Hi Class,
You pretty much rocked your blog posts do far and since today's class was going to cover blogging for the course and how to improve your posts etc. and since it is still snowing/snowy outside we will be doing this online work rather than in class work.
One of the blog assignment type we did for the class was the "In The News" assignments. In order to familiarize you with these assignments, we would like you to read some of the posts from past students to see what they were interested in and how they went about blogging about behavior modification in the news.
http://www.psychologicalscience.com/perception/2011/02/topical-blog-week-12-due-friday.html#comments
http://www.psychologicalscience.com/perception/2011/02/topical-blog-week-9-due-friday.html#comments
After reading the posts from the links above please answer the following:
Which posts did you like the best? Why?
Do you think we can adequately learn about sensation / perception from reading the news? How so?
Has reading these posts changed your idea of what sensation / perception is? Why or why not?
Based on these posts are there any specific topics you are interested in learning?
Thanks,
--Dr. M
(A snow day...really? There's not even that much snow...)
I personally liked the posts from topical blog week 12 better than the other topical blog. The one that stuck out to me the most was posted by Genaro (who is actually a friend of mine and I had no idea he took this class). He looked at the phantom limb. Phatom limb is a perceived sensation from a physically amputated limb of the body, so basically you can feel a limb that isn't there. That is awesome and I enjoyed reading about it.
I highly agree that we can learn about sensation/perception from reading the news. These simple notions happen everyday in our lifes and go unnoticed because people don't know what they're looking for. The news covers a lot of different topics and I believe that we can relate them to sensation or perception in one way or the other.
Reading these posts and the previous topical blog posts has definitely changed my idea on what perception and sensation is. I am excited to actually start finding these things on my own and sharing them with the class. I believed before this course that this class was simply just how we perceived the world. Which, it sort of is, but it also goes into much more detail.
Once again, everything is most likely going to be interesting in this class.
haha - that's enough snow to go sledding so snow day it is : -)
PS - Tell Genaro I said hi!
The post that I really felt I wanted to talk about the most was written by rothaad about texting and driving. I took cognitive psychology a few semesters ago so it isn’t completely fresh in my mind so there may be a few holes in my thoughts when it comes to the actual terms. In the class we learned about attention and also we talked about mastery of behaviors. When going over the theories we concluded that when and if you actually “mastered” a task you it was possible to perform both tasks simultaneously. We then found ourselves on the topic of texting and driving. When relating the theories behind our attention to the topic, we concluded that if the person driving had “mastered” texting, and “mastered” driving, he or she could adequately perform both tasks. The problem with this we did discuss was external variables such as road conditions, variance of other vehicles and people and animals, which sometimes come out into the road. I found it interesting because it is related to fairly current legislature that was passed. Our laws didn’t comply with the psychological theories that are at bay. Possibly because there are many who have not mastered the art of testing and driving and that puts others in danger, which we cannot have.
I definitely think we can learn about sensation and perception through the news. You can pull almost any news article and put a psychological spin on it, and I know sensation and perception can be related to many of the topics as well. I think, for me relating a topic to a theory or concept helps me remember it better. Perhaps I would not have recalled how that theory would have worked if I had not had the texting and driving example to refer it to in my head.
I wouldn’t say reading the articles had “changed” my idea of what sensation and perception is, but it has helped me understand more how it can be applied to every day life.
As for specific topics I would like to learn more about in class, I think I need more of a general base of information about how our senses actually work before I can go much further. I really enjoyed reading many of the posts, for example I thought the post about the camera that could work as eyes was very interesting and miraculous, but I haven’t the slightest idea about how that even begins to work, and I am interested come to understand.
I think that's a great point. You can't just assume everyone is good at multi-tasking, especially when it comes to the important task of driving. Think about it next time you use your phone or text while driving. How much of your attention do you devote to driving, anyway, even when not texting/talking? Probably not as much as you think, b/c we tend to go on "auto-pilot" when we drive after a while. But, when you saccade back and forth from phone to road, phone to road, how can one say with absolute certainty that nothing bad will happen? Essentially, you are blind to any changes in front of you (the road) that my have happened during the time it took you to look at your phone. In that period nothing could have changed, or, something could have changed about the road, such as a person or animal walking out, etc. Good points. Attention is limited with respect to the number of tasks one can successfully accomplish simultaneously.
I liked a lot of the posts from the first link posted. I especially liked the few posts about hearing loss. Reading a few of those about hearing made me remember an article I read on Huffington Post about a woman who was deaf her whole life and then had surgery and they video taped her reaction to hearing her own voice for the first time ever. It was really moving and inspirational.
