interesting in this chapter was the one about taste and smell, more so taste. I did not know that there was such a thing called papillae in my mouth, I just thought it was taste buds on there. This was interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First, I put salt on just about everything and I never had an actual understanding of why, just assumed that I liked salt a lot. Now I know that I must have more taste buds for salty foods than the average person. I also really was intrigued by the study done to see if taste preferences in newborns are influenced by a mother’s diet. This makes me think of all those super picky eaters out there and if their mothers are just the same way.
Transduction is defined as the process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This is pretty much the basis of one’s psychological experience. Transduction is how someone interprets the outside stimuli, and then how their brain is going to react is psychology.
The most memorable thing that I read in this chapter was in the section about how we see. Specifically, in the paragraphs about perception they talked about how a pilot crashed into a volcano due to top down expectation but really it was bottom up processing. The pilot thought they were flying over Ross Ice Shelf where there are no mountains, so he flew lower so the passengers could see the landscape. But really he ended up running into a 12,000 foot volcano.

Terms: papillae, taste buds, transduction, psychology, top down processing, bottom up processing, perception

When reading chapter five many topics stuck out and were interesting to me. The first thing that caught my attention was absolute threshold and difference threshold. Absolute threshold is the minimum amount of physical stimuli required before you detect the sensory input. In the book they provided a table that showed the absolute threshold to detect input for each different sense. After I was done reading the whole chapter I went back and relooked at the figure because it amazed me how much we are able to notice with our five senses. On the other hand difference threshold is the smallest difference you can notice between two pieces of sensory input. For example, if you are ever in a car but you cant hear the music because of the noise going on around you, you turn the music up louder and louder until you can hear it. Once you get past the noise outside you realize that the music is blaring. We could not detect the change in how loud the music was because it was already so loud. To go along with that our senses are also able to adapt constant stimulation and detect changes in our environment, this is an example of sensory adaptation. Another interesting subject was the idea of how we see. I have awful vision and for me it was fascinating to learn how our eye works. I learned that the reason why there are glasses and contacts is because they provide clear, focused vision by helping the lens bend the light. Although, light is actually more focused more by the cornea than by the lens. That being said, both the cornea and the lens work together to focus light on what we know as the retina, or the light-sensitive layer of tissue lining the inner eyeball. One thing that was memorable for me was how much taste and smell are related. Our sense of taste relies on our sense of smell very heavily. Eating is something most of us like to do quite frequently. The reason why we like certain foods so much is because food, fluids, and other substances stimulate our taste buds. Each of us have our own individual taste preference that depend on what sort of tastes you prefer. There are five main tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory. Another thing that surprised me was the fact that taste preferences in newborns are influenced by what their mother likes during the months before pregnancy. As babies develop they become familiar with all that’s going on around them including what their mother eats. One main subject I learned about in chapter five was transduction. Transduction is the process of converting one form of energy into another. The receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. With our psychological knowledge if we didn’t have transduction life would not make much sense because we would not be understanding all the actions going on around us. The example the book uses is a traffic signal turning green. This shows the general processes of sensation and perception because the brain alters the action potentials and you interpret them to the light being green. So without transduction us as humans would not be able to let alone drive but, taste, touch, smell, or hear things. The idea of this is that all of our senses ultimately occur in our brain. The psychological terms I used were absolute threshold, difference threshold, sensory adaptation, lens, cornea, taste buds, transduction.

After reading Chapter 5, Sensation and Perception, I found many things to be interesting. Taste buds and papillae were interesting to read about because during food consumption and gustation the taste information is set to the brain through facial nerves. I never knew how much your brain worked with taste buds. I also learned that every taste experience has five qualities, sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. What is umami? This is not an everyday term for me. Foods that have a bursting flavor are considered an umami quality. I also found interest in reading about how the ear corresponds with the brain. Soundwaves move from the outer ear to the eardrum and cochlea causing vibrations throughout the ear. The hair cells are stimulated and bent, sending signals to the brain by the auditory nerve. The signal reaches the thalamus and auditory cortex. Again, I was interested with how much the brain is involved with our hearing and how it undertakes our perceptions of sounds. I learned about how listening to loud music for a specific amount of time can severely harm our hearing earlier in life. We should listen to music and still be able to hear the person sitting next to us talking and carrying on a conversation. This will protect your ears from any further damage. Another interesting topic to learn about was how our mothers pass their eating preferences to their offspring. My mother and I share the preference of vegetables, such as, carrots, broccoli, and asparagus.

What is transduction? During the process of transduction, sensory receptors change stimuli then are sent to the brain to be interpreted. If we did not have transduction, our brain would not receive these important signals causing our action potentials to be uninformed. We use transduction in our everyday lives and its important for our survival and happiness. For example, you touch a hot stove. The neural signals are sent to the brain like a message causing you to react and pull your hand away quickly. During this process, your action potentials are firing. This is important in psychology because the brain needs to receive signals for our bodies to react to the stimulus.

The most memorable thing I read about in Chapter 5 was synesthesia. This is when a person experiences a sensory stimulation but reacts to the stimulation in a different way than construed or expected. An example of synesthesia is when a person is given a color but will always see a certain number. I found this extremely surprising because it is amazing how people can learn living with these distractions. But some of these individuals do not know any different so it may not affect them as much as others. Another topic I found surprising was how cold and warm receptors share information with the brain. The sensory receptors in the skin detect the temperature and send this information to the brain as warm or cold. Overall, throughout this chapter, I found it interesting how the brain works with all or our senses and processes information from stimuli.

Terms: Taste buds, Papillae, Gustation, Sensation, Perception, Eardrum, Cochlea, Hair cells, Transduction, Sensory receptors, Cold receptors, Warm receptors.

Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This process is so fundamental to psychological experience because it helps us detect what is happening in the world around us and how we should handle it. It helps us react by sending action potentials to our brain. For example, say we are driving our vehicle into the garage. We press a button and have to wait a little bit for it to go up. Once it starts to go up that’s our physical stimulus. We interpret that by our sensory receptors in our eyes. The transduction comes into play because the sensory receptors translate the physical stimulus into signals that will tell the neuron to let us know to drive forward. The perception will tell us to start driving into the garage. It is a very interesting way of thinking!
The most memorable I think learned was about the auditory receptors in our ears. It is cool to know that you can cup or bend your ear to hear something better. The sound you hear travels down the auditory canal to your eardrum, which is stretched tightly across the canal. Since it is stretched across, having fluid built up behind it hurts and sounds funny because the eardrum cannot vibrate properly. As the sound waves hit the eardrum it vibrates and the vibrations travel to the ossicles. These vibrations continue through the cochlea, which is a fluid-filled tube that curls into a snail-like shape. The cochlea holds sensory receptors the sound can continue to move along within the ear. Finally they hit the hair cells causes a transduction. Once the neurons are aware of what is happening action potentials sends the ‘sound’ or the information to the thalamus and then to the primary auditory cortex located in the brain. Your ear and brain work constantly so that every noise that floats into your hears becomes a sound that you are aware of.
The most interesting thing I have read from this chapter would be the difference threshold and the absolute threshold. Difference threshold means they difference between one sense and another sense. For example, if a friend and you are driving together and you start to drift off to sleep. Your friend turns up the radio a little bit and you open your eyes because you hear a difference in sound. It is crazy how small of a difference something can have that you notice. Absolute threshold is the smallest amount of physical stimulation required to detect a sensory input half of the time it is present. In other words, it is the bare minimum of something that you will notice. The examples that really interest me are the sight and taste. How a candle 30 miles away we can still see a candle light or how 1 teaspoon of sugar can be detected from 2 gallons of water.
Key Terms: physical stimulus, transduction, perception, sensation, eardrum, hair cells, cochlea, difference threshold, and the absolute threshold.

After reading this chapter I found a lot of things that were interesting. I was really amazed with how our eyes allow us to see color, because objects reflect different wavelengths and we turn that into color. The concept of difference threshold really interested me because like the example in the book, I do my homework and listen to music at the same time, and sometimes when the song changes it’s louder and I immediately am pulled out from whatever problem I was on and am focusing on the song. I also remember from my high school psychology class doing a difference threshold experiment with penny’s in film cases and I remember how hard it was to tell the difference between which cases had which amount of penny’s in it. Fast fibers and slow fibers were something that I thought was really interesting. I’ve played many sports so I’ve been hurt a lot, and it’s interesting to know that for different types of pain they traveled on different pain receptors.
Transduction is when the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. Like if you touch the hot stove signals are going to go from your hand to your brain and your brain is going to respond by removing the hand from the stove. This process is so important to psychological experience because it is the change of physical stimuli into neural signals.
The first thing that I found memorable or that stood out to me was how our retina has a blind spot. I remember doing the dot and x experiment in my high school psychology class, but it still amazes me that our eyes are capable of filling in that missing space. Even though the example in the book was super tragic, the plane accident, it will help me remember how to tell bottom-up processing is when information is based on the basic stimulus properties and top-down processing is based on information from out brain. Something else that really caught my attention was the “Use Psychology in Your Life” section about how listening to loud music through headphones can actually mess up your hearing. I have really sensitive ears when it comes to loud music, and I can’t stand when my music is to loud, I just never thought it was true that when music was turned all the way up like that it could actually hurt your ears. I also thought the experiment about pregnant mom’s drinking carrot juice and the child actually liking carrot juice too was cool. I am a very picky eater now so it makes me wonder if when my mom was pregnant with me if she didn’t eat foods that I don’t know now, and I wish I would have thought of that question for the last assignment.

Terms Used: Difference Threshold, Transduction, Retina, Bottom-up Processing, Top-down Processing, Fast Fibers, Slow Fibers

Cassandra Rutledge
Chapter 5
One of my favorite topics of this chapter was learning where all of the sensorys go to in the brain. All of the sensorys first go through the thalamus to be processed. Touch goes to the Somatosensory cortex, vision goes to the primary visual, hearing to te primary auditory cortex,taste to the gustatory cortex, and smell goes to the olfactory cortex. I also liked learning about the eye. The process of which vision works is kind of interesting to me. First, the light waves pass through the cornea, then the light goes through the pupil, the iris is what gives your eye the color that they are. Last but not least, the lens is the muscle that adjust your pupil to the amount of light that is allowed to come in.Transduction is when the sensory receptors to change the stimulus to signals that the brain will be able to understand. The process is fundamental to psychological experience because through the senses the neurons are firing action potentials to the brain to decode what is happening around us. I thought the theories were pretty memorable. The trichromatic theory has to do with the different cone receptors that we have. Each receptor is sensitive to different wavelengthes of light. S cones are the most sensitive to short wavelengths, which leads to seeing blue. M cones are the most sensitive to medium wavelengths, which leads seeing green. Last but not least, L cones are most senitive to long wavelengths, which make us see red. The opponent-process theory is just stating that when you see a certain color you may see a different color after looking away after stareing for awhile. For example stareing at a yellow image you see blue after looking away from the yellow image.
Terms: somatosensory cortex, thalamus, primary visual, primary auditory cortex, gustatory cortex, olfactory cortex, cornea, pupil, iris, lens, Transduction, stimulus, neurons, trichromatic theory, opponent-process theory, sone receptors, s cone, m cones, l cones, and wavelenghths

Morgan Sowers
Chapter 5
During this chapter what I found to be most interesting was synesthesia. Even though it dates back to ancient Greece and it’s not all that rare of a condition (1/2000 – 1/200 people have it) I can’t recall ever hearing about it before. The idea of being able to taste the color blue and smell the color green is truly fascinating, and although it sounds like a pretty awesome condition it certainly has it’s downfalls. I would hate to be in the situation of the man in the text that doesn’t like to drive because stop signs make him taste earwax. Another tidbit I found to be interesting was that our pupils dilate when we see something aesthetically pleasing, which makes sense because then we can take more of it in. Transduction, as the book describes it, is a process where “sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand” (156). That translates to me as being a sort of messenger to the brain, which is why it is so essential to the psychological experience. Our senses are the things that experience stimulation from the environment, but they cannot process information, which is why we need transduction to convert the message and send it to the brain where a necessary response can be applied to the situation at hand. Some of the surprising and memorable things I read in this chapter were more along the lines of fun facts. For instance, the average eye can see a single candle flame from 30 miles away on a clear night, which is extra amazing to me because I have terrible eye sight-maybe I can only see 20 miles? I also found the “Try it yourself: Find Your Blind Spot” exercise (page 63) very interesting and also freaky, I didn’t realize things in my line of vision could just… disappear like that. A couple other things that were surprising was that women are (generally) better at determining odors than men, which I think is odd how that can change due to gender. Also, I never knew that experiencing flavor is something that occurs in the brain rather than the mouth (taste buds) and that flavor has more to do with smell than with taste. The psychological terms that I used were: sensory receptors, transduction, and taste buds.

One of the topics that is really interesting to me is the section Threshold to detect sensory information. I find it interesting that although there is a lot of physical stimulation around us, but we don’t even notice a lot of it. The physical stimulus needs to go beyond some point of before we can actually get a sensation from it. Absolute threshold is the last level of physical stimuli that is required before we detect the sensory input. The book describes a condition called synesthesia its where people receive sensory input in one form and experience it in another form. I found this condition some what interesting to read because it says that with this condition it is impossible to imagine anything. The book has an even more interesting example of this condition. It says that during brain scans of these people that have the condition that looked at black numbers on a white back board, researchers found neural activity in the brain are responsible for color vision.
Localization was the next thing that I found interesting. Localization is locating the origin of a sound. The book says that most of our understanding of this came from research with barn owls. The birds have to locate their prey, so they tuned their hearing. It says that in a dark laboratory, a barn owl can locate a mouse through just it’s hearing. The owls have two cues that they use to locate a sound. The first one is when they first hear the sound in each ear. The second cue is the intensity of the sound in both of the ears. The sound will come softer on the opposite ear that the sound actually came from. Humans use a similar way to localize sounds.
Transduction is a process where the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. Transduction is fundamental to psychological experience because given that psychology is the study of the human mind and its functions, it helps us so that we can experience things with actually knowing what and why we are experiencing them with sensory receptors.
The most surprising and memorable thing I learned about in this reading was about the five main tastes because it says that tastes involve nearly infinite variety of perceptions which is incredible. Just the thought of it is mind blowing because you think its easy to eat an apple and taste it, but after reading this and actually thinking about it and how there is a lot of unique combinations of receptors that it has to go through in order for you to taste that one bite of apple. The scientists believed that different regions of the tongue are more sensitive to certain tastes, but figured out that the different taste buds are spread throughout the tongue and mouth. Genetics plays a big part on whether you can experience taste sensations intensely or not. I think it’s interesting that some people can experience and be aware of flavors and textures and can be way more likely to feel pain when eating very spicy foods, than others are.


Terms Used: Threshold, sensory, physical stimulus, fundamental, psychological, absolute threshold, psychological experience, cues, localization, five main tastes, unique receptors, infinite,

The topic I found most interesting from this chapter was the section that described sensation and perception and the way we are affected by them. Sensation being the detection of physical stimuli, we are exposed to it every second of the day. Perception being the further processing of sensory information, it also occurs every second of the day. This is what makes this topic so interesting. Whether it is the wind blowing in your face or you stubbing your toe on a coffee table, it is still a sensation. The perception you make of it is what makes it a positive or negative sensation. Our constant detection of physical stimuli keeps us constantly processing and asking ourselves what we think of the information. Even with the same sensory input, we may react differently because of the way we perceive it. Our perception to a sensation will be the ultimate source of a reaction. However, we don’t react to every sensation we encounter. The brain is a very powerful supercomputer and it is smart enough to let some of the outside stimuli pass without having to react to it. This is what made the section so interesting.
Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. When specialized cells called sensory receptors detect a stimulus called a sensation, during transduction the sensory receptors change the that stimulus into signals the brain is capable of understanding. When the brain is able to further process the information it was given, that is when a perception takes place. Transduction is fundamental to psychological experience. Without transduction, the sensations we experience couldn't become perceptions. All of our perceptions are what make us experience the world. Without the ability to experience the world, the world wouldn’t be worth living in. We wouldn’t be able to respond to the things we experienced because our brain wouldn’t really know what we experienced. Without transduction, everyday life would be boring for sure!
I think the most surprising or memorable thing I will take from this chapter is the portion about super tasters. Some individuals have the ability to taste things with intense sensations. The trait is generally determined by genetics. Super tasters have nearly six times the taste buds as a normal person. They can better taste food with more intense flavor and are more aware of the texture of what they are eating. Most super tasters are picky eaters because of the fact they are so aware of what they put in their mouth. If you have more than 30 papillae, which contain groupings of taste buds, per one fourth square inch on your tongue; you just might be a super taster. I personally think being a super taster would be a really cool thing. I’m curious to know just how much of a difference the extra taste buds make and just how enhanced the flavors of different foods are.

Terms used: Sensation, Perception, Transduction, Sensory Receptors, Taste Buds, and Papillae

Transduction is the process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This process is fundamental to the psychological experience because it is how we perceive the world around us. It can shape our perceptions about experiences. For example, a bad smell in a restaurant can result in a negative experience at the restaurant. The signal detection theory states that the detection of a faint stimulus requires a judgment. Our senses are effect how we react to the world. If the restaurant has an unpleasant scent, most people would not want to eat there. A scent, sight, touch, taste or smell can also bring back vivid memories, like looking through a photo album or smelling your grandmother’s perfume. Our memories are made with our senses.
The most interesting topic to me was how we feel touch and pain. The fast fibers transduce information about fast, sharp pain, like stepping on a tack. However, slow fibers transduce information about ongoing, dull pain. The same sense allows us to judge where out body is in space, and also aids balance and a sense of direction. There touch sense includes warm receptors, cold receptors and pressure receptors.
The most interesting thing about this chapter is where all the information about senses is processed in the brain, but the sense is smell is processed in a different part of the brain. The sense of smell is processed in the olfactory cortex, but all other senses are processed in the thalamus. It is amazing how each of the senses had an absolute threshold and a difference threshold. The one that most surprised me was the teaspoon of sugar in two gallons of water. I also liked the explanation to the question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound?” The way the author explained through the definition of sound and hearing, it completely makes sense that the answer would be “no.”