I do agree that we can learn about sensation and perception from reading the news. Obviously there isn't going to be articles relating to openly talking about the subject of sensation and perception, but that doesn't mean we cant implement what we are learning in class to a ton of things we find in the news. There are stories in the news all the time about people losing or gaining back senses for the first time, soldiers losing limbs/having surgeries etc.
Reading these posts have somewhat changed what I thought about the class. Like I said in my last post, that we all have a preconceived notion about what we think the class is going to be about and sometimes we are right and sometimes we are wrong. By reading these posts I have gained a greater understanding to what this class is really going to be about.
Here is the article I talked about in the first paragraph:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/30/sara-churman-deaf-woman-_n_989220.html
That is a great video - here are some other good ones. I like the picture of the kid at the very bottom of the page....http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/9-people-hearing-for-the-first-time
I chose the post by Genaro because I listened to an MPR program a few weeks ago about this topic. The program discussed a man whose arm would go into bouts of pain quite often and that he felt like he was clenching his fists all the time. The doctor then figured out a way, using mirrors, to make his brain think that he was unclenching his fist which helped solve the problem SO COOL!
I think that it may actually be better to learn about sensation and perception by reading/ listening to the news because then we can actually relate to people around us and make connections rather than with text books where you just read fact after fact about something that maybe happened 100 years ago rather than yesterday to a guy that your sister knows (for example).
Reading the posts hasn't really changed my ideas about the topic but it has made me think about them a lot more. For instance today I slammed my finger in the car door but my brain did something strange that I did not realize had happened until later. At the time I had a mitten on and could not actually see my hand. As soon as the incident happened my brain said oh that didn't hurt because you have a ring on that finger that protected it (this happens to me all the time), but later my finger started to hurt really bad so I took my mitten off and there was not a ring on that finger and my finger was actually badly hurt. Brains are awesome and tricky...thats what this class has made me realize so far.
I like your ability to retrospect upon your experiences with sensory > visual integration. The expectation drove your hypothesis of what had just happened and the visual input (mitten on the hand) confirmed your mind's hypothesis. Then later when the visual input no longer matched the hypothesis/expectation, the initial sensory stimulation of slamming your pressure sensitive mechanical receptors in the door gave rise to the realization and probably pain.
Keep thinking about the world that way, it's much more fun.
I enjoyed the article about new technologies that are able to make the blind see. The only examples that were given about experimenting with this technology is through people who were born with sight and lost it progressively through life. I would be much more interested in seeing the result of giving an individual who has been blind at birth this technology. Much akin to the classic "Molyneux's problem", what would this individual be able to see without the neural build of ever experiencing sight?
I don't think that we can adequately learn sensation and perception, on a whole, from the news. I personally believe that news articles would be good supplemental material to realize the applications of the knowledge we are learning, but I wouldn't feel comfortable using news stories as prime source of information for building my concept of what sensation and perception is.
These posts haven't changed my idea of sensation and perception. Not because they aren't useful, but because I haven't developed a proper personal idea of what I think sensation and perception is. Ask me again in a couple weeks.
I'm compelled to tell you about a talk at UC Berkeley this summer at a research gathering of the minds from the universities of northern California and northern Nevada. In this talk the researcher essentially described a very thin microchip/electrode strip that they were able to attach/implant to the retina of a dog (I think it was a dog, but could have been another animal). This dog had lost some of its vision or most of its vision. However, with the new microchip/implant this animal was able to (via artificial stimulation of the retina) discriminate low level features in the visual world (e.g., lines and bars, orientation, edges, etc.). Technology often informs and propagates research ideas to keep them moving in the right direction.
After reading some blog posts from week 9 and week 12, I enjoyed reading the posts from week 12 better because they were more detailed and explained the background history a bit more than the previous week posts, and you could see the improvement in the 3 week gap. I did enjoy reading the week 9 posts, as well, because you could tell that the students were interested in what they wrote about.
I do think we can learn about sensation and perception from reading the news, because new discoveries can be made every day, and the media (news) is a way of learning about new discoveries. I think that a classroom setting is a better, and more effective way of learning about sensation and perception because the news usually only highlights the sensational (no pun intended) aspects of stories. In contrast, a classroom setting provides a way to learn about a variety of topics by someone who should be considered an expert in that area. The news does provide a person with suggested topics that they could choose to study or research more intensely, though.
After reading these blog posts, I do feel that I didn’t know the vastness of topics we were going to cover in this class. I didn’t know that sensation and perception encapsulated so many areas that seemed more like anatomy/physiology, biopsychology, or neurology subjects. But in reflection, the topics of the blog posts show the inter-relation of psychology and the study of the human body. It makes sense to me now that I think about it.