Psychological Terms: sensation, perception, sensory receptors, transduction, absolute threshold, difference threshold, warm receptors, cold receptors, thalamus, olfactory cortex, pressure receptors, fast fibers, slow fibers

Overall, I thought this whole chapter was very interesting. The most interesting topic, to me, was the section called “How Do We Hear?”. It was really cool to learn about how different noises in the environment can effect one’s hearing. I did not know that there was a way to measure volume, but I learned that it is called decibels. Anything above about 70 decibels can cause damage to one’s hearing if it is heard for a long enough time. Before reading this, I did not know that when one uses earbuds on the loudest volume, it will damage one’s hearing in approximately 15 seconds. Thinking about it, I have probably done a lot of damage to my own hearing because I have played my music to maximum volume for a lot longer than that multiple times.
I also thought it was interesting to learn about how vision starts as a light wave and turns into a perception of thought. The light waves begin the physical stimulus after going through the cornea. The cornea is a clear protective layer covering the eyeball. Next, it goes through the pupil which is the black circle in the middle of the eye. The muscle that is controlling how much light is let into the pupil is called the iris. The lens adjusts to the distance of the subject in which one is trying to look at. Proceeding the lens, light waves begin the sensation step with the retina which is the rods and cones. These two detect light waves. The rods are more sensitive to low levels of illumination opposed to the cones which are more sensitive to higher levels of illumination. Into the third step, it starts transduction in which the signals are now being processed into the brain by the ganglion cells to the optic nerve. Finally, the thalamus transfers the thought to the visual cortex. It does not seem like a lot of work for one to see an object, but the brain works at an amazing speed that it does not take long at all for one to process it.
According to the book, transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This is very necessary to the psychological experience because without it, the light waves, sound waves, etc., would just stay as a physical signal and a sensation and not transfer to the brain as new interpreting information.
The most surprising thing I read about was that an infant prefers tastes that his mother drank or ate while he was in the womb. There was an experiment conducted within four different groups of pregnant women who (two) drank carrot juice and (two) drank water. The results came back and stated that three of the four groups of babies chose the drink that their mother drank, coming to the conclusion that children like the tastes that they are familiar with.
Psychological Terms: decibels, light wave, perception, physical stimulus, cornea, pupil, iris, lens, retina, rods, cones, transduction, ganglion cells, optic nerve, thalamus, visual cortex, sensory receptors, sound waves

Transduction is when sensory receptors change stimuli into signals that are sent to the brain. The example in the book is given by talking about traffic lights. When a traffic light turns green, that green light becomes the physical stimulus. Those waves from the green light are detected by receptors in the driver’s eyes. Transduction comes into play at this stage because the sensory receptors translate the physical stimulus (the green light) into signals that will later become neural signals. These neural signals will travel along fibers to the thalamus. Other areas of the brain process those signals and build a representation of that physical stimulus (the green light). The brain, therefore, interprets that green light as a sign to go ahead and drive. This example proves that the process of transduction is very important. Sensory receptors are organs that can detect stimulation and transform it into information for the brain to process. Without the process of transduction, the sensory receptors would not be able to change the stimuli into signals for the brain. For example, the brain would not really know what the green light means, and it would cause problems for the external world. Therefore, transduction is important because the brain would not know what certain stimuli means without those sensory receptors.
From this reading, the topic of feeling touch and pain was very interesting to me. I was not aware that the human body had warm and cold receptors. I did not realize there were two different types of receptors. The warm receptors detect stimulus’ temperature, and they change it into information processed in the brain as warmth. Cold receptors do the same with a stimulus, but it is processed in the brain as cold. The way humans experience touch is interesting to me. When something is felt on the skin, like hot water, the skin registers that stimulation. The receptors are stimulated at this point, and warm, cold, and pressure receptors are activated. They convert the stimulation into signals transmitted via different nerves. The signals travel to the thalamus and other areas of the brain that perceives that hot water. The way the brain perceives touch and different temperatures was very memorable to me. It amazes me that many processes occur, yet the reaction time is so quick. This shows that the brain is so complex and quick.
Terms: Warm receptors, cold receptors, sensory receptors, physical stimulus, external world.

The topic that is the most interesting to me is reading about the human eye and how it perceives light waves. It’s so interesting that the world around you is just light waves that are passed through your iris, lens, and retina to the brain by sensory signals. How we perceive color amazes me in particular. We are able to identify colors by the wavelengths of light that the object reflect and also how the receptors in our eyes process that light. And according to the trichromatic theory, different cone receptors are the reason that we get different color perception results.
Transduction is the process where sensory receptors change the physical stimuli into signals that the brain can actually understand. This is so fundamental to psychological experience because it is the process by which you actually perceive the world. The process of sensation and perception decides how you experience the world and how you respond to outside information. Transduction is what creates this experience by forming physical stimuli into information that the brain can read.
The most surprising thing that I learned was that influences on food preferences begin in the womb and that the same food can actually taste different to different people. I thought it was very interesting that mother can pass their eating preferences on to their offspring just by what they had eaten during pregnancy and immediately following the birth. It does make sense, because the baby eats what the mother eats in the womb, that the baby would become accustom to those foods and develop a preference to them.


trichromatic theory, lens, retina,

The most interesting part of chapter 5 was sensation and how we sense different things using different parts of your body. I already had knowledge of how we have our five senses, such as hearing, taste, touch, and vision. Why I liked about this chapter is that they explained how every person’s senses create a different perception then the next. I remember learning about a car and under the car they show a color line. The example is to show that everyone looks at the same car but chooses a different color from someone else. I viewed the car as more blue than purple but I asked a friend and they said that the car was more purple than it was blue. This really surprised me because we had a different opinion of the same car. I’ve learned that my processing is very different from my friend because we are different physically and psychologically.
In regards with the senses and the way our perception changes the way we view things, they both have to do with our receptors and transduction. Starting with transduction, it is the process by which the receptors change physical stimuli into signals which are then sent the brain. Receptors are what help in signaling when finding physical sensations from their environment. A good example of the process of transduction is a stoplight. The lights is the physical stimuli. When you are able to detect this, your eyes detect the light waves and transduction occurs when the stimuli that you detect is transferred in to your brain. The next step in the process is perception. Your brain interprets the information to figure out how to deal with the stimuli. An issue that can arise is if the stimuli is not strong enough then the brain never receives the information thus never reacting to the situation.
One other rather interesting topic that was discussed in the chapter was the way we are able to react and control the way in which we feel pain. If I am able to distract myself from the pain in some way, whether it was thinking about something else or just clearing my mind completely. This section talked about Swedish researchers who discovered that while listening to music, it is a good way to distract oneself from the pain that is felt. Also, being a person who really enjoys food, I liked to learn about how many taste buds we have, and learning that we have about eight to ten thousand of them.
Terminology: sensation, perception, transduction, receptors, pain receptors, taste buds, stimuli

The most interesting topics that I read was about how we detect pain throughout our body and how sensation and perception can affect us. I also thought that the five different types of tastes was interesting, especially the fifth one; umami. Another interesting topic that I read was how distraction and music can help control or reduce pain.
Transduction is the sensory receptors that translates the stimuli into signals that the brain can understand. Transduction is fundamental to psychological experience because it is how our brain understands stimuli. The stimuli is what we sense or perceive that is all around us in our everyday lives. This stimuli is transported through our eyes or skin to our brain that signals what that stimuli is. This relates back to psychological experience because psychology is the study of how we behave and how we mentally process. Transduction helps our brain react to the stimuli and makes us behave the way we do. It also helps us mentally process what we saw or sensed during that stimuli.
The most surprising thing that I learned in this reading was how I am a supertaster. I did the try it yourself on page 180 and found out that I am somewhat a supertaster, I am in that 25 percent of people who are more sensitive to strong and bitter tastes. The weird thing that I found out was how supertasters don’t like the taste of coffee, but I do drink coffee every day but I am still in the category of a supertaster.
Psychological Terms: Sensation, Perception, Umami, Transduction, Sensory Receptors, and Stimuli.


For me, one topic that was interesting was Synesthesia. I’ve never heard of people being able to taste words, like people’s names, or associating days of the week with certain colors. I liked reading about Fig. 5.1 with the color-number synesthesia. People with this condition associate a certain number with a particular color every time. When testing this condition, scans of the brain indicate that a certain area of the brain shows activity when shown black numbers on a white background. The two areas of the brain allowing you to see colors and understand numbers are connected or side by side with each other. Because the two areas are so close, one could have adopted the others role. I think it’s strange to think too areas can take each other’s roles. Imagine if the area of the brain that controls sight adopts the sense that allows us to feel. What if we could feel something we look at, it would be really strange. I really question how the brain can just switch roles and why it doesn’t happen more often if all the areas of the brain are so close in proximity. After reading about the color-number synesthesia and how often synesthesia occurs, I started thinking about my own experiences. I remember when I was younger I would associate letters and numbers with certain colors. I remember that the number five was red, four was yellow, three was a dark green, two was blue, and one was a different shade of blue. At the time I had no idea why I associated these things together, but now that I know I could have synesthesia is overwhelming.
Transduction is a process by which the sensory receptors change the physical stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. The way I interpret this is when you see something, this image is sent to the brain where it can process this image and spark a thought in the brain telling it to do something. Transduction is important to psychological experience because without the brain processing the images we see or things we taste, we wouldn’t be able to make connections between these things and our actions. Our perceptions and sensations add up to the experiences we have in the world. Without transduction or being able to understand things that are seen, there is no way to react appropriately to situations. The example in the book is when you know to accelerate the car when seeing a green light. Without transduction, your brain wouldn’t know, on the other hand, how to appropriately stop the car when seeing a stop sign.
I thought the part of the chapter talking about absolute threshold was surprising. The absolute threshold is defined as, the smallest amount of physical stimulation required to detect sensory input half of the time is it present. A better way for me to look at it is what is the smallest amount of stimuli can be present before noticing it. The most surprising part was the table listing some examples. I didn’t realize just how strong the senses really are. The fact that a person can start to taste a teaspoon of sugar in two gallons of water or see a candle flame from 30 miles away under the right conditions is astonishing.

Psych Terms: Synesthesia, Transduction, sensory receptors, physical stimuli, perception, sensation, absolute threshold, sensory input

9/22/14

Throughout this reading I found the topic of taste preference most interesting. Before reading I had thought that taste was something that was an opinion and that we all tasted things the same. I know now that preferences in taste come from many places. The number of taste receptors plays a large role in taste preference. I read online that cats actually lack a sweet taste receptor. This must be why my cat won’t eat an Oreo when I put it to her face. Taste preference can also depend on texture and consistency of the food or drink. Lastly, cultural factors play a role. For example, different areas of the world eat insects. This is not common here in the United States.

Transduction is defined as the process where the sensory receptors change the stimulus input into signals that the brain can understand. Transduction is fundamental. Without it we wouldn’t be actually able to understand the taste, smell, sound, and sight of an object. In a sense it would be as if we were blind, deaf, stuffed up, and not able to feel things. I’m not sure if we would be able to really do anything since we haven’t any sense to rely on. For example, bats can’t see so they rely on touch and sound. We would have nothing to rely on.

Most surprising throughout the reading was the Opponent-Process-Theory. As an art major I have seen this throughout art history. I wasn’t aware that it had a name however. A major artist that used it was Jasper Johns. He created a green-colored American flag that used this theory. Almost exactly like the one in the book. I was actually a little upset that the book didn’t mention his name. I would like to use this theory in my own artwork. I would be interested to explore the limits of this theory.

Psychological Terms: Opponent-Process-Theory, transduction, taste preference, sensory receptors.

After reading this chapter, I learned a lot about how sensation and perception contribute to our various experiences in life. I found perception to be the most interesting because the way people perceive everything differs on who they are as a person, and what they have experienced in the past. I thought sensation was fairly interesting too, but that was all prior knowledge before reading further through the chapter. The visual aids and examples throughout the chapter sold the idea, and explained how differently the same object can look, or in some cases, taste. After sharing the car color example with those around me I found that no one seemed to decide on one color, concluding that perception is different from person to person.

Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This basically means the stimulus input is converted into something the brain can actually understand. This is very important to understand because it can help those with problems be better cured, with correct diagnosis and treatment. Into shorter words, it would help those know why they have what they have.

The most memorable portion of the reading goes back to the beginning with perception. Since I found it to be most interesting, I focused my thoughts on that, and feel I much better understand what it means, and how it happens.
Psychology Terms: Sensation, Perception, Transduction, Stimuli, Brain.

To me the most interesting thing in this chapter was sensation to perception with transduction. I thought it was really interesting that there are multiple steps involved in this process but it all happens so fast you don’t even notice. The process is starting at the physical stimulus, and then goes to sensation, then to transduction ending in perception. Transduction is the process that allows visual messages to be sent to the brain to then be interpreted. An example would be if you were to put your hand in boiling hot water the energy from the water or environment turns in to neural energy, which then sends the message to your brain saying to take your hand out of the water. Transduction is very important because as humans we have to react to things at all times and without those messages going to our brain we would react a lot slower which can lead to a bad outcome at times.
I think the section about auditory receptors was most interesting and surprising. It said in the section that everything we hear I just merely a change in the air pressure produced within our hearing distance. I thought this was interesting because its pretty much saying there isn’t actually sounds there are just interactions in different parts of our ears that make us hear certain things. An example was if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound? The answer to this question is no and that confused me at first but then I thought about it and it started to make sense that the only reason we would hear it is because of the vibrations in the air that make the perception of sound.

Terms: Sensation, Perception, Receptors, Transduction, Stimuli, Absolute Threshold, Difference Threshold, Auditory, taste buds, fast fibers, slow fibers

Throughout the chapter, there were many topics that were interesting to read about. One of the first things that interested me was the title of the chapter, Sensation and Perception. When talking about sensation, we are talking about what we detect from what is going on around us and we send that information to our brains. What is cool is how these sensations that you take in are turned into perceptions with further processing of the brain. The perceptions that people have are how sensations are interpreted. These two things relate to the process of transduction. Another interesting topic is the concept of Weber’s law. This law is based off the work of Ernest Weber who found out that the just-noticeable difference of two sensory inputs are based on a proportion of an original sensory input rather than off of a fixed difference. This concept deals with sensory inputs that someone may notice when he or she is doing something. The opponent-process theory is something that I have read about before and it was cool to read about it again. I find it interesting how in the book example that they give, a person can stare at a flag that is green, yellow, and black, and then you quickly look at something else and see a faint image of the American flag. It is the perception of the eye that allows us to be able to do this that makes it so intriguing. Localization is another interesting in which people and animals try to locate the location of sounds. The book gives the example of an owl trying to capture a mouse. The owl uses two helpers to find the mouse. First it uses the time when the sound arrived into each ear. It then uses the amplitude of the sound wave in each ear. This helps locate where the mouse is.
Transduction is a process when the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. This process is so critical to psychological experience because it directly results in the neurons’ firing action potential. When talking about vision. More processing has to take place before they are coded into action potentials. An example of this is when you are at a traffic stop and the light goes green. Messages are sent to your brain and back to tell you that it means “Go.”
A process that I found surprising was how long it takes for sound to go through the ear and enter into the brain. Sound enters through the outer ear where it funnels down through the auditory canal. From the auditory canal sound enters into the eardrum. The eardrum is membrane that starts the beginning of the middle ear. The vibrations of the sound are transported through the ossicles. The sound enters into the inner ear where it reaches the oval window, which is located within the cochlea. Within the cochlea is the basilar membrane that stimulates the bending of hair cells. Hair cells are the receptors that detect auditory input. From here these inputs are sent to the brain. This seems like a long process, but in reality, it only takes a split second.

Terms: transduction, sensation, perception, localization, opponent-process theory, neuron

The human body is a very complex system. All of the motor skills and senses that are all maintained with in the brain is a very difficult task, yet we rarely think about these events. In figure 5.3, we study what parts of the brain control what part of the body and its function. The eyes have a very difficult course of events that must occur quite quickly to have the human react quickly: form either dancing to the beat of the music to throwing a football. The light must quickly be detected by the sensory receptors in the eyes. The through the process of Transduction those receptors translate the physical stimulus into signals and are sent as neural signals to the brain to be interpreted. This process is required so very much be each and every human because it is one of the few ways we are connected to the world, it is how we understand the world around us. Even though the eyeball can be a magnificent object, it does have its limits, as does each other sense, this is called the Absolut Threshold. Every sense is quiet difficult to understand, yet it is interesting to understand how they work their magic to help us understand our world . That is what I liked to read about this chapter. I liked reading about how my ears understand and send signals that make up music that we all enjoy. I loved studying figure 5.18 because of all the complex organs that help us to hear. I especially liked understanding the eye diagram and how the eyes can understand the world. My eyes were formed differently within the womb so I wanted to know how this happened and if it can be helped anyhow.
Psychology terms used: Receptors, transduction, Figure 5.3, absolute threshold, Figure 5.18

The topic that I found to be most interesting was how we taste. I’ve always been fascinated by the sensations of taste and how they’re different for every person. Since I was young, I’ve always known of the taste buds that reside on my tongue but was so intrigued as to how they worked. By reading this chapter, I learned that taste buds reside in mushroom shaped structures called papillae and that every person has over eight thousand taste buds! I’ll even admit that after reading this chapter I ran to the mirror and examined my tongue to try and catch a glimpse of my numerous taste buds. I was also interested to the idea that there is five different main tastes. There’s sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory and that everyone experiences these tastes differently. For myself, I love all things salty and sweet. I love eating some salty peanuts or a bag of sweet candy corn. But when it comes to sour foods, I can barely handle Sour Patch Kids! My personal preference for taste also leads to the idea that everyone has different taste preferences based on the number of taste receptors on their tongues or cultural factors. For example, I cannot tolerate spicy food at all. I don’t like it whatsoever and don't find it to be tasteful. But when it comes to sweets, I divulge quite a bit. I love the sweet and rich taste of many foods. I thought the idea of how we taste and why we prefer the foods that we do was interesting.
Transduction is the process where sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. This is so fundamental to psychological experience because without transduction, we would not be able to experience the senses. We would not be able to see, taste, hear, touch, or smell. Without these senses, we wouldn’t be able to understand things like the changing of a red light to green, or tasting a piece of chocolate cake. These senses help us experience life in an advanced setting which gives our brain more perception and sensations.
The most memorable thing I learned about while reading this chapter was how we perceive objects by organizing visual information. I was extremely fascinated by figure 5.12 on page 167. It was an illustration of a younger woman, or so I thought. I read the caption and it said it was a picture of a young woman, and also of an old woman. I stared at the picture for a solid two minutes trying to see this old woman. Once I finally found the older woman, I was flabbergasted as to how this picture could be a younger woman and an old woman. What we see barely takes place in the eyes, instead, what we see is a result of the processes in our brains. This concept really stuck with me because I remember looking at the illustration and being extremely frustrated because I couldn't see this older woman. My brain was not seeing it therefore I became irritated. After I read this chapter I looked up more illustrations like the one in the book online. I once again became frustrated because I never saw both figures right away. I think it’s fascinating that a picture can do that to a person.
Psychological terms I used were sensation, perception, sensory receptors, taste buds, papillae, and transduction.

Alberto Sveum
I was not familiar with “cones” present in the human eye until this reading. I especially had no clue how many different parts of the eye there are. I never thought it would take so many different parts of the eye to comprehend what we see around us. Cones alone do a lot of work, but not all of it, which is pretty daunting. Different levels of light call different parts of the eye into action. I thought this was strange. Why wouldn't one part be responsible for all different levels of light? Why does it take rods to see lower levels and give us night vision? This really makes me appreciate the complexity of the body.
The bit about using ear buds and the appropriate volume levels sort of scared me. I think this information was especially valuable because I never put too much thought into what I am hearing or the audio I have going on around me. The book said it only takes 15 minutes at the average rock concert to do damage to the ear’s hair cells. Even a lawnmower can be damaging after a while! It is a wonder my ears even work still! This really makes me rethink how loud my iPhone is when I go out to run. It’s definitely notable that when your ears ring, it’s meant to keep you from hurting yourself.
The way we perceive all stimuli involves transduction. Transduction occurs when stimuli from senses like hearing or smelling are converted into electronic signals so that they may be interpreted by the brain. Without transduction, it would be impossible to experience any sensations. One key example of the dramatic consequences of having no ability to experience stimuli is talked about in the book regarding children who cannot feel pain. The book says because the children do not feel pain that would normally protect them from further harm, they are likely to die at a young age.
I was fascinated with the bit discussing smell perception, memory, and the amygdala. When this chapter discussed certain smells bringing up memories of holidays or certain events I quickly thought of pumpkin pie and the smell of Thanksgiving. The fact that the amygdala manages the experience of smell along with emotions and memory makes perfect sense to me. I no longer am puzzled as to why a certain smell of cookies reminds me of my grandma’s Christmas gatherings.
Psychological terms: Transduction, stimuli, cones, rods, hair cells, amygdala

From the reading, the topics most interesting to me were regarding the light and how we perceive color, and how we hear sounds. The comment in the book with the question “if a big tree fell in the middle of the forest and there was nobody there to hear the noise, would it actually make a noise?” The book’s answer was very intriguing to me stating that there would be no noise. But as I thought harder and harder about this concept, it made complete sense that there would be no sound because the sound waves would be bouncing and active, but no ears or brains to process the vibrations to clarify that there was a sound. Then I was interested further down on that same page when it talked about the bending of the hair cells. I always understood that the vibrations entered the ear drum, the ear drum vibrated, sending vibrations through the cochlea and vibrated all of the fluid in there. I never knew that hair cells bent to form signals. I learned that the sense of taste is also called gustation.
Transduction is when the sensory receptors convert the signals they were given into something that the brain can interpret and recognize. This process is so fundamental to psychological experience because as the signals come into the brain, it signals to our brain about a certain event, and then our brain acts without thought. An example would be: our eyes see a green reflection from the stop light, that signals our brain, and our brain thinks go, since it was told green.
I had a few surprising things that I learned while reading this chapter. The first was that the iris increases the size of the pupil when one sees something beautiful or cute, I always thought it was just with light. Another was with the colors and additive color mixing and subtractive color mixing. The nanometers and the ability some people have to be able to mix colors to get other colors amazes me. When all the wavelengths are present, white is perceived. Then there is combining of pigments and when all pigments of red yellow and blue are mixed together, black is seen. Another thing was when you switch blinking your eyes while looking at an object. I’ve done this before, but only out of curiosity, never did I know what I was doing, really. So I learned that this is because the retina of each eye has a different view, known as binocular disparity, and this is how we know the depth of objects we see. This concept partners well with binocular depth cues, the cues of depth since we have two eyes with two different perceptions. I learned that the vibrations are referred to as hertz and they are equal to the amount of hair cell firing in a second. Also temporal and place coding are used depending on the frequency of the sound waves that go through the ear. And at the very end of the chapter, I learned that when you are wide awake, you ignore your pain receptors, and then when you finally relax to prepare to go to sleep, that’s when you realize your pain receptors are active and stimulated because you aren’t distracted by anything.
Terms: sound waves, hair cells, cochlea, ear drum, transduction, additive color mixing, subtractive color mixing, binocular disparity, binocular depth cues, hertz, temoral coding, place coding, gustation,

Transduction is the process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually send to the brain. Sensory receptors are the organs that detect physical stimulation from the external world and change that stimulation into formation that our brain can process. Something that I thought was interesting about this certain topic was that there has to be enough amount of stimulus for our brain to actually recognize what is happening. This process is important to our psychological experience because of the way we as humans perceive things. It is interesting to think that we are all seeing the same things, but it could be different in our brains than in someone else’s. Transduction is important for our survival because we use it every day. An important topic that was talked about was the absolute threshold, which is the minimum amount of physical stimuli required before you detect the sensory input. Some examples of the absolute threshold are: taste- 1 teaspoon of sugar in two gallons of water, smell- one drop of perfume diffused into the entire volume of six rooms, touch- A fly’s wing falling on your cheek from a distance, hearing- the tick of a clock at twenty feet under quiet conditions, and sight- a candle flame thirty miles away on a dark clear night. I thought it was interesting to learn about how complex our vision is with the way we see things. I never realized how complex the eye actually is. I learned about rods and cones which both allow sensation of the light waves. Another thing that I thought was interesting to learn about was the auditory receptors in our ears. It is interesting that we can do things to our ears to hear better, I thought this was interesting because as a kid I remember always having ear problems when I would want to go swimming and I was have to get tubes put into my ears several times to try and prevent ear infections and now I hardly have any problems with my ears except for popping a lot when I go swimming. I think its cool how you can cup your ear to hear something better or even by putting headphones in is so much different without. With talking about headphones it is important not to use them too loud because it can damage your ears and a lot of people are realizing this now because so many people need hearing aids. The most memorable thing that I learned about from the chapter was when it talked about our taste receptors. I thought this was the most interesting thing because it talked about how our brain recognizes taste instantly through out taste buds. There are five different types of taste that we characterize food in and these are sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. I had never heard of umami before but basically it is a taste that is bursting with flavor and as example of this would be mushrooms or cheese. I also thought it was interesting when it talked about our taste preferences like some people are really picky eaters and like certain foods while others do not. I just think its amazing how all of our senses correlate with our brain so much so we can recognize all of these things in our body.
Some psychological terms: transduction, stimuli, sensory receptors, absolute threshold, rods, cones, auditory receptors, taste receptors, umami

I thought the pain section was interesting because it is something we all experience and it is a more complex process than I thought it was. How people always see it as a bad thing when in reality its a signal knowing something isn’t right with your body. Reading that section reminds me of those shows that are advertised where people can do crazy stunts since they don’t experience pain but have a lot wrong with them. The book stated how those people usually don’t live long because they don’t know when something is not good or right with their body. I think it is cool how the nerves alert the brain really fast when it comes to experience pain due to fast fibers alerting about sharp pains and how slow fibers cause the chronic pain. When you burn your hand on a hot pan, you feel it right away so they work really fast alerting the brain about the pain. Suffering from headaches, I made the connection that they are probably usually more slow fibers since they are usually the long and dull pain. It is good information to know pain can be controlled by distracting yourself to where you can’t think about it, something I always kinda thought seemed to be true but it is good to know other people experience it as well.
Transduction is an important process to the brain for understanding things and it is important
to understanding the brain and how it processes things. It is also sensations which helps things like know what is a good or bad feeling that is being experienced. It is important to psychological studies because when you have to understand the brain to get a good answer and knowing how it processes things is very important.
I personally found the ear part of the chapter most memorable because I have always had trouble with my ears. When it comes to draining, multiple infections in a year, and was told in seventh grade it is possible I could be close to being half deaf in one ear. I was always kind of bitter about learning about the ear because of my discomfort it causes me so often and frustration it causes many doctors when I come in. Reading that part of the chapter was actually interesting. I realized there was a lot more to the ear than I thought. The hair cells were something I’ve never heard of and how they actually have a huge impact on processing sound waves to the brain. I found the cochlea kinda cool as well because it holds fluid and is a tube which I think is something I have had issues with. From experiencing a share of ear infections, I thought it was interesting reading about the vestibular sense and how ear infections are disturbances. I also experience a lot of car and seasickness very easily so finding out they were sort of related was something I never thought about and may explain why I have issues with both problems due to conflicting signals. I do think it was a very informative chapter for me with my experience with my ear trouble.
Terms used- fast fibers, slow fibers, vestibular sense, hair cells, cochlea, transduction

The most interesting aspect in the reading was how the brain is able to take in all the nonsense that is the world we live in and make sense out of it. For instance, it shocked me when the book informed me that there is no such things as colors, sounds, or flavor. In the example of color, our eyes are receiving light waves and our little receptors are transducing the information into signals that the brain can decode and make sense out of. Sound works the same way in that it travels in sound waves and is taken to the brain to be sorted into language or noises. Flavor was a really hard one for me to accept because when I eat a food I taste it in my mouth and not in my brain. It is amazing how much information the brain can take in and make sense of all of it. Before learning about psychology I thought that my brain was lame, but now that I am learning all of the things that my brain sifts through and all the firing actions it processes in milliseconds is overwhelming. I also found interesting how humans have an absolute threshold. Sometimes a person does not need a bunch of stimuli to hear something or see something and other times it would take bright flashing lights for a person to notice an irregularity. The signal detection theory made me think about waiting for a text. When I was in middle school and found texting to be the coolest thing on the planet I would always think that I heard my phone go off when in reality it was a false alarm. Of course over time I have been able to have more correct rejections because I am not as attached to my phone as I used to be.
Transduction is the work of sensory receptors taking in outside information and shifting it into signals that the brain can understand and use. It is important because it connects us to the world around us. Without being able to process light waves, sound waves, or any of the information that our sensory receptors pick up we would not live for very long and we would not be able to make our own perceptions about life.
This probably sounds gross, but I thought it was intriguing how the hair cells move to match lower pitches of sound waves. Now whenever I am listening to someone with a low voice talk I am going to think of a little party of hairs moving around in my ears. Thinking about noises also made me wonder why certain sounds evoke different emotions in people.

Terms used: light waves, sound waves,transduction, firing actions, absolute threshold, signal detection theory, false alarms, correct rejection, sensory receptors, hair cells.

For me, the topic that most interested me in the reading was the part about taste preference. Apparently, people like or dislike certain foods because of the sensation each individual gets from that particular food. Each person’s sensation is usually slightly or drastically different from another’s and that’s why some people may enjoy, for example, an apple and some people may despise the taste of an apple. Texture is also a key factor in what foods I like and what foods you like. Textures of foods have different sensations in each individual’s mouths. Studies also suggest that cultures can be a factor in taste perception. What one mother may eat while she is pregnant, another mother may never eat that same food and therefore the babies of each mother may have differing food preferences. I found all of this very interesting because I personally have always wondered why I loved a certain food and my friends didn’t and vice versa. Yet again, perception is a huge factor in the way we live our lives. In the book, transduction is when “the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand.” Transduction is simply getting information to the brain and back to the rest of the body so it can react to the stimuli around it. It is important because without it, we would not be able to react to anything or feel/sense things around us. The most surprising thing I learned after reading this was that humans can ‘smell’ at least ten thousand smells. The fact that that is possible is really quite remarkable. The researchers are even questioning why and how we are able to detect a certain smell. Our brains are powerful in ways that most of us still can’t imagine. I would even be so bold as to argue that the brain may be the most dynamic organ known to man. The psychological terms I used were preference, perception, sensation, sensory receptors, stimulus, and transduction.

I found all the topics about our senses very interesting to read. I found our ability to see things the most fascinating. It makes me think though do other people see the same thing as me? Or if anything is different in their image. We all have the same general make–up, but it just makes you think what other people see. Sight, along with every sense we have, has many unique qualities. Something about sight though intrigues me because I think seeing the world is the best thing we will do. If we saw the world in black and white this world would be very boring and less interesting. Without sight I think that we are given the opportunity to explore everything this world has to offer. I think hearing is another very interesting thing as well. One summer I broke my eardrum and couldn’t hear for about a month, this was awful because hearing things can have a huge effect on our behaviors and feelings.
Transduction is changing one form of energy to another form. This process applies to our psychological processes as our body has sensations and perceptions. We all have these feelings and they can be triggered just by the slightest things. According to the book taste can be triggered by just one teaspoon in 2 gallons of water, smell is one drop of perfume diffused into the entire volume of six rooms, touch; a fly’s wing on your cheek from a distance of .04 inch, hearing is the tick of a clock at 20 ft. under quiet conditions, and vision is a flame 30 miles away under clear conditions. Knowing all of these things is really interesting because it just takes the smallest things to trigger the difference threshold.
The most surprising thing I learned after reading this chapter is synesthesia. This is a unique condition where people cross two things together. One example that the book shows is how most people see numbers as numbers and that is it. People with synesthesia will associate numbers with colors and this is called color-number synesthesia. It says it is really hard for people to understand this condition if you do not have it. Some people will be able to taste colors or words with this. It is extremely hard to understand this, because while I can taste foods and other things but I can’t put a taste to a word or color. If I haven’t tried a food that someone is telling me about I can go taste it but without synesthesia I cannot go taste a color or word. I can only imagine how it would taste by them explaining it to me. This is just mind blowing to me because of their ability to do this and because it is so hard to explain it if you do not have this condition.
Key Terms: Transduction, sensation, perceptions, synesthesia, difference threshold

In Chapter 5, the most interesting thing to me was sensation and perception. It’s crazy how our sensory receptors detect the stimulus, or change, and the fact that our brain processes the action in just a split second. We all can experience the same sensation but our brains analyze things in different ways so we all judge the situation differently. For example, I could tell my friend to check out a song that I really like. My friend will hear the same thing I did, but might have a different perception and opinion towards it. Our own perceptions really make us different from everyone else, and make us unique. I find that fascinating. When it comes to sensation, the book provided an example of when a stoplight turns from red to green. This is where transduction takes place. Transduction is when the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. When this happens, your mind knows that you need to go, all because of our sensory receptors detecting the change of the stoplight colors. It’s amazing how well our brain can perceive something and then perform an action almost immediately after we initially perceive it. When it comes to our brain perceiving something, it consists of particular steps: detecting the stimulus, sensory receptors transduce the stimulus information, and then your neurons fire potentials. When I think about what the most surprising thing was that I read, I believe it was how for each different type of pain you experience, different receptors take action. The fact that you can control the pain receptors is crazy as well. For example, I played football in high school and situations came up all the time where I would have a head to head hit or get a stinger in my shoulders from hitting someone in practice. This is where I would truly feel the pain and it would bother me. However, in a game, I would be just so focused that even if I got hit hard on a play, I would still just get up and keep going, completely blocking pain at the same time. I’m sure adrenaline had a lot to do with it as well, but when I look back at it, I guess I controlled my pain receptors without even really knowing the whole psychological background behind it. My body thought “Hey, you’re in a game right now. Just block out the pain and you’ll stay in. You’ll be ok.” There were also other instances where if I went to tackle someone and have a hard collision, everything would go black for a few seconds after the impact. I wasn’t unconscious, I was still functioning fine but it probably wasn’t the best thing for my body. Anyway, overall, the brain never ceases to amaze me when learning about it in this class. It’s abilities that we all take for granted is truly an amazing thing.

The most interesting topic for me in this chapter was about sensation and perception. Sensation is that our body detects physical stimuli from our surrounding through our five senses like feeling, testing, hearing, smelling and sighting. Perception is the process how our brain accept this sensory information by five senses. After reading this chapter, I thought the most interesting part was the fact that every people has various perception respectively, that is, something that I feel really good can be felt really bad by another person. We can hear and taste something equally, in other words, we can experience the same sensation. However our brains can analyze the same sensation in different ways according to our experience, values and characteristic. For example, when I am with my friend, I like to listen to music about love and parting and I can become sentimental. However, my friend doesn’t like to listen to this music because it recalls a painful split from her boyfriend.
Transduction has to do with sensation and perception as mentioned above. That is, transduction is defined as the process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli like feeling, testing and smelling into signals that the brain can actually process and understand. This process is so important in psychological experience because the process is related to how we actually perceive and understand the world. If we don’t have this process, we can’t understand our sensation also, we don’t know how to react to specific situation appropriately. For instance, if we know how to react when we eat very spicy food by transduction process, we can deal with this situation by drinking milk.
The most memorable thing I learned in this reading was about taste because I really like to eat food. In our mouths, there are approximately 8,000 to 10,000 taste buds that contain the receptors for taste. These structures are involved in detecting the five elements of taste perception: salty, sour, bitter, sweet and umami. When we eat something, the taste information is sent to our brain. One of the most memorable information about taste is the part about super tasters. Supertasters have nearly six times as many taste buds as normal people so they can taste things much more intensely. As well as, I knew supertasters are determined by genetics. I think I am supertaster in regard to sour taste like my mother because I feel sour taste very well than others so I can’t eat lemon and vinegar.

Terms: Sensation, perception, transduction, taste, taste buds, supertasters, genetics

Terms Used: sensation, perception, sensory receptors, transduction, neurons, stimulus,

The thing that interested me the most was probably learning how all the senses work, so basically the entire chapter. Specifically one thing I thought was interesting was that the higher the amplitude something has the louder it is going to sound. This kind of makes sense because when I was at prom my friend and I stood up in front of the speakers. We could feel our pants vibrate which goes along with what the book said that sound is caused by changing the pressure in the air. Since the speakers were loud the amplitude of the sound waves was big. If the amplitude was big then the pressure in the air had to change a lot and that caused our pants to vibrate. Another thing was the taste. I have two-step nieces who are picky eaters. I didn’t really understand why they are picky eaters, but after reading the chapter I understand. The chapter said that they have more taste buds so as the book says “tastes can overwhelm them.” (page 179) This could be a reason why my nieces are picky. It also makes sense cause the book says that this is in your genes, and their mom is a picky eater. Most of the things make logical sense after you read them. The part about localization being able to tell where a sound is at was like that. The book said that owls use the same way we do just a lot better.

Transduction is when your senses take the information that they have and make it so the brain can use it. It is very important for our experience. We basically experience the world through senses. If we were not able to transduce anything we would not be able experience the world. We could not use any sense.

The sense of hearing was the most surprising. There is a lot that goes into hearing things. The amplitude can change how loud something is. Also there is two ways that we hear things. We use temporal coding. This is helps us hear things with a low frequency. The hairs in your ears send information to your brain at the frequency. The other kind is place coding. This depends on what part of your brain get the information. The thing that is kind of memorable is localization because it makes logical sense.

Amplitude, sound waves, taste buds, localization, transduction, temporal coding, place coding

The most interesting part of the reading to me was how we perceive color. I think it’s crazy that the way we see colors has a lot to do with how light hits the objects we are looking at. I also found color opposites very interesting. It really is true that if you stare at a red object for a long time than look away that you see green and if you stare at a blue object long enough that you see yellow. I have always been able to see these images in my head but I never thought about how they correspond to each other by color. In the book, transduction is defined as “a process in which the sensory receptors change the stimulus to signals that the brain can understand”. This process is fundamental to psychological experience because in order for our minds to understand things our eyes must send signals to our brains for us to process the information. The most memorable concept that I learned throughout this reading would be the way our taste preferences work. We all have different foods that we like and dislike, and I think it’s awesome how everyone is different in that way also.
Terms: transduction, psychological experience, taste preferences

The most interesting things for me are sensation and perception. This is probably because the entire world around us is made up entirely of your own sensations and how we perceive the world. We are seeing and feeling the world in different kinds of waves. Our brain can process these sort of signals, turn our sensations into information that our body can use to respond to the world around us. I think that its amazing our eyes alone can do transduction just so that the brain can understand what we are seeing. Transduction of course being the process that will change the stimuli (or stimulus input) into signals that the brain will be able to understand and use. Vision takes some of the most transduction out of all of the senses. Without this process our world simply would not make sense. We would not be able to see, think, hear, taste, or smell the way we normally would. Overall, that would affect our conscious world and our experiences in them. The most exciting or memorable thing that I learned from this chapter was the first thing I talked about. I’m just very blown away at just how much of our world depends on our brain.
Psychological Terms: Sensation, perception, seeing, feeling, signals, transduction, vision, stimuli, brain.

This chapter reinforced what the previous four chapters have relayed to me, it is a minor miracle that humans are able to function at the high level that we can without even consciously thinking about a majority of the processes that are occurring all the time. For example; being able to see a jumbled mess of objects and make sense out of what they are is a major phenomenon. People don’t actually see the objects our brains think we see; instead, we see the light that is reflected off of these objects. The object itself reflects one specific wavelength of light, which then travels through the cornea, to the pupil, then the light is focused by the lens on to the retina, the rods and cones in the retina detect light waves. The ganglion cells process this information and send action potentials down the optic nerve to the brain in a process called transduction. The information is sent through the thalamus and processed by the visual cortex on the opposite side of the brain of the eye where the information came from. The brain then takes the information it received, organizes it and makes a meaning out of it. This whole process happens in a flash, and there are others like it going on all the time, which drive home the point that the human body is a miracle of incredible organization and design.

Transduction is important to everyone’s psychological experience because it is the part of the visual process that enables the brain to gives sights meaning. What actually enters the eye of a person are many light waves, and that’s all they are until they undergo transduction. When the light waves finally reach the rods and cones within the retina they are converted into signals that are processed by ganglion cells that then fire up action potentials and sent them along the optic nerve. This is a crucial step in the process of vision because it is what enables our brains to turn meaningless light waves into images we understand.

The most surprising or interesting concept was right at the beginning of the chapter when they introduced synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition where people’s senses are crossed; for example, a person could see a sound, taste a sight, hear a smell and so on. This peaked my interest because we have been constantly discussing how the brain has adapted over time, so I thought this must be a special adaptation for people to more vividly remember certain things. If a person that sees numbers as a specific color no matter what is tasked with memorizing a phone number, the person will be going off of two different important details of the number in their head, they will see the number and color sequence. I believe synesthesia is our brains trying to improve how we are able to remember things, because experiencing things with more than one of the senses will help an item stick more easily in your memory.

When reading this chapter, I found some things to be particularly interesting. It is a lot of information that I have never put into consideration before, but that makes a lot of sense now that I'm reading about it. The first thing was under the section titled "There Must Be a Certain Amount of a Stimulus for Us to Detect It". There is a great amount of physical stimulation that reaches our senses but not all of it is noticeable to us. However we don't notice it until there's a certain amount that is reached before we do take notice. The minimum physical stimulation that needs to occur before we realize that sensory input is there is the absolute threshold. Then there is the difference threshold, which is the minimum amount of change between something for you to notice it, like if the color on a background screen or monitor drastically changes colors and you glance up at it.

As an art major, I also find the trichromatic theory interesting. In art we're taught that red, yellow, and blue are the three primary colors. But based on the trichromatic theory, which states that there are three different styles of cone receptor cells in the retina that are responsible for color perception. S cones are sensitive to short wavelengths, which would be blue, M cones are sensitive to medium wavelengths, which results in the perception of green, and L cones are the most sensitive to long wavelengths, such as red. This makes me wonder if it would make more "sense" if green was a primary instead of a secondary color. But then, additive color mixing and subtractive color mixing come into the mix. Additive is when talking about wavelengths and light, and subtractive is when talking about actual pigments, like paints.

Another thing is transduction. Transduction is a process where the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. This is like seeing police lights, and knowing to pull over. Your eyes saw the lights, sent a signal to your brain, where transduction occurred, which sent a signal to the rest of your body to know to pull over. This is important to psychological experience because it leads into how we perceive things. If something is wrong in the process of transduction, then we won't be able to perceive it properly.

I definitely found it memorable that some food preferences start in the womb. It might explain why my mother and myself like a lot of the same food that my dad doesn't like. I think it might also be useful if broccoli doesn't make me puke when I am someday expecting and want my future children to develop a liking towards vegetables. I also found synesthesia very interesting. I just can't wrap my head around the fact that people can taste food and think of a color, or have someone's name taste like earwax in their mouth.

Terms used:
absolute threshold, minimum threshold, perception, trichromatic theory, additive color mixing, subtractive color mixing, transduction, synesthesia

Psychological terms: conscious, wavelength, cornea, pupil, retina, lens, rods, cones, ganglion cells, optic nerve, action potential, transduction, thalamus, visual cortex, synesthesia

The trichromatic theory was interesting to me how it relates to color perception to cone receptors. The color perception results from activity across three different types of cone receptors. Each of the receptor is sestina to a different wavelength of light. Another interesting thing to me was our taste preference. Our preference comes partly from our different numbers of taste preceptors. Also, cultural influences on food preferences begin in the womb, which I did not know. Also the sense of taste is called gustation. It is an adaptive functions which means taste is related to survival. Another thing interesting to me was that there are thousands of olfactory receptors in olfactory epithelium. And each receptor resounds to different odorants. Us, humans, can detect about ten thousand smells but researchers are still exploring the receptors. I was also interested to find out that we have two types of plain receptors, which are fast fast fibers and slow fibers. Fast fibers are in the skin,muscles, organs, and membranes around both bones and joints. The myelinated fibers quickly convey intense sensory input to the brain where it is perceived as sharp, immediate pain. Slow fibers are receptors in the same part of the body but the unmyelinated fibers slowly convey intense sensory input to the brain, where it is perceived as chronic, dull, steady pain.
Transduction is a process which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. Taste directly relates with transduction where is results in neurons firing action potentials. For vision more takes place. The information is coded as action potentials. After the brain processes this, we interpret this as a “green light.” Meaning this processing of the information following transduction is perception.
The most memorable thing to me was hair cells. I did not know that there was such a thing. Hair cels are sensory receptors in the cochlea that detect sound waves and transduce them into signals that ultimately are processed in the brain as sound. Another thing was that we detect five basic taste sensations which are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory. I tried to think of a food that did not fit any of these categories but I could not. I was surprised by that.

Terms: transduction, sensation, hair cells, receptors, vision, cochlea, transduce, slow fibers, unmyelinated, chronic, signals, womb, ordorants, fast fibers, wavelength, epithelium, olfactory, gustation, preceptors, trichromatic theory, cone receptors

Based on the reading the topic that interested me the most had to have been the description on our perception of touch. The reason I say this is because I don’t really think about what all goes on when I touch something. Also, I believe the pictures that show all the details under our skin are very fascinating. They do a good job in helping one understand what is going on inside of our bodies, which is stuff that we do not think about.
Transduction is a process in which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent into the brain. It is fundamental to psychological experience due to the fact that it is an important process that affects how, or what we see with our eyes.
However, I did not find a single thing in the reading interesting. Everything seemed pretty bland minus the pictures. The pictures are a very detailed and help explain a lot of the material which is helpful since I learn better when I see, or do something related to the topic.
Terms: Transduction, Perception, Fundamental, Psychological Experience.

How we see and hear the world is a little more complex than one would think. The sensations and perception to one person could be completely be different from another person, and all the functions that happen come from our brain. There are a lot of smaller parts at work that we don't really think of until we read about them. Our hands, eyes, feet, skin, and brain all work together in order to sense the environment around us. These parts of the human body would be considered sensory receptors. So what would the process be called when our sensory receptors change the physical stimuli into signals sent to the brain? The book has described this process as transduction. The five common senses that most people in the world have are the following: taste, smell, touch, hearing, and vision. Our eyes, nose, skin, ears, and tongue play a large part in our lives in order for each of these senses to be effective. I would say that this process is fundamental compared to psychological experience because most everyone experiences sensation and perception the same way, but do not think the same way. An example I can think of is that we all taste food the same, and that is with our tongues. But the idea of abortion could be taken several different ways depending on the person and the way they think. The eye, although small, has a few smaller parts working within it in order to give us vision. The lens, retina, rods and cones, are some of the main parts of the eye. The ear, in my opinion, is the most important part of the body (besides the brain) that allows us to learn the most and get the most out of our lives. Hearing people is important, hearing the world around you is essential in order to get the best information. The eardrum, cochlea, and hair cells all work to hear the world and send signals to the brain. The best kind of stimuli the ear can receive is music. I feel like music has the most potential to describe who a person really is. One song can really reveal a lot about a person, especially if it's one of their favorite songs. I would honestly hate to be deaf, because music can be some of the most beautiful experiences in a person's life. The sound of guitar and drums are some of my absolute favorite sounds, as well as violins. Throughout this chapter there was honestly nothing mind blowing, it is a pretty simple concept in my mind. There were a few terms that I had not heard of before, but knew about most of the functions in our sensory receptors. Mostly everyone functions the same way when it comes to the sensation and perception of the world. I would like to have seen a story about a blind person or a deaf person because I know that since one sense is missing, the other senses of that individual heighten beyond normal. The thing that stuck in my mind the most was the section discussing the ear and how the sound waves got to the brain.

terms: sensation, perceptions, transduction, sensory receptors, lens, retina, rods, cones, eardrum, cochlea, hair cells

This chapter was especially interesting to me because I learned a lot about sensation, perception, sight, sound, taste, smell, touch and pain. Of these topics, the most interesting to me was the section over detecting pain in our skin and throughout our body. I found it very intriguing that children born with rare genetic disorders that leaves them insensitive to pain usually die young, regardless of supervision. It is so amazing that our bodies tell us when we are in pain so we know how to prevent or stop the pain from being afflicted upon us. I learned that there are thin nerves that carry pain information to the brain. All body tissues that sense pain carry these. These include skin, muscles, and membranes. Receptors work in many ways. In the shower when you are testing the water with your hand or foot and decide on a temperature, one’s perception of the temperature might be wrong because of how many receptors are being stimulated. One’s perception is much more accurate when using your whole arm or foot. The brain has two fibers that carries information to it: fast fibers and slow fibers. When learning the difference between the two, the model provided in the book was very helpful. Fast fibers deal with sharp, quick, or immediate pain while slow fibers deal with dull, steady pain. Both fibers contain axons. Fast fibers contain myelinated axons while slow fibers contain nonmyelinated axons. Both work when you get hurt. The book used an example of getting burnt. Without even being conscious of this happening, fibers in my body were performing their duties to my brain when I was burnt using the fryer at work. The fast fibers gave me my initial reaction to back away from the grease and protected me from any further burning. The slow fibers in my body caused pain to the wound in order to keep it from being affected by any outside objects. This was the most surprising thing to me, because I have always thought the burn was just painful because of the initial burn. I was unaware that the human body uses pain to allow to heal. Distraction is a huge relief from pain. Pain is more intense when you are trying to sleep, because most of the time distractions are removed when trying to sleep. Severe pain is an exception. Something could be seriously wrong if distraction does not help in the slightest bit.
In the reading I also learned about a process called transduction. This quick process involves sensory receptors to change into physical stimuli that is sent to the thalamus in the brain during perception. I interpret this as sensory receptors giving a signal to your brain that tell you what to do. You either know what to do based on experience, knowledge, or instinct from your hearing, taste, smell, or touch senses. Smell is not processed through the thalamus. Transduction is the third step in a four step process of changing sensor input to a personal experience. The other steps include physical stimulus, sensation, and perception. All of these steps are needed to perform simple daily functions such as stopping at a stop sign. This process is fundamental to psychological experience because it enables you to interpret information and respond appropriately. This process includes many day to day tasks that, typically, we don’t think much of. Because of this process, I decided I strongly dislike pickles, and I know to not eat them. This process enables me to know that I need to pull over to let an ambulance by coming from behind my car or to turn the music down when it is too loud. This process is your perceptions working, and your perceptions are your experience of the world. It is so important to everyday life.
Psychological Terms: Sensory receptors, fast fibers, slow fibers, myelinated axons, nonmyelinated axons, perception, transduction, physical stimulus, sensation, perception, thalamus, stimuli

One of the topics that were interesting for to read about was “From the mouth to the brain”. In this section I learned that chemical molecules from all kinds of foods are dissolved in your saliva that is then picked up by your taste receptors. I just found this to be very intriguing to me because there are thousands of different foods and chemical molecules in the world and our taste receptors distinguishes every single one of them. Its also amazing to think we all know how our papillae picks up the taste from chemical molecules and sends its information to our brain by a set of nerves called facial nerve. Another topic I found interesting was “Five main taste”. From this section I learned that you have five distinct types of taste a sweet taste that would consist of sugar, a sour taste such as a lemon, salty taste for salt, bitter taste, and umami. While reading about the five tastes I stopped my self at umami and thought to my self “what the heck is that word!” Arose from Japanese the word umami means savory or yummy. The synonyms didn’t quite make sense to me until I read the rest of the section. This taste is usually used when you have a feeling of bursting in flavor. I could now understand the true meaning of yummy such as eating a thick well-done steak. There are people whose can taste foods intensely. These people are said to have a less pain tolerance for spice foods. These types of people would make great food inspectors or even taste testers. I am actually one of those people I can consume very spicy substances and hardly have any high threshold of pain. This also explains why I am a picky eater many of the people who have this “amazing gift” I should say have also a downfall we become very picky eaters. Sometimes I don’t even eat my mothers cooking at home because it just doesn’t taste great to me, not to bash on my mothers cooking its just over time my receptors have given me different foods that have a lot better taste then others which satisfy me. Transduction is a process which your sensory receptors physical stimuli into signals that are sent to the brain. With out this process we wouldn’t be able to control any of our senses. It’s the understanding of that sensation which we have. Such as seeing a stop sign out senses allow us to stop because we understand if we didn’t we could potentially get in an accident. The most surprising thing I remembered in the reading was figure 5.12 where it has an image of a person but you can interpret in two different ways. I interpreted the image as a young lady but I you can also interpret the image as an older woman but I cannot see that.

Terms: Receptors, papillae, umami, stimuli, Transduction, sensory receptors, facial nerve, threshold,

One of the topics that were interesting for to read about was “From the mouth to the brain”. In this section I learned that chemical molecules from all kinds of foods are dissolved in your saliva that is then picked up by your taste receptors. I just found this to be very intriguing to me because there are thousands of different foods and chemical molecules in the world and our taste receptors distinguishes every single one of them. Its also amazing to think we all know how our papillae picks up the taste from chemical molecules and sends its information to our brain by a set of nerves called facial nerve. Another topic I found interesting was “Five main taste”. From this section I learned that you have five distinct types of taste a sweet taste that would consist of sugar, a sour taste such as a lemon, salty taste for salt, bitter taste, and umami. While reading about the five tastes I stopped my self at umami and thought to my self “what the heck is that word!” Arose from Japanese the word umami means savory or yummy. The synonyms didn’t quite make sense to me until I read the rest of the section. This taste is usually used when you have a feeling of bursting in flavor. I could now understand the true meaning of yummy such as eating a thick well-done steak. There are people whose can taste foods intensely. These people are said to have a less pain tolerance for spice foods. These types of people would make great food inspectors or even taste testers. I am actually one of those people I can consume very spicy substances and hardly have any high threshold of pain. This also explains why I am a picky eater many of the people who have this “amazing gift” I should say have also a downfall we become very picky eaters. Sometimes I don’t even eat my mothers cooking at home because it just doesn’t taste great to me, not to bash on my mothers cooking its just over time my receptors have given me different foods that have a lot better taste then others which satisfy me. Transduction is a process which your sensory receptors physical stimuli into signals that are sent to the brain. With out this process we wouldn’t be able to control any of our senses. It’s the understanding of that sensation which we have. Such as seeing a stop sign out senses allow us to stop because we understand if we didn’t we could potentially get in an accident. The most surprising thing I remembered in the reading was figure 5.12 where it has an image of a person but you can interpret in two different ways. I interpreted the image as a young lady but I you can also interpret the image as an older woman but I cannot see that.

Terms: Receptors, papillae, umami, stimuli, Transduction, sensory receptors, facial nerve, threshold,

One of the topics that were interesting for to read about was “From the mouth to the brain”. In this section I learned that chemical molecules from all kinds of foods are dissolved in your saliva that is then picked up by your taste receptors. I just found this to be very intriguing to me because there are thousands of different foods and chemical molecules in the world and our taste receptors distinguishes every single one of them. Its also amazing to think we all know how our papillae picks up the taste from chemical molecules and sends its information to our brain by a set of nerves called facial nerve. Another topic I found interesting was “Five main taste”. From this section I learned that you have five distinct types of taste a sweet taste that would consist of sugar, a sour taste such as a lemon, salty taste for salt, bitter taste, and umami. While reading about the five tastes I stopped my self at umami and thought to my self “what the heck is that word!” Arose from Japanese the word umami means savory or yummy. The synonyms didn’t quite make sense to me until I read the rest of the section. This taste is usually used when you have a feeling of bursting in flavor. I could now understand the true meaning of yummy such as eating a thick well-done steak. There are people whose can taste foods intensely. These people are said to have a less pain tolerance for spice foods. These types of people would make great food inspectors or even taste testers. I am actually one of those people I can consume very spicy substances and hardly have any high threshold of pain. This also explains why I am a picky eater many of the people who have this “amazing gift” I should say have also a downfall we become very picky eaters. Sometimes I don’t even eat my mothers cooking at home because it just doesn’t taste great to me, not to bash on my mothers cooking its just over time my receptors have given me different foods that have a lot better taste then others which satisfy me. Transduction is a process which your sensory receptors physical stimuli into signals that are sent to the brain. With out this process we wouldn’t be able to control any of our senses. It’s the understanding of that sensation which we have. Such as seeing a stop sign out senses allow us to stop because we understand if we didn’t we could potentially get in an accident. The most surprising thing I remembered in the reading was figure 5.12 where it has an image of a person but you can interpret in two different ways. I interpreted the image as a young lady but I you can also interpret the image as an older woman but I cannot see that.

Terms: Receptors, papillae, umami, stimuli, Transduction, sensory receptors, facial nerve, threshold,

Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. The book used the example that when you are driving and you are stopped at a red light and it turns green your brain will tell you, “oh it’s green I should probably go now.” This a fundamental in psychology because there are certain actions that are crucial, so if our sensory receptors didn’t change the physical stimuli into signals to be sent to the brain a lot of things would be very delayed in the world today or it wouldn’t happen at all.
I found a lot of topics interesting one of the ones that I found interesting was grouping. Just because it looks the same we think of it as a whole or as a group. The book used the example that if we are at the park and see geese just roaming around, since they look a like we group them together. Which is also known as a flock, because to our vision they look a like and they tend to stay close together or most of them do.
Another part of this reading that I found very interesting was figure 5.18. How we can listen to a whisper, have a normal conversation with another person, and listen to a vacuum cleaner for any amount of time, and they range from twenty to about seventy decibels. You can only listen to vehicle traffic for eight hours at a time before there is damage to your hair cells. You can only listen to a lawn mower for two hours, which is probably why some people will wear earplugs when they mow the lawn. So hopefully there will not be as much damage done to your hair cells as soon if you have to mow the lawn longer than eight hours. This one I probably found the most interesting the average rock concert you are only supposed to listen to it for fifteen minutes before damage occurs. Which most people when they go to a rock concert are there for hours. So they is probably a lot of damage done to their hearing. This one I didn’t find as surprising, but it probably effects the most people. You should only listen to a portable music player for two minutes.. But with earphones you should only listen to for fifteen seconds… Which most people including myself will listen to music for hours on end. I know if I am not talking to someone I most likely will have headphones in. So I just wonder how bad my hearing will be when I’m older.. Then the ones that are most damaging and do immediate damage are a jet engine, gunshot, rocket launch. Which those weren’t that surprising to me either.
Terms Used: Decibels, physical stimulus, grouping, transduction, sensory receptors,stimuli

I found the most interesting part of the chapter to be the section about taste. I like food, so knowing how exactly we taste is really interesting. In our mouths we have taste buds that detect the chemicals of what we taste. I already knew about the taste buds on the tongue that allow us to taste and the papillae that hold them, but I did not realize that the taste buds were also in the throat. There are also five main tastes that each individual can taste with each of us having a preference. The five tastes are sweet, sour, salty bitter, and umami, which is like a burst of flavor. Everyone has taste preferences, but only on flavor. Preference is also judged on hot or cold, and soft of crunchy.
Transduction is the step between sensation and perception where the brain turns the stimulus into a reaction. Sensation is when we detect stimuli in the physical world and our senses are trying to tell us something is there. Perception is what our brain tells us what the thing is and gives us each a personal experience on the world. Without transduction we would not be able to understand what the different stimuli in the physical world mean. We would not be able to use our five senses to able to survive as a species. We need transduction to tell us if we should eat the berries on the bush, run away from a dangerous predator, or identify the sounds of our tribe. Without transduction our ancestors would not have survived long.
The most surprising section in the chapter for me was the section about hearing and damage to our hearing. I knew listening to music with ear buds for a rally long time was bad for your hearing; however I did not realize how bad it really was. Fifteen seconds of listening to music with ear buds on full volume is worse for your hearing then fifteen minutes at a rock concert. How hearing works is that stimuli enters our ears to our eardrums which vibrates to the sounds and the signal passes through the middle ear through the cochlea to the hair cells which sends the signal to the brain which analyses it and tells us what we hear. Music is a part of my life, so now when I listen to music I am going to use the sixty/sixty rule, sixty percent volume for sixty minutes, so my ears do not take as much damage as they have I the past.
Psychological terms: taste, taste buds, papillae, transduction, sensation, perception, hearing, stimuli, eardrum, middle ear, cochlea, hair cells


One topic that I find to be very interesting is the section dealing with colors. I find it very interesting that an object appears to be a certain color because of the wavelengths of light that the object reflects and how the receptors in the eye process the light. The trichromatic theory relates color perception to receptors by using three main colors. Blue, red and green are the three main colors. Trichromatic theory explains how we see color based on the mixing of the wavelengths. The mixing of the wavelengths helps to create different colors. I found this interesting because it is intriguing to think that wavelengths of light and the eye receptors create colors.

Transduction is a process in which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals get sent to the brain. During transduction the signals are broken down into ones that the brain can understand. The process of transduction is so key to psychological experience because it helps our senses. Once the transduction is coded out it will send out different action potentials. The different action potentials get processed in the brain and will give you different things to interpret. For example, when the light turns green at a stop light it sends action potentials to your brain thus telling you to go. After transduction the next process is perception. All of the senses work differently during the processes or transduction and perception. Transduction and perception are important factors to psychological experience because transduction influences perception and all of your perceptions add up to your experience of the world.

Personally, I think the most memorable part that I learned about in this reading is how the different senses work. Such as the fact that the way we see color is in wavelengths and reflections. For hearing, the bending of the hair cells causes transduction that enables the process of interpreting the auditory information into signals. I find the taste buds to be very memorable. I find it memorable that there are five different kinds of taste buds and they are spread almost uniformly throughout the tongue and mouth to help us experience taste. The way the senses work is very memorable because your senses are something used everyday without even noticing all of the processes that are involved in doing so.

Psychological terms used: taste buds, transduction, hair cells, trichromatic theory, action potentials, perception, wavelengths, psychological experience, sensory receptors

From this chapter the most interesting topic to me was sensation to perception, or how our senses gather information for our body and our brain. The senses sense room temperature, bright and dim lights, someone speaking and smells. The things we don’t sense are waves from x-rays. Another interesting topic to me was our five senses. It would be impossible to have these if it wasn’t for transduction, which is the process of turning sensation into perception. This process makes it so the brain can understand the messages. I thought it was very interesting that a mother can pass on her tastes to her child. Another interesting topic was taste buds. It blew my mind that there are only five tastes, which are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. The fact that we have so many taste buds blew my mind also because I thought they were only on our tongue! Another interesting topic to me was how we perceive objects. People can perceive objects in different ways.
One thing I thought was memorable was that some food preferences could start in the womb! No wonder I like chocolate, my mother told me she craved chocolate when she was pregnant with me! Something I found surprising was reading about the mouth and the brain. It’s amazing how much our taste receptors do so we can taste our food. They work together with saliva to dissolve our food. The psychological words I used were perception, senses, transduction, brain and stimuli.

I found this chapter to be extremely interesting, I always think about how other people see things and if their perception and sensation is the same as mine. Everyone is different, and we think differently than everyone else. I thought the sections about seeing and hearing were the most interesting. Even though humans have been around for an extremely long time, we still are all different. The human race is and will never be perfected. Everyone will have their own set of problems. I have glasses, some don’t. It has been this was forever. Although we can adapt to our problems, like sensory adaptation. We know there is a distraction, but we can concentrate on something else that is more important for the time being. Transduction is a process which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This is so important because you need it to experience everything! From eating to seeing and you need it to see warnings and to know when to do something at the right time. For example, if you are in a race you need to hear the gun to start running. If you don’t then you may fall behind, or start before anyone else and get into trouble. The most surprising thing that I learned was that people can taste the same food, from the same batch and still have a different taste of that food. Some may like it, but some may not. I always thought everything tasted the same for everyone, but it all depended on if you liked it.

The topic that I found was most interesting was the way we perceive color based on physical aspects of light. Humans can visibly see light that consists of electromagnetic waves. The waves range in length of light range from 400 to 700 nanometers. Light has multiple physical qualities. One the physical qualities is the amplitude. The amplitude is the height of the light wave from base to peak. Everyone experiences this as brightness. Light also has a quality of wavelength. Wavelength of the light wave is the distances from peak to peak. The most interesting physical quality of light is hue. This is the distinct characteristics that place a particular color in the spectrum. Another interesting physical quality is the saturation. Saturation is the intensity of the color. According to trichromatic theory, color perception is related to cone receptors. I thought that the trichromatic theory was the most memorable thing from the chapter. It was the most memorable because I did not know trichro-matic means three-color. It is interesting because color perception results from activity across three different types of cone receptors. Each cone is connected to different wavelengths of light. I did not know the additive color mixing was connected to the trichromatic theory. The additive color mixing is the combining of wavelengths.
Transduction is connected with sensation to perception. Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. It helps the sensory receptors communicate with the brain. Sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals for the brain and after the that they become neural signals. Transduction is important because the visual messages have to be able to be recognized by the brain so it can be interpreted. Without transduction, we would not be able to understand the things we do through all of our senses. It helps us to recognize what we are doing in our everyday lives.
Terms: amplitude, brightness, wavelength, hue, saturation, trichromatic theory, additive color mixing, transduction, sensory receptors, neural signals

I found this chapter to be extremely interesting, I always think about how other people see things and if their perception and sensation is the same as mine. Everyone is different, and we think differently than everyone else. I thought the sections about seeing and hearing were the most interesting. Even though humans have been around for an extremely long time, we still are all different. The human race is and will never be perfected. Everyone will have their own set of problems. I have glasses, some don’t. It has been this was forever. Although we can adapt to our problems, like sensory adaptation. We know there is a distraction, but we can concentrate on something else that is more important for the time being. Transduction is a process which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This is so important because you need it to experience everything! From eating to seeing and you need it to see warnings and to know when to do something at the right time. For example, if you are in a race you need to hear the gun to start running. If you don’t then you may fall behind, or start before anyone else and get into trouble. The most surprising thing that I learned was that people can taste the same food, from the same batch and still have a different taste of that food. Some may like it, but some may not. I always thought everything tasted the same for everyone, but it all depended on if you liked it.
The terms I used were perception, sensation, sensory adaptation, transduction.

The most interesting piece of this chapter to me was learning how the brain processes sensation into something with meaning, called perception. Everyday we receive stimuli from the environment. This stimuli is the sensations, such as touching, seeing, smelling, etc. Through the process of transduction, our sensory receptors change the stimulus input into signals that the brain can understand and perceive. One example is sound. When we hear something, it is only a group of sound waves of different lengths that are received by sensory receptors in the ear. However, our brains will receive the information sent from these receptors and make a cohesive perception of the noise that was made. In some cases, we lost the ability to sense certain stimuli. Have you ever burnt your tongue? When this happens, your taste buds become inactive. Due to this, it is hard to taste any food from that location of the tongue. If the burned area is located over the area of our tongue where we sense sweet tastes, then when we eat sugary foods like ice cream, it may not be as enjoyable as it usually is. Another form of perception loss is agnosia. Agnosia is the loss of ability to recognize certain stimuli even though the sensory receptors are not defective. Agnosia occurs due to brain trauma and prevents the transduction of stimuli in the brain. People with visual agnosia may have perfect eyes yet they cannot recognize what they are seeing due to damage to the area of the brain where sensory information is transduced and perceived.
A very interesting video I watched not too long ago was by a Youtube channel called Vsauce. Vsauce makes all sorts of videos regarding philosophy, science and many other things. In one video, he talked about whether or not we all see the same color. The video was titled “Is Your Red My Red?” The video was actually quite eye opening. The whole concept is that we really never know if the red that I see is the same as the red that you see because when we can't describe a color to another person. When we grow up and we are taught color names, we may actually not have the same name for colors as other people. Let's say we look at a red block. To the teacher, it is their concept of red. However, the student's perception of the color may actually be green but the name that the teacher has given it is 'red'. Now, the student will recognize what would in his eyes be a green block as a red block. I always thought this was an interesting concept that always got me thinking both scientifically and philosophically. Perception is the most important part of our human experience. Everything we do is based on sensory input, transduction and perception. We feel, smell, see, hear, and taste millions of times a day and it all adds to our human experience. Perception was definitely the most interesting thing I read about during this chapter as it has always been a topic of my own introspective discussions.
Terms: sensation, perception, transduction, sensory receptors, stimulus, brain, signals, stimuli, Agnosia, senses

After reading chapter five I was very interested in how ours eyes perceive information and send it to the brain. I remember learning a little about how the eyes work in middle school, but that was just the basic information. I really like how the book described the process of seeing an object on page 161. When we look at an object, light bounces off of it and enters our eyes. These ways then pass through our cornea, pupil, and iris. Behind the iris the lens change shape due to muscles. The lens only change if you are looking at an object that is either way too close to your eyes or if the object is far away. I thought this was really cool because it is as if we have binoculars that are constantly changing so we are able to see a little better. I had no idea that the lens and the cornea work together to focus light on the retina. What really surprised me was that each retina holds about 120 million rods and about 6 million cones. On page 164 the book continues to explain how the information from our eyes reaches our brains. The rods and cell are the visual sensory receptors that transduce the information as light waves into messages by cells in the retina.
Transduction is process in which our sensory receptors change stimulus input into signals that we can understand. An example the book gave was on page 157 and the traffic signal. In order for action potentials to be coded, more vision processing must happen. After these action potentials are processed you are able to interpret a green light. The process of transduction is very important because in order for us to react to instances that might be dangerous, the cells have to work very quickly. On page 157 the books talks about how in each case a physical stimulus is detected, and specialized sensory receptors transduce the information and then the neurons fire action potentials. Without this process, we could experience a lot of dangerous situations. For example, on page 187 and 188, the books mentions how we have two pain receptors. We all have two kinds of nerve fiber, fast fibers and slow fibers, which carry pain information to the brain. If you were to touch a hot pan the fast fibers would have activated because of a strong physical pressure. This would have made you feel sharp pain and caused you to remove your hand quickly. The slow fibers keep us from using the affected body part which helps recover the burn.
I think the most surprising thing I learned from this chapter was about synesthesia. It was very interesting to learn how some people experience a certain taste when the say someone’s name or they associate a specific color to a day of the week. I didn’t think this was actually possible to have.
Psychological terms: lens, retina, sensory receptors, rod, cone, transduction, fast fiber, slow fiber

Transduction is the process when sensory receptors take the physical stimulation information and turn it into signals of information that the brain can understand. If the brain can’t understand what the stimuli is trying to tell you, you can’t function correctly to respond to the stimuli. For example if you are touching a hot stove top and you didn’t know it, then if the transduction process wasn’t working properly the brain determine what you sensory stimuli is telling you. So in this case you would keep burning our hand and not even know it.
The most interesting facts I learned in this chapter would be about the wavelengths of the light we see. This really caught my eye because I never even thought about how when we see a color it’s really sensory wave lengths that we determine as a color. When the wavelengths are short we perceive the color blue. Long wave lengths are perceived as red. The in between the wave lengths show different colors like green, yellow, orange, and so on. Now when the amplitude height is high then we see this as bright colors. When the amplitude height is low then we see it as dark colors.
Another memorably thing I learned was when we taste something how it goes to the brain and the receptors in our taste buds. The sense of taste is called gustation where taste is related to survival. So when we think something tastes bad it’s because our brain thinks it will be bad for our body. The brain does this to keep poisons out and still be able to eat food that won’t hurt you. There are five main tastes sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. You might say “what? Umami is a taste?” but this is because umami is the most recently recognized taste sensation. This is a weird kind of taste sensation where there are bursts of flavor when you eat meats, cheeses, or mushrooms. So to determine what taste we have in our mouth we have to let the brain determine this. When we tastes something it’s the sensory receptors detecting chemical molecules. Sensory receptors are in your taste buds which each of us could have up to 10000 tastes buds. Groupings of taste buds are called papillae. Once the sensory receptor’s, called taste receptors, detect the chemical molecules then transduction happens to let the brain understand the stimuli is. Then mostly facial nerves carry this message to the brain to determine to keep eating or to spit it out.
Terms: Sensory receptors, transduction, shot/long wavelength, high/low amplitude, tastes buds, papillae, stimuli

The most interesting thing in this chapter to me was reading about the thresholds. Absolute threshold was interesting to read about because it the minimum amount of physical stimuli required before you detect the sensory input. The part the really interested me though was the part where it said that it is the minimum amount detect half of the time. In other words you may not feel it when you reach the stimulus. I was wonder why they would just make this threshold at the point where you detect it 100% of the time. It was also interesting reading different threshold about how it’s the smallest difference that you can notice between two pieces of sensory input. Transduction has to deal with sensation and perception. Sensory receptors are what detect sensations, and turn them into information. Transductions is this process in which the receptors do what is stated above. The process sends physical stimuli messages to the brain; this would be the sensation part. The perception part comes next, which is where your brain interprets the information given. Not only does it interpret the information but it also decides how to deal with it. To be able to do this though there must be enough stimuli to set this entire process into motion. This is threshold concepts that I talked about as the most interesting thing in this chapter. To me the most memorable thing in this chapter is at the end when they talk about controlling pain. I have always wondered why everything is more painful at night when you are trying to sleep, and now I know it’s because your brain is remove distractions the area of pain is being focused on more, it has nothing to do with the pain actually getting worse then before it’s just the way you are thinking about it which is really cool.
Key Terms: Absolute threshold, physical stimuli, sensory input, different threshold, Transduction, sensation, perception, and Sensory receptors.

The topic in this weeks reading that has stuck out the most to me was the topic of smell perception. The reason that this was the most interesting topic is because I myself am actually unable to smell. I have never been able to smell and my mom cannot smell either. what I found so interesting about this topic was the way a smell is processed in our brain happens in more than one area. For instance when we decide whether or not a smell is pleasant or unpleasant that is done in the prefrontal cortex and the intensity of that smell is actually decided in another part of the brain the amygdala, which also the part of the brain that has to do with emotional and memory. I thought that this was very interesting because it helps give me hint of what parts of my body may or may not be working correctly and impact the reason why I have always been unable to smell. transduction is the sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. This is true of all of the senses however, they all happen in different ways, for example, when we have the sensational of touch, transduction directly results in neurons firing actions potentials. However, when it comes to vision, more processing is required in order for the information to be coded and sorted. I believe that this is such an important and essential psychological function because without it there would be no way for our brains to process the information brought on by our senses, the way we react to stimuli in general would be an entirely different experience. One of the things I also found in this chapters reading, again along the lines of smell was the fact that humans can detect about 10,000 smells. There are thousands of olfactory receptors in the olfactory epithelium. Researchers are still trying to explore how the receptors perceive different smells and how smells can be interpreted so differently by our brain. One though is that when a smell is experience several receptors are activated in which create a pattern in order to decipher what the brain will interpret that smell to be.

Psychological Terms: transduction, Olfactory Epithelium, Olfactory receptors, Neurons, Stimuli, Prefrontal Cortext

In this chapter I found the reading over sensation and perception to be the most interesting topic. Sensation is the detection of physical stimuli from the world around us and the sending of the information to the brain. Perception is the brain’s further processing of sensory information. Sensation is activated by physical stimuli such as light waves, sound waves, food molecules, odor molecules, temperature changes or pressure changes on the skin. Once any of these has been detected our brains then perceive the information sent to it through our senses. This happens in a four step process. The four steps are physical stimulus, sensation, transduction and perception. The book gives an example of a stop light turning green, which is the physical stimulus. When the stop light turns green the light waves and detected by the sensory receptors in the drivers eye. The next step is Transduction and this is the most important step. Transduction is what changes the input signals from the sensory receptors into signals that the brain can understand. It does this for literally every single sense, whether it be taste, smell, sight, touch, or hearing, transduction is always there. Without this step we would never have a clue what was going on, because our brain would not be able to understand the signals from our sensory receptors. Back to the example, once the sensory receptors have translated the physical stimulus, the transduction then translates the signals so the brain can now perceive what is going on. This brings us to the last step, perception. Once the signals from transduction reach the thalamus, our brain perceives the green light as “go”, or “start driving”. This process is amazing, especially due to the fact that our senses are constantly being flooded with information. This raises the question of, how do we not get overloaded? For humans to detect physical stimulus there must be a certain amount of it, this is called our threshold. Our absolute threshold is the minimum amount of stimuli that must be present for us to detect it as a sensory input. It can also be thought of as the smallest amount of a stimulus that a person can detect half of the time the stimulus is present. Another threshold is the difference threshold, this is the smallest difference that we can notice between two pieces of sensory input. I never realized that we had these thresholds, thank goodness we do though, without them we may go crazy.
The most memorable thing from the reading in my opinion was the supertasters. I found it interesting that they have almost six times as many taste buds as a normal taster does. I also found it interesting that they may experience actual physical pain from eating spicy foods. Supertasters may be at a higher risk for some cancers that bitter foods can protect against, but at the same time they tend to be thinner and have less of a chance of cardiovascular disease due to the fact that they dislike fatty and sugary foods. For some reason this topic really intrigued me.
Key Terms: Sensation, Perception, Transduction, Sensory Receptors, Physical Stimulus, Stimuli, Threshold, Absolute Threshold, Difference Threshold, Supertaster, Cardiovascular Disease

The most interesting topic to me was the part about audition. Hearing is so important to me and the fact that I learned a little more about the process gave me a little more insight as to why it is important. We perceive a lot of audible sensory input every day and the way we analyze it is so cool. I had no clue the that outer ear was so important to the way we capture sound, I actually had no idea that is why our ears are shaped that way. The eardrum is something that you learn about from a young age, but I think the way that the book depicted the vibrations going to the ossicles was really effective. The vibrations continue to the oval window that is located with the cochlea. Than the sensory input stimulates the hair cells, and the fact that all this happens in a matter of milliseconds is so amazing to me. The thing that really interested me was the way we perceive the sound. The way we her loud and soft, low and high is pretty neat. When the amplitude waves are high we perceive the sound as loud and when the waves are smaller we perceive it as soft. Much like amplitude, when the frequency waves are long we perceive the sound as lo and when the are shorter together we perceive them as high. To me this is so important and I would never want to damage my eardrums. I read one time about the effects of music on the brain and how that creates some sort of chemical that makes music “addicting” to us and I would be interested in knowing a little more about that.
Transduction is the process when there is a physical sensory input and the sensory receptors turn the input into signals that are relayed to the brain. I think this is also cool. The fact that different parts of the brain perceive different stimuli very quickly is pretty interesting. The main parts of brain for perceiving stimuli is gustatory cortex, primary cortex, olfactory cortex, and somatosensory cortex. This is so important to psychology. It is important because a lot of these stimuli is how we determine the world around us. They also relate to sensation and the things that we don’t like.
The most thing that surprised me most about the reading was the topic of pain. I think in our everyday lives we think about pain of something that just “hurts” and not about a reaction to something. I didn’t know that there are two types of pain receptors, but it makes sense now that I know. The fast fibers hay myelinated axons which are highly insulted which allows for very quick information. On the other hand the slow fibers have unmyelinated axons and without the insulation the information doesn’t move as fast. A lot of the pain is also about perception and how we perceive the feeling of it. So if we distract ourselves, we may forget about how much something hurts because it is really about perception. This is very interesting because in psychology I feel like we talk about perception a lot and how the individual perceives the world around them. All these sense could be a very important way as to why they feel the way they do. I think that it important for me to remember throughout the course of this class.

Terms: audition, sensory input, audible, eardrum, vibrations, ossicles, cochlea, stimulates, hair cells, perceive and perceptions, frequency, amplitude, transduction, sensory receptors, gustatory cortex, primary cortex, olfactory cortex, somatosensory cortex, sensations, pain receptors, fast fibers, slow fibers.

Right off the bat, the book introduces us to synesthesia. This to me seems like the most interesting topic within the discussion of our senses and perceptions. I remember Professor Maclin talking to us about how the name of someone tasted so bad that the significant other had to break up with them. Similarly, the book talks about a man named William who hate driving because to him the sight of road signs taste like earwax and ice cream. It sort of perplexes me how one sense in a human can trigger another and I can almost imagine what that is like. There are parts of me that could reach out and understand what it may be like but still no actual clue how they feel when synesthesia occurs. Like I can relate with the way something or someone could make you think of a color, but that’s only because there are emotions that I personally relate to with that certain color. If I was actually able to smell orange when I looked at a flower or taste a circle when I was eating a chicken it would definitely be an interesting experience.


Transduction is the process in which the brain responds to stimulus inputs from our sensory receptors. In other words it is the process on how what we sense is transferred to our brain. The book gives us examples like how at a stoplight we know green is go, and it also tells us how when we taste something the stimulus shoots into our brains to help perceive what we’re tasting.

The most memorable thing from this chapter was again from the beginning of chapter 5 when the book talked about how color really isn’t there, it’s just light waves bouncing off at different speeds. This was the most memorable to me because it’s hard for me to think that colors don’t really exist; it’s all in our eyes. Same thing with how the book explains the “if a tree falls in the middle of the forest does it make a sound if no one is around to hear it?” It just seems crazy and somewhat changes how I perceive the world because it seems like the common knowledge I had as a kid is being challenged with science and it’s such an interesting concept to grasp.

Terms: Synesthesia, Sense, Perception, Transduction, Stimulus, Sensory Receptors

The topics that were most interesting to me were how we taste and smell. I love food so I was really interested to know how I can even taste these variety of flavors. Your taste buds sit on your tongue and reside in tiny mushroom-shaped structures called papillae. Any substance will stimulate your taste buds. At that time, the taste receptors transduce the sensory input into action potentials. The information is sent to other brain regions through a set of nerves.
Olfaction has the most direct route to the brain. Smell begins when you sense chemical molecules that come from outside your body. They pass through your nose and the upper portion of your nasal cavity. In there a warm, moist environment helps the sensory receptors, called olfactory receptors. These receptors are embedded in the olfactory epithelium. The olfactory receptors transduce the odorants into signals that the brain will ultimately process. These signals are processed in the olfactory bulb, the brain’s center of smell.
Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This process is fundamental to psychological experience because it works with our brain, our main center of control, to control our five senses.
The most memorable part where it discusses synesthesia. I found it interesting that people who have this disorder have such mixed up senses. The fact that they can taste names, colors, and visual perceptions would make life very unique but yet difficult depending on the tastes.
Key Terms: transduction, taste buds, papillae, olfactory epithelium, olfactory bulb

Ch. 5
Transduction is the mental process of turning sensations into perceptions. For example, when I hear music, I am literally hearing different noise “sensations” that would mean nothing at all without perception. My brain takes those noise sensations and perceives that I am listening to “Journey”. Without transduction, my brain would never make the jump from the noises to the sweet melodies of Journey. This would make for a sad existence. Transduction happens with every single noteworthy sensation that the body receives. As long as the sensation passes the absolute threshold and is deemed by the brain to be “important”, transduction happens and the brain does perception.

The most memorable section was the entire chapter on vision. The other four senses are pretty nifty sometimes (like the strong bond between the olfactory senses and memory), but vision is where it’s really at. My conscious projection of reality seems to be entirely dominated by what I see, so it is interesting to know how I see. I went through all of the optical illusion sections multiple times and tried to force my brain not to see what the little descriptions told me. In some cases, it worked. For the example with the multicolored flag, I actually was able to see the same yellow, black, and green colors when I looked at the other blank square. Eventually, it did fade into the more natural red white and blue. During the blind spot test, the red dot went away (I could not influence that because it is physically impossible due to receptor/cone placement in the eyeball), but I was able to keep the gap between the blue bars. It’s incredible to think that our vision can be so heavily influenced by thought. It is also scary to think about how people see what they want/expect to see. The pilot, whose tour plane full of people hit a volcano, was not expecting to see the volcano. Because of his top-down processing of the world around him, he missed an ENTIRE MOUNTAIN. That only goes to demonstrate how subjective vision really is. Honestly, it’s absolutely nuts that the whole transduction process can lie to us like that. I wonder what it would be like to have no filter on what sensational information was processed (aka no absolute threshold). I feel like I might only want a few minutes of it, but it would be totally worth experiencing.

Terms: absolute threshold, olfactory, sensational, transduction, perception, brain, optical illusions (maybe), top-down processing, subjective vision (another maybe).

One of the topics I found quite interesting was the blind spot test. I’ve heard about the blind spot before but I’ve never actually tested it before. I just sound that very interesting. I just found the whole structure of the eye awesome. For me, learning about how the retina holds the rods and cones that give us the sensation of light waves. It’s cool how we our vision works. I think it’s neat how when we see something we actually see it upside down and then our brain ends up flipping it around for us. Another topic I found awesome was how our taste buds work. It’s awesome how there are five different taste sections on the tongue. I also found the two types of pain receptors to be pretty interesting. I learned that fast fibers are heavily insulated and can carry information very quickly. Slow fibers on the other hand move very slowly and it seems as though the information seems to leak out. It was cool to learn that distractions can actually reduce our perception of pain. Something for me could not hurt all that much if I’m not paying attention to it. This makes sense to me because I remember during football games I would have cuts on my legs from cleats and I’d be bleeding but I wouldn’t even notice. A friend of mine actually tore his bicep during a game and didn’t notice at all until the end of the game when he noticed an indent in his arm. It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.
Transduction is the sensory receptors change the stimulus input signals that the brain can understand. I feel like this is important to develop our psychological experience because the way I experience something might be different from what somebody else experiences. It all depends on how my brain translates or interprets it.
I found the infant taste preferences test very memorable. When my mom was pregnant with me she ate a lot of fruit and I feel like that might be why I love to eat fruit so much. My mom also told me that when she was pregnant with my sister she didn’t have any cravings for any certain type of food. She ate everything and that must be why my sister is such a good eater while me and my younger brother are very picky eaters. That was something really cool.

Terms used: retina, rods, cones, taste buds, transduction, slow fibers, fast fibers

One of the things I found most interesting in this chapter was the sense of smell. I have learned about other senses in other science classes but not much about the sense of smell. I was interested in the fact that a receptors were embedded in the Olfactory epithelium and are only as thick as a dime. Something so thin is responsible for such a powerful sense. Although it isn’t clear exactly how many smells it can detect, I was amazed to read about the fact that the average nose can differentiate about ten thousand smells. These smells are then sent to the olfactory bulb in the brain and is then processed. I also found it interesting that different types of smells, such as good or bad and strong or weak, are processed differently. Whether a smell is pleasant or horrible is decided by the prefrontal cortex. To tell if a smell is strong or weak it is processed by the amygdala. This area is also involved with memory and emotion which explains why certain smells bring back memories from the past. The smells the strike me the most with memories are deodorants and perfumes. They remind me of certain sports seasons or old boyfriends.
Transduction is defined by the book as the process in which sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signals that the brain can understand. For example, a person sees a red light. In order for this person to understand what this means the information of the color needs to be transduced by the brain to tell the person to stop the car. This is vital to the psychological experience because it is the fundamentals of perception. Without transduction we wouldn’t be able to comprehend the physical world around us. This process is the reason why our outside experience affects our internal psychological experience.
The most surprising part of the reading was about controlling pain. The best way to control the pain is to distract yourself from it. If a person is focused on the pain they will perceive it as more intense. This is so surprising because our conscious mind can control things that we may have thought were out of our control. If someone experiences a broken bone there isn’t anything they can immediately do to control its healing, so that results in frequent pain. We can gain back some of this control by distracting oneself from that pain and consciously turn off those pain receptors. Another topic I found surprising was that our bodies have more than five senses. For as long as I can remember five senses was taught in science class. I now know there are also senses such as kinesthetic sense and vestibular sense. Kinesthetic helps us maintain our position in space. Vestibular uses information from receptors in structures of the inner ear called the semicircular canals.

Psych Terms: semicircular canals, pain receptors, kinesthetic sense, vestibular sense, conscious mind, transduction, sensory receptors, stimulus psychological experience, perception, prefrontal cortex, sense of smell, Olfactory epithelium, olfactory bulb, amygdala

In chapter five, the most interesting section that I read was about what we hear and how we hear it. Your hearing is the last sense to go when you die, and I work in a nursing home and have witnessed death, but it was just interesting to read about how our hearing evolves throughout our lifetime. There are many different factors that contribute to our hearing such as: parts of the ear like the eardrum, cochlea, hair cells, and also physical aspects like the automatic notion to read lips or to recognize what environment we are in, and of course sound waves which are not able to be seen. High frequency and low frequency sound waves have different pitches, so depending on your age and/or wellness of all functioning parts of the ear, you will hear different sounds and noises. Transduction is when our sensory receptors send signals to the brain to process what is happening physically outside the body. It is all a process to understand the physical environment we are in and what is happening around us. It transmits signals and sends them to the brain to be able to understand the stimuli. Transduction is used in every single process of our sensations. The most memorable section that I read was about the sensation of feeling and how we feel pain. I found this most memorable because a few days ago in anatomy we had learned about the skin and pain receptors, and how that information is sent to the brain to be processed to tell yourself to back away from whatever is hurting you. There are a lot of different receptors that function for different reasons. You have warm receptors to be able to detect heat, and cold receptors to detect cold, as well as pressure receptors to detect different amounts of pressure. All of these receptors are able to detect that stimuli and send signals to brain to tell yourself what you are feeling. We have millions of sensory receptors throughout our body that all send signals through our nerves and to our nervous systems to allow our brain to process the information. We all deal with and feel pain differently. But, our bodies are designed to have the same pain receptors and fibers that make up this sensation. The two types of pain receptors are fast fibers and slow fibers. These fibers function differently in the aspect of how fast or strong the pains are. The fast fibers are more of the sharp, quick pains, and the slow fibers can be described as more of a chronic pain. It’s nice to be able to connect information from two different classes because I can relate them together and it makes it easier to understand.

Psych Terms: High frequency, low frequency, sensory receptors, cochlea, eardrum, hair cells, transduction, sensation, warm receptors, cold receptors, pressure receptors, nervous system, pain receptors, fast fibers, slow fibers.

In Chapter 5, I thought the most interesting topic was the section about motion aftereffects, also known as the waterfall effect. This happens when you look at a moving image for a long time, and then look at a stationary scene. When you do this, it looks like the new scene is moving the opposite direction. The thing that I found to be so interesting about this is how we can use this as evidence that motion-sensitive neurons are in the brain.
Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. Transduction is important to our psychological experience because without it sensations wouldn't be able to be turned into perceptions. Transduction allows us to make sense of what we're hearing and sensing. The most interesting topic in this chapter to me was the section "Ten Thousand Smells". I thought it was interesting that humans can detect close to ten thousand smells because I, personally, can't smell at all. The book discussed that researchers are still exploring how the receptors transduce odorants into the perception of distinct smells. I went to a doctor once to get my smelling checked because I can't smell, and the doctor said I was born without a bone behind my nose that is needed to smell, so I thought it was interesting how this chapter discussed smell and how we smell.

Terms: motion aftereffects, waterfall effect, transduction, motion-sensitive neurons, smell, receptors, physical stimuli, sensation

The most interesting topic to me was how we perceive color based on physical aspects of light. An object appears to be a particular color because of to factors: the wavelength of light that he objects reflect and how the receptors in the eye process the light. Visible light consists of electromagnetic waves ranging in length from about 400 to 700 nanometers, for humans. The trichromatic theory relates to color perception to cone receptors. Color perception results from activity across three different types of cone receptors, which is how we can tell a flower is yellow rather than blue. Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. Without it our brain would not get signal for sensation, therefore if you came into contact with something dangerous you wouldn’t know to get away from it. The most memorable thing in this chapter was that our sense of taste relies heavily on our sense of smell. Tate and smell together produce the experience of flavor. Flavor is based ore on smell than taste. The experience doesn’t take place in your nose or mouth but in your brain.
TERMS: Wavelength, Trichromatic Theory, Perception, Receptors, Transduction, Sensory, Sensation

From this chapter, the most interesting topic to me was sensation to perception, of which how our senses gather information and send it to our brain. We use both sensation and perception hundreds of times per day, from being to warm in our sleep and removing our covers, getting into the shower and adjusting the heat. Smelling foods and becoming hungry or using the light from the sun to wake us up in the morning. We are able to sense all of these different things around us but we don't notice radio waves, x-rays, or the microscopic parasites crawling on our skin. There has to be a certain amount of physical stimuli for us to notice it, this minimum amount of stimuli is called absolute threshold. This is the minimum amount of physical stimuli required before you detect the sensory input. The Difference threshold is the smallest difference that you can notice between two pieces of sensory input. Which means it’s the smallest amount of changes in the physical stimulus required to detect a difference between one sensory experiences to another. Another interesting topic to me was synesthesia, I think that it is so interesting that saying a name or a word can trigger a taste in some people’s mouths or that a color and a number are co closely related. I had never heard of synesthesia before, and did not realize how common it is. Chapter 5 focused mainly on our main senses; touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight. It would be basically impossible for us to have any of these senses if it wasn’t for transduction. Transduction is process in which the stimuli for a sense is converted into a chemical message that is eventually interpreted by the brain. If there was no transduction to occur; our brains would be essentially worthless. We wouldn’t be able to interpret any of the things around us. One more topic that was interesting to me was the relationship between taste and smell. I had already known some of the information that the book had given but that was many new things that I had learned as well. When the book had discussed taste buds and how they reside in tiny mushroom-shaped structures called papillae I had found that extremely interesting because I didn’t know that the taste buds were actually in a structure, I thought they were just on your tongue. And, if you have more than the average papillae then you could be a supertaster which means that you are hypersensitive and hyperaware to taste and the flavors in food. This chapter was very interesting and I feel I was able to learn a lot about the human body.
Terms- x-rays- microscopic parasites- absolute threshold- sensation- perception- Difference threshold- Transduction- stimulus-papillae- synesthesia- sensory input- taste- hypersensitive- hyperaware

I found a few topics in this chapter to be incredibly interesting, especially Synesthesia. I’d hear about this in the past concerning music in a sense that when someone would hear music they can also see the music will abnormal colors. I’ve always thought it was quite fascinating and somewhat wished I could experience that sensation. I also enjoyed reading about the process of grouping. I realize that pictures and doodles don’t really mean anything by themselves but our brain gives them meaning once they are perceived a certain way. I notice that my brain naturally wants to group images a certain way to get more information out of that image. I might be incorrect but that might be similar to how our brain can read some texts even if the letters are out of their correct order. For example; “did you konw taht it deosn't meattr waht odrer the ltteers of a wrod are in, the olny ipmratnt tihng is taht the fsirt and lsat ltteers are in the crrocet piotiosn.”(taken from a Vitamin Water bottle) I also found it interesting that there are five main tastes that our taste buds experience, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. I had never heard about umami before and could see how that would be an important taste.
Transduction is the way sensory receptors change the stimulus input to signal so that the brain can understand. This is a fundamental process to the psychological experience because, as the book mentions, it is how we experience the world. Without this there would be no experience.
One of the most surprising things I learn in this chapter was that the certain regions of the tongue are not more sensitive to different tastes, which is something I’ve always heard to be true. Turns out they are more uniformly spread out than not.
Terms: sensation, perception, transduction, grouping, taste buds.

What is Transduction? Transduction is the process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This process is fundamental to the psychological experience because it affects our process of sensation and perception, which have 4 steps for each major sensing system. In each case, a physical stimuli is detected, specialized sensory receptors transduce the stimuli information, and neurons fire action potentials. The most surprising thing I learned about in this chapter is how complex our mind and body work together to achieve what most people take advantage of; life. Terms: Transduction, sensory receptors, sensation, perception, neurons.

In chapter five the most interesting thing I read was about the traffic signals. Changing from red to green. There actually is no red or green color in the signals or in the light you see. Instead our eyes and brain enable you to see redness, and greenness of the light. Objects in the physical word don’t actually have color, the objects reflect light waves of different lengths. Our visual perception allows us to see color.
Transduction can relate to the different colors we see. Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. There are different types that can relate to transduction. Smell, taste, sight, sound. Such as taste transduction directly results in neurons firing action potentials, while for seeing more processing must happen before the information is taken to action. We see because we can measure wave lengths up to 400 to 700 nanometers. The brain then receives the action potential creating information. Taste is a serious of different steps to send receptors to the brain to know what we are tasting. The chemical molecules combine with saliva on the tongue, then the molecules stimulate the sensory receptors that are located on the taste buds that are grouped within the papillae. The taste receptors then covert the chemical molecules into signals that are transmitted in the brain. The order of taste all relates to transduction because it sends sensory receptors to change psychical stimuli into signals and send them to the brain. Hearing is kind of like taste, it goes through an order of operations in order to ear. The first thing is the eardrum, the thin membrane that is the beginning middle of the ear, and it makes sound waves causing the ear drum to vibrate. Then the signals travel to the cochlea, a coiled bony fluid in the inner ear that houses sensory receptors, then it reaches the hair cells that detect the sound waves and transduce them into signals produced in the brain as sound. There are a lot of sensory receptors that allows us to smell, taste, ear, and see. It is important for transduction so we can change stimuli so our brain can tell us what we are doing. The most memorable thing I read was the five main taste because we come across them every day. Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami is the most recent. It is Japanese for savory or yummy. So the more taste buds you have the more you will taste the five main tastes.
Terms: transduction, sensory receptors, ear drum, cochlea, hair cells, papillae, taste buds, neurons,

Transduction is “A process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain” (Grison G-10). Transduction is important because without it we would be able to see, hear, taste, and smell things without actually knowing what the object our senses are trying to tell us is. The book uses the example of the green light on a traffic light; green means “Go” and our brain registers that causing our foot to move from the break to the gas pedal. Another example would be when we smell smoke we realize something is burning; we either try to get ourselves away from the burning object or, if it’s small enough, try to put the fire out ourselves.

The idea of seeing color was interesting. The way we see color is light and that is influenced by the amplitude, or brightness, of the light and the wavelength of the light. Amplitude is the height of the light wave from base to peak. Wavelength is the distance from peak to peak. The amplitude is what causes us to see the brightness of the color and the wavelength helps us see the hue and saturation. Hue refers to the distinctive characteristics that place a particular color in the spectrum (Grison 164). Saturation is just the intensity of the color. Hue depends mainly on the light’s dominant wavelength when it reaches the eye, whereas, saturation depends on how many wavelengths reach the eye. The book uses the example for hues such as blue-green or yellow-green. With saturation when there is only one wavelength when it reaches the eye, the person will see a vibrant color such as blue, red, or yellow.

Something that surprised me was the difference between additive color mixing and subtractive color mixing. Additive color mixing is the mixing of the wavelength of lights, when more wavelengths get added the lighter the color gets until it is white. Subtractive color mixing is the mixing of pigments when you mix pigments they get darker and darker until the color is black.

Words: transduction, sensory receptors, amplitude, wavelength, hue, saturation, additive color mixing, subtractive color mixing

The topic that interested me the most was the section about how we smell things with our nose. I always wondered how this worked, so I was excited to get to learn about it in this chapter. I learned that olfaction, the sense of smelling, has the most direct route to the brain. It begins when we sense chemical molecules, called odorants, from outside our bodies that pass into our noses and through the upper and back portions of the nasal cavity. In the nose there are sensory receptors, called olfactory receptors, in the olfactory epithelium that detect these molecules. These sensors then transduce the odorants into signals that the brain will process in its olfactory bulb. Each of these receptors responds to a different odor, of which there are about ten-thousand in the world, leading scientists to believe that each smell stimulates several receptors in a pattern that determines the final olfactory perception. This perception then, processed in the prefrontal cortex, tells us if we find the smell pleasant of gross. Because of it being processed in the amygdala, the area in the brain responsible for emotion and memory, these scents often evoke feelings and memories after they are processed. This is one of the reasons why smell is one of the strongest senses.

Transduction is the process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain where they are processed and understood. Sometimes it directly results in neurons firing action potential that signals reactions throughout the body. It can convert light waves in the eye into signals, which are sent to the brain where it can interpret the light’s harshness and meaning. It sends signals when hairs bend in the ear, converting the pressure into signals to that tell the brain how to process the sound. In taste and smell it converts chemical molecules into signals to tell the brain if the scents and flavors are pleasant or unpleasant. And finally when we feel things transduction uses warm, cold, and pressure receptors that convert feelings into signals to tell the brain if it is painful or not. Because of this, transduction is a fundamental process in a psychological experience. The signals it sends help us to process the environment around us, such as a red light means stop and a green light means go. It is because of the transduction signals that we can interpret this information and respond appropriately, such as then telling us to drive or stop the car.

The most surprising thing I learned in the reading was that how we perceive things to be hot or cold and painful or not painful actually depends on how many receptors are being stimulated. If a person sticks her hand in a pool or shower and deduces that it is just right, she may find that she was very wrong when she puts her whole body into it. This is because many more receptors are being simulated now, while only a few were before. Also I learned that distraction can reduce one’s perception of pain. That’s why doctors try to distract you with conversation as they give you a shot, adjust your bones, or work on your teeth. Without these distractions, one may focus and worry about the pain, thus increasing their pain perception.

Smell, olfaction, odorants, nasal cavity, sensory receptors, olfactory receptors, olfactory epithelium, olfactory bulb, transduction, neurons, action potential, sound, taste, perception, pain

The most interesting topic to me was about synesthesia, I had heard in the past about people who can taste colors, hear smells, and so on and so forth, but it was always associated with “crazy acid tripping stories” and things like that. I was completely unaware that it was an actual psychological condition that people not only have, but enjoy and look at it as a positive in everyday life. I wonder what it would be like growing up, I’m sure it would make the kid feel different, and this may stunt social growth and development. The books says that it can occur in 1 out of every 2,000 people, and this is crazy considering I’m sure I’ve come across at least 2000 people (in passing) and at least one of them statistically should have had this…which brings the question, I wonder how my name tastes? Some questions I would have would be:
What makes a certain thing taste/sound/smell a certain way?
What is the actual cause of this and is it genetic?
Can it suddenly happen to someone who hadn’t experienced it before?
Another thing that sparked my interest is how people perceive things differently, sensory input, and this got my girlfriend and I into discussion on how maybe I just see clothes differently and that’s why I occasionally don’t match (she did not buy it). I wonder to what degree the differences can be, and is it directly related to color blindness? Transduction is the action of signals sent to the brain by sensory receptors changing physical stimuli. Without this we would be literally senseless. And we would be 100% less efficient as living things., no perception whatsoever.

Words used: Perception, Senses, Synesthesia, Sensory input, Transduction, Social development, Genetic

From the chapter 5 reading, the most interesting topic to me was the topic of sensation and perception. I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know about this section, and I thought it was interesting that both of these things are so closely related. I learned that sensation is the detection of physical stimuli from the world around us, and the sending of that information to the brain. What is meant by physical stimuli, is things that we can experience with our senses, such as light waves, sound waves, food molecules, odor molecules, temperature changes ect. Perception however, is a little different. Perception is the brain’s further processing of sensory information, which is our conscious experience of the world. In other words, our perceptions translate our sensations into information that we need. The interesting part about this is that people don’t experience these things in the same way. Even if a person experiences the same sense, they can’t possibly perceive it in the same way. I also thought that is was interesting that the color we see in everyday life is not actually there. Our brains are putting the color there with the help of reflective light waves, and our brains interpret it as color. The example that they used in the book was a stop-light. We see a stop light as having three different colors: green, yellow and red. Our brains are actually seeing these colors on their own, because there isn’t any actual physical color, and with that information, our brain uses it to take action. We have been taught that green means go, yellow means yield, and red means stop. However, our sensory receptors have to obtain a very large amount of physical stimulation in order for our brains to react to it. Absolute threshold is minimum amount of physical stimuli that is required by our sensory receptors to detect it. During all of this, the sensory receptors must change the stimulus input signals into signals that our brain can understand, and this process is called transduction. This goes along with the concept of the stop-light. Our brain alerts us that we are seeing a green light, so our immediate response is “go.” This process is so fundamental to psychological experience because without it, our brain would not be able to interpret the signals, leaving us with no knowledge of how to react to it. Following the same example, if our brain was unable to undergo transduction, we would not understand the green light. Instead of going, we might sit at the stop-light unaware that it is our turn to go, or we might have not stopped at all. Transduction is important to our everyday life because it helps us interpret the world around us. Another thing from this chapter that I thought was interesting was the section about how taste buds, and how our receptors can easily detect chemical molecules. I would say this was also the most memorable thing about the chapter, because it really caught my attention. I am a very picky eater, and now I have a better understanding of why that might be. The sense of taste can also be called gustation. Our taste is also related to our survival, because if we eat something that tastes bad, we spit it out. The reason this relates to survival is because we use this method for to keep toxins out of our bodies. Back to my picky eating, everyone has individual taste preferences, which come from our taste receptors. With this being said, the same pasta can taste completely different to two different people. Another factor that contributes to taste preference is the texture of the food you are eating. This is a big factor for me when it comes to choosing foods that I actually like. For example, I can’t eat bananas because of the soft and mushy texture. It’s not that the banana tastes bad, it’s that the texture makes me cringe. In conclusion, I learned several new things in this chapter, and I could relate to all of it because we all have senses and perceptions even if we don’t think about them.
Terms: sensation, perception, physical stimuli, light waves, sound waves, molecules, sensory information, conscious, sensory receptors, brain, absolute threshold, stimulus input signals, transduction, taste buds, chemical molecules, gustation, toxins, taste preferences, taste receptors

From the reading I found that the part about color perception based on light was the most interesting to me. The trichromatic theory or “three color,” results from 3 types of cone receptors. Something I found interesting about this is that with paints, they are determined by pigments rather than refracting light. The pigments absorb different wavelengths and prevent them from being reflected. Reading about the opponent process theory fascinated me with the fact that staring at a red image for a length of time we see a green afterimage when we look away. This is proposed by the idea that the ganglion cells in the retina fire visual impulses to the brain that make red and green seem like opposites. I find it peculiar that a color is based off of wavelengths and brightness is based off amplitudes. Day to day you go about seeing a vast range of different colors and it doesn’t cross one’s mind that it is from wavelengths, they’re just there.
Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This process is fundamental to the psychological experience because for vision to occur more processing needs to happen to be coded as action potentials. From seeing one thing occur, we also register a meaning for that.
One of the most surprising things I learned about in this reading was the fact that humans can detect about 10,000 smells, but we don’t really know how the olfactory bulb works.
Psychological terms: cone, trichromatic theory, opponent process theory, transduction, olfactory bulb.

Chapter 5
The topics that interested me the most were sensation and perception, and how we perceive objects by organizing visual information.
When it comes to sensation, I did not realize just how many different things our senses can detect, and how many we detect at one time. The book used the example of all the senses we detect from a splash of a grapefruit. We detect food molecules, odor molecules, temperature change, and pressure change, all from a tiny drop of juice on our skin. Naturally our sensory receptors do all of the work for us, sometimes we do not even register how many senses we have being activated. The sensory receptors do all of the work by detecting what they call a stimulus, something as simple as a light wave or sound wave. Perception, the organization/interpretation of sensory signals, is just as important to the human body. If our senses are picking up on a hot stove that is burning our hand, it is necessary to have perception to interpret the situation so that we do not get harmed by the stove. The process of changing the stimulus to an input that the brain can interpret, perception, is a process called transduction.
Transduction is extremely important to psychology because it allows for our brain and senses to interact. If our senses try to send information without translating it to something that our brains can read, then the brain cannot perceive the situation. Transduction is what allows for our mind and body to work together.
I was also interested by the way we perceive objects. The fun part was looking at the art pieces that could be viewed in two ways, like the witch and the elegant woman with her head turned away. Grouping has a large part to do with this. It tells us what pieces should go together. Two other factors that play into perception are bottom-up processing and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing is your basic stimuli that take in information from the environment and transfers it to the brain, while top-down is your perception on things based from passed experiences and expectations. Our expectations of our environment can sometimes get us into trouble though.
The most surprising or memorable thing for me was the idea behind opponent-process theory. I thought it was really interesting how we perceive colors. The lighting creates the color for us, but it was really interesting to see how we as humans try to mix colors, figure out which ones colors can be imagined together and which colors cannot. A question that I wish could be answered is, “why?”. Why can we not imagine a reddish green color, or why is it that when we look at a green image for a while, we see a red afterimage? I just found it really interesting.

Terms: sensation, perception, Sensory receptors, stimulus, transduction, opponent-process theory, grouping, bottom- up and top-down processing.

This Chapter the most interesting topic to me was sensation of perception when our sensors gather information and send it to the brain. Most of the information that is being gathered at on time is the temperature of the room, someone saying something in the distance, or talking on their cell phone. We sense the felling’s we are able to see and touch. Sensory detectors in our body help us detect senses and send it to our brain in a simple process. This includes physical stimulus, sensation, transduction, and perception. I never thought that that everything that happens to us daily would have a simple four step process. When you touch a hot pan your reaction is to instantly pull back because it is hot. The sensor in your hand tells your brain to pull back so your don’t damage your nerves the hand. It tells you its hot and it hurts. Same goes for any other type of stimulus your body would react to in a matter of seconds. This process happens so fast that you wouldn’t think youd have time to react but if you waited to pull your hand off a hot surface before you moved it the nerves would be damaged. Your body reacts faster to protect itself for you.
Psychological terms: stimulus, sensory, sensation of perception, transduction, and perception

I thought the first section in chapter was very interesting. It had to do with how perception and sensation affect us. I didn't know what the difference was between perception and sensation. Sensation is picking up what smell, taste, touch, and light is. Perception is how are brain is interpreting it. I thought it was interesting that our senses are constantly changing to our environment and the stimulation that we are surrounded with.
Transduction is the process that sensory receptors change because physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. I think transduction is important to us because it helps us respond or react to the environment we are in. For example if an area is to loud you’re going to leave or cover your ears because it’s hurting your ear drums. You are physically hearing something and your brain is giving you a response on what you should do.
One of the most memorable things I learned in this chapter was that there are certain parts of your tongue that are more sensitive to different tastes. I found that memorable because I didn't even know that. I just thought that your tongue taste everything the same.
Terms: Sensitive, transduction, sensory receptors, physical stimuli, sensation, perception

From this chapter the most interesting thing I found in was about our five senses them being taste, smell, touch, hearing, and our sight. I remember learning this back when I was younger and knowing what each sense could do and stuff. But after reading this section of the chapter I learned so much more, that there’s more to it than just being able to taste, hear, smell, touch, and see. One other thing, they also didn’t tell us there were two other senses called kinesthetic and vestibular senses. The kinesthetic sense basically helps us control our position in space while the other sense, vestibular uses information from receptors in the structures of the inside of your ear. Now what I learned about the main and known senses are that we have these senses because of transduction which are taste receptors which convert the chemical molecules into signals that are transmitted to the brain, primarily but the facial nerves we have and without this we would basically be useless and not enjoy our senses. But the two senses that stood out more to me were the taste and smell because of the taste buds which are really called the papillae. These papillae are really tiny structures that are mushroom-shaped and are also not just on your tongue but also spread throughout your mouth and throat. A fun fact I learned from reading from this section was that most people have approximately around 8,000 to 10,000 taste buds. This defiantly relates to psychology because it obviously involves our brain by how the taste information is sent there fist, and the signals are sent there so the brain can respond to the stimuli which I found pretty cool. An interesting but memorable thing that stuck out a little bit to me was how everybody has different preferences of taste. I knew we all did but the fact that they begin in the womb is the fascinating part. Basically the mother passes down their eating preferences on to the offspring which while I was reading that I sort of realized that me and my mom kind of almost have the same preferences in taste, not all but almost the same.
Terms: transduction, kinesthetic sense, vestibular sense, chemical molecules, facial nerves, papillae, taste buds, stimuli

Reading Chapter 5 explained a variety of information that included: sensation and perception. Sensation talked about the awareness of the physical stimuli from the world around us and the sending of that information to the brain. To me sensation is a big part of my daily life because it stimulates what my mood might be in the moment. Body odor, sensing of food, and the slight temperature changed are some of the examples that can be a sensation in our everyday life. Perception explains the different viewpoints people can have differently than other people. There are many parts that come into play with understanding information; sensory receptors is an organ that detects physical stimulation into information that can be processed by the brain. Transduction is a processes by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. The psychological experience that explains the reason of why we use transduction is because it fires neurons into action that interprets them into signaling you into action. My favorite part in the chapter was about receptors in our skin that detect temperature and pressure. Warm receptors sensors the skin that detects the temperature of stimuli and transduce it into information processed in the brain as warm. I learned that sometimes the body can trick you into thinking that something is “warm” but finding out that it actually is cold. For example, jumping into the pool and knowing that it is freezing cold when your entire body is in the pool.
The types of experiences that perception and sensation of touch are: physical stimulus, sensation, transduction, and perception. The basic understanding of the reaction flows through the brain and triggers it up the cranial nerves and the spinal nerves. It goes to the somatosensory cortex and passes through the thalamus. In page. 189, it talks about the kinesthetic and vestibular sense, which involves our kinesthetic sense that tells us how our body and limbs are positioned in space. Vestibular sense allows us to maintain balance. Further on it goes into great detail about the senses that included: taste, smell, touch and so on. We as humans can detect five basic taste sensations: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (savory). It was interesting to read a lot of information about the different ways we use our senses and the benefits from them also. In the section 5, they explain different receptors and fibers inside our body. In touch, the receptors get off information about pressure and temperature. Pain is a fast fiber that sends information immediately. I have learned a great deal of information and facts that never came to mind when I thought about the senses that we use in our daily life.

Terms: sensation, perception, sensory receptors, transduction, warm receptors, physical stimulus, and somatosensory cortex.

The most surprising thing about this chapter to me was if men and women differ in their sense of smell. Structurally the olfactory system in men and women are the same, but there might be a difference in sensitivity and odor memory. To find this out an investigator presented 80 different odors to men and women. Women outperformed men in almost all of the tests. Women learned to identify 63 of the odors better than men. The researchers aren’t completely sure why this is but they have a couple theories. For example, high estrogen levels in women may enhance their olfactory abilities or women may have better olfactory memory then men. The thing I found most interesting was about depth perception. Psychologists don’t understand how we can see depth or distance since our retinas are two dimensional yet we can see three dimensional objects. The reason though why we do have depth perception is because of the binocular and monocular cues. Binocular cues are specifically for depth perception that involve both eyes while monocular cues are for depth perception that only involve one eye. The definition of transduction is the conversion of stimuli received by the receptors into a form that can be used by the nervous system. For example, sound waves cause little hairs in your ears to bend and if they bend enough a neuron will fire and now auditory information can be transferred to your brain. Without transduction we wouldn’t be able to do a lot of things throughout our daily life. Like, smell, hear, be able to convert light that we see, and much more. Psychological terms: Transduction, Depth perception, Binocular cues, Monocular cues.

Although mentioned briefly, the topic I found to be most interesting to me is the phenomenon of synesthesia. I think that it is fascinating that different parts of the brain can be activated at once and that sensory information from one thing can be experienced as something quite different, altering one’s perception of the world around them in unique ways.

Transduction is the bridge between sensation and perception. It’s how we can understand what we are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, and what that means. One could think of it as the human brain’s Rosetta stone, translating unknown stimuli into something we can understand. All of our conscious experience is given to us through the process of transduction, and it happens so fast that we, of course, cannot tell. The signals travel to your brain and neurons fire in mere milliseconds.

This may not be an actual topic, but the thing that was most memorable to me were the numbers in this chapter. For example: the process of transduction takes milliseconds. There are 120 million rods and 6 million cones in the eye. Also, each individual human has 8,000 to 10,000 taste buds. Examples like these may come as no surprise, but sometimes we forget just how much goes on in the human body and how fast it happens so that we experience everything in our day-to-day lives and take for granted. It’s no wonder why so many people like the biology aspect of psychology because you get to learn some amazing things about how the body works and just how complex we human beings are.

Terms: synesthesia, brain, perception, stimuli, transduction, neurons, conscious, rods and cones, taste buds

From the Ear to the Brain was the section that I found most interesting while reading chapter 5. I have always thought that the human ear is shaped the way it is because that is how we are born. When reading the chapter I learned that the ear is shaped like a shell so that we can capture as much sound as possible. I have never thought of a person adapting to where they can capture more sound. The eardrum I always pictured to be a drum like structure that sound bounced off. After reading about the eardrum I found that in a way I was right about the structure of this part of the ear. I was surprised to read that the eardrum is a membrane that is stretched tightly across the canal that sound travels through. The hair cells are very surprising and interesting to me. I think it’s interesting how the hair cells inside the ear are sensory receptors inside the ear. Why this is interesting to me is because depending on how the hair cells bend and in what direction it relays the information to the brain.
Transduction is a process that changes physical stimuli into signals that get sent to the brain. Transduction is an important process for several different reasons. An example of why it is important is driving and coming upon a stoplight. The role of Transduction takes what you see and turns them into action potentials. So when the light changes from green to yellow transduction changes that into action potentials telling your brain to tell your feet to step on the brake and slow down and coming to a stop when the light changes from yellow to red.
Throughout the chapter I found something very surprising to me. I learned that we have taste buds not only on our tongues, but that we also have them in our throat. Growing up I learned that taste buds were only on the tongue, so to find our that we have them in our throats as well is very surprising and interesting to me.

According to the text, transduction is “a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain”. Without transduction, our brains wouldn't be able to interpret our sensory information, meaning we would actually experience what our bodies were sensing. Though to an extent humans cannot sense everything – we have both absolute and difference thresholds that can cause us to not interpret what we are sensing if they are minimal or of minimal change, respectively –, a transduction-less life would be much more extreme. This would cause us to be, in function, blind, deaf, and not able to taste, smell, or physically feel, rendering our senses useless and our bodies extremely vulnerable.

Transduction is also important to our psychological experience. Psychology is defined as how we and our brains react to what we experience, and without transduction, we virtually wouldn’t experience anything.

I found the section on synesthesia most memorable to me in this chapter, as I know someone who has it – though with hers, most sounds have color. Reading about synesthesia in such an intellectual way was not exactly entertaining – certainly not as entertaining as it could have been –, but it was interesting to see how it is explained: “sensory input in one form is experienced in another form”.

The most interesting topic to me was that of gustation, or our sense of taste. The hardware involved is more than just taste buds, on the tongue there are papillae (where taste buds are located), within the taste buds are taste receptors, and then nerves transfer the signals to the brain, where transduction allows us to interpret the taste of what is in our mouths with the thalamus and the gustatory cortex. Within the topic of gustation, I additionally liked reading that mothers’ eating habits are transferred to their fetuses. I’m passionate about health, and it’s comforting to know that, to an extent, I can encourage my child to eat healthier foods from before he/she is even born.

Transduction, sensory receptors, stimuli, sensory information, absolute threshold, difference threshold, psychology, synesthesia, taste buds, papillae, taste receptors, thalamus, gustatory cortex

After reading this chapter it was hard choosing what topic was most interesting to me. I found the topic of synesthesia to stick out in my mind the most because It seems to cray to be real. The fact that a name can trigger a taste in some people mouth or that a color like red made William taste a gross mixture of of pistachio ice cream and ear wax is unfathomable to me. I have had the experience of being able to smell something and relate it to a color or taste something and relate it to a color as well but never as drastic as the story in the textbook . Before reading the beginning of this chapter I have never heard of synesthesia and to learn how common it actually is crazy. I think it would be so annoying to have that be a normal sensation in my everyday life. I think that my perception or interpretation of the psychical things around me would be drastically different then they are now.
To understand transduction first you have to understand perception or sensation. This is when sensory receptors are what detect physical stimulation from the external world and change that stimulation into information. Now transduction is the process by which they send sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. Almost everything that we do is a result of transduction and it is a major part of humans everyday experience.
Without transduction, we wouldn't be able to understand what the light waves that our sensory receptors mean or what they are telling us to do. Without transduction, humans wouldn't be able to do things like listen to music, taste thing, understand touch or smell. Its a very important function in our daily lives.
Most Memorable thing that I have read in this chapter has to be about the eye.I find these two gewie things in our head holes to be very interesting and to learn more about how they function and process information is always memorable. My favorite part about the eye that I read about is learning how we receive color and how light effects that. The color we see is also know as the trichromatic theory, or the fact there are three types of cone receptor cells in the retina that are responsible for our color perception. It talks about how we are very sensitive to light and its wavelength and thats how we get our color mixtures.
I found this chapter to be very interesting, I love learning about how we take in and procces the outside world

Synesthesia, Perception, Sensation, Transduction, Sensory receptors, Trichromatic theory

From this chapter there were many topics that caught my attention and that were very interesting to me. The first topic that I thought was interesting was learning about our eyes and how we perceive color or our perception about color. Its interesting to know that colors are actually just the color they are because of how we see light waves and light lengths. Another interesting topic was to learn about the ear. A question in the text came up and said if a tree falls in the middle of the forest and no one is there to hear it fall does it still make a noise. I personally thought it would but according to the book and theories it actually does not make a noise. just vibrations. Just like how we don't see color, we don't hear noise either. Just vibrations. Our ears are very important when it comes to sound and everything in our ear is the way it is for a reason. Just like the shape of it is shaped like this so we can funnel in sound to our eardrum to hear better.

Transduction is a process by which sensory receptors change physical stimuli into signals that are eventually sent to the brain. This basically means that if you see a red light change green your eyes will process that information through the eyes and to the sensory receptors in the eyes to the brain. This is fundamental to the psychological experience because without transduction we wouldn't be able to send information to the brain and even worse be able to interpret what we are seeing and what it means.

The most surprising and memorable thing that I read in this chapter is in 5.4 when learning about taste and taste buds. I learned that there are actually one 5 types of tastes that we taste. which are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. that surprised me because I never though of us only having 5 types of tastes that we taste because some foods are so different than others. Also, what stuck out to me when learning about taste was about the supertasters. Its amazing that someone can have 6 times as many taste buds as someone else.

psychological terms: light waves, light lengths, Transduction, sensory receptors, physical stimuli, supertasters, taste bud, five main taste, perception

From chapter 5, in all honesty felt kind of like a review of things I had learned previously in different biology and science classes. But not all of it was review for me, I had never been taught about the senses through the distinct view of psychology which I found to be very interesting. Transduction is one of the terms that was used and emphasized heavily in the chapter, and is defined as being the process by which the brain turns light and other sensory inputs into neurological codes that the brain can then process further and express to us in some way that we can detect it/ differentiate it from the other sensory stimulations in the world. Sensory inputs are all the different things that can stimulate a part of the human body, resulting in an awareness or an experience related to us, or someone we are observing. The chapter also struck me as interesting because of the part on eye sight. I had known that colors were really just whatever spectrum was not absorbed by an object, but I did not know that things really do not have any color, and it is only our brains that perceive the wavelengths of light this way. Another fact that I found out was that the lens of our eye’s actual bubble, and flatten depending on the distance away the object being observed is stationed. I also found from this small section that it was very interesting that the pupils actually enlarge when we see something we really like or want. I had noticed it before, but my brain had not taken it into conscious consideration due because of another term I learned in this chapter, which is the absolute threshold. Later on, sensitivity was one of the main points, and I found it to be fascinating that the human eye, with no obstruction, during the night can see a single candle light from 30 miles away. Or that we can taste one teaspoon of sugar in 2 gallons of water. Despite these obvious senses, I found out about how the brain groups things, and tries to help us understand and see things easier in our day to day lives. This is why we have illusions, because or brain is taking the information and trying to turn it into something we can understand better. This is where the Gestalt Principle of Organization comes in to play. There were a serious of optical illusions in the text, and could trick your brain into thinking something was one way, or real, when in reality it was either multiple things, or didn’t exist. One example of this would be Illusory Contours. Overall it was very interesting and surprising to learn about this aspect of Psychology, and why we think things are the way they are, even when they really aren’t.
Terms: Transduction, Sensory Input, Absolute Threshold, Sensitivity, Illusions, Gestalt Principle of Organization.

The most interesting topic in this chapter for me was how we perceive objects by organizing visual information, Gesalt psychologists have made the theory that our brain has a specific way of perceiving things so in some instances it lies to us to believe in something that isn't there just to make it fit. Motion aftereffects is also a phenomenon which i find intriguing. Synesthesia is one is the most interesting topic though, It is such a weird thing to imagine a person associating colors with numbers or tastes with words, It is a very mind boggling though that you would taste a certain thing just by hearing a name.
Transduction is the process where the sensory receptors change the stimulus input they receive into signals so that the brain can understand them. sometimes neurons just fire action potentials, when a neuron has more positive energy inside than the outside then it fires a action potentials. vision requires more processing to get to the brain than other senses. This process is necessary for us to actually sense something otherwise the brain wouldn't know what information is being sent to it and not be able to respond.
there has been a lot of things in this chapter that have been memorable, The synesthesia is one of the most memorable and i want to meet someone with the condition and talk to them about this experience myself. I tried the exercise where you have to choose the color of the car and then ask friends to do it too and i was surprised by the result. some of them chose the same as me while others had very different choices, there are factors that would change a person's view on the color of the car though such as the sunlight on the car would make it seen lighter so some people might take that into consideration while others would not. Infants taste preferences because of what the mothers drank during pregnancy was also a very memorable concept and that it actually worked was shocking for me because i was not expecting that result. The difference in pain when you are trying to sleep and when you are not differs because when you are awake, you have distractions away from the pain but when you are trying to sleep then you focus more on the pain.

Terms:Gesalt Psychologists, motion aftereffects, synesthesia, sensory receptors, stimulus, action potentials

From this chapter the most interesting was transduction. Which is when images on the retina are transformed into electrical signals. This allows the visual messages to be transmitted to the brain to be interpreted.
Sensation- the process by which stimulation of a sensory receptor gives rise to neural impulses that result in an experience or awareness of conditions inside and out.
Psychophysics- minim amount of physical energy needed to produce a reliable sensory experience
Seniority-
• Light- candle flame can be seen at dork from 30 miles away
• Sound- the tick of a watch under quiet conditions 20 ft. away.
• Taste- one teaspoon of sugar in 2 gallons of water
• Smell- one drop of perfume diffused into the entire volume of a 3 bedroom apartment
• Touch- the wing of a bee hitting cheek
Physical events- remember everything we experience arise out of the activity of neurons
Other senses-
• Vestibular senses- how one’s body is oriented in the world with respect to gravity
• Kinesthetic senses- body position and movement of the body parts
Perception-
• Is the next level of processing- understanding, identifying, recognizing, labeling
• Incoming information conveys colors, orientation, movement
• Prior knowledge and experience shape perception

Author Profile Page unipanther | September 23, 2014 6:09 PM | Reply
The most surprising thing about this chapter to me was if men and women differ in their sense of smell. Structurally the olfactory system in men and women are the same, but there might be a difference in sensitivity and odor memory. To find this out an investigator presented 80 different odors to men and women. Women outperformed men in almost all of the tests. Women learned to identify 63 of the odors better than men. The researchers aren’t completely sure why this is but they have a couple theories. For example, high estrogen levels in women may enhance their olfactory abilities or women may have better olfactory memory then men. The thing I found most interesting was about depth perception. Psychologists don’t understand how we can see depth or distance since our retinas are two dimensional yet we can see three dimensional objects. The reason though why we do have depth perception is because of the binocular and monocular cues. Binocular cues are specifically for depth perception that involve both eyes while monocular cues are for depth perception that only involve one eye. The definition of transduction is the conversion of stimuli received by the receptors into a form that can be used by the nervous system. For example, sound waves cause little hairs in your ears to bend and if they bend enough a neuron will fire and now auditory information can be transferred to your brain. Without transduction we wouldn’t be able to do a lot of things throughout our daily life. Like, smell, hear, be able to convert light that we see, and much more. Psychological terms: Transduction, Depth perception, Binocular cues, Monocular cues.

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