After reading these posts, I am interested in learning more about the retinal prosthesis. I think cochlear implants have made a wonderful impact on many people, and hope that a retinal prosthesis could do the same for many people suffering with vision loss. I would also like to find out the impact it would have on people that have never been able to see the world around them.
I mentioned a retinal implant in a reply to the post above yours. The cochlea is an amazing piece of anatomy. What is even more amazing is it's physiology and the organization of the hair cells within the basilar membrane that give rise to the tonotopically organized auditory system. The cochlea will come to fruition in the auditory chapter, but if you're interested now, no need to wait. Also, the news is great, but as I find myself learning more and more and expanding my knowledge of these topics, I find the news to occasionally be chalk full of misinformation. Not always, but sometimes. Be a skeptical and informed consumer of media information.
I liked most of the posts from blog week #12 because there was a lot of diverse posts, from "eye cameras" to medicinal marijuana. My favorite of them all was the one that kmarie posted about medicinal marijuana, only because I have been quite interested why California and Colorado are the only two states (there might be one or two more, I can't remember) that have legalized it. I think the other states should really look into it. The studies have been done, and according to kmarie and her research, medicinal marijuana is said to really help with pain! Other posts I liked was the "phantom limb" post. I enjoyed reading about it because I have never heard of such a thing, but my mind indeed has tricked me into checking my phone on a false vibration.
I think it takes some sort of pre-knowledge to really research sensation and perception on the web because literally you can see some sort of sensation or perception in almost all articles!
These posts have changed my idea of S&P in a good way. I learned that you can find them in such a wide array of topics (this makes me even more excited to learn more on my own).
I am excited to learn everything I don't know about sensation and perception. I can't really think of any one thing that I am necessarily pumped to research. But looking forward to the class!
Phantom limb sensation is a great topic that I'm sure you will discuss in class. For more information about treatment and the causes of phantom limb pain, check out Ramachandran's work (UC San Diego) and his TED talks, which are amazing as well.
When it comes to medical marijuana, you've got a huge debate that extends far beyond the realm of altered perception all the way to policy implications for state and federal law and treatment of illness, etc. The list goes on and on. California and Colorado are the big ones, but there are actually 16 total states that have put some form of medical marijuana legalization in place. A friend of mine from Oregon (where it is legal if you have a medical card and are a provider to other card-holding patients with a documented disease/illness), operates a manufacturing and distribution based compassionate care business legally within the eyes of the State of Oregon, but illegally according to federal standards. The implications of this substance for medical treatment as well as in altering your perception of the external world are vast. It's definately a hot topic right now. At the end of the day, its really not as big of an issue out west and people in states like California and Oregon essentially farm cannibis plants like people in Iowa farm corn.
The blogs that I enjoyed the most gave a very good outline of the article that they read. They gave a very informative outline of the article so that I could understand the main points of the article without reading it. They gave necessary details so that I could understand the article completely. They then showed how the topic of the article related to course material. This gave me a real world examples that I think would help me understand the course material better. In particular, I liked swanson's blog on chimps. This was informative and related to course material. It even had a like to a video which is always a bonus.
I think that it is possible to learn about sensation/perception from the news. However, I think it is necessary to understand basic terms and ideas so that the reader of an article can accurately interpret the article. It is also necessary to understand terms that the articles may use. I think this is the whole point of reading the course textbook.
I wasn't really sure what this class would be like coming into it, so it really hasn't changed idea of sensation/perception, but helped me understand what kinds of topics will cover. I think this class will have many interesting topics to cover.
Some topics that I think will be interesting are selective attention and pain interpretation.
The cool thing about blogs is that if you find something online while you're trying to expand your understanding of a topic, you can share it with the others in the class. If you find helpful videos, pass those along.
I found some of the posts from week #12 to be interesting. I particularly enjoyed reading about the new technology that gave some sight back to the blind. Giving light back to the blind by using same electrical waves that the brain functions on. Showing just how new technology can help a person, and when understanding the function of a something things can be altered to make the same affect.
I think we can learned quiet a bit about sensation and perception from the news, we just have to know what we are looking for in the beginning. As I'm looking to learn more, I'm sure I'll see more of it in the news as the class continues. And just this glimpse so far has showed me there is more to this topic then sensation and perceptions but down to the details within the topic.
I'm compelled to tell you about a talk at UC Berkeley this summer at a research gathering of the minds from the universities of northern California and northern Nevada. In this talk the researcher essentially described a very thin microchip/electrode strip that they were able to attach/implant to the retina of a dog (I think it was a dog, but could have been another animal). This dog had lost some of its vision or most of its vision. However, with the new microchip/implant this animal was able to (via artificial stimulation of the retina) discriminate low level features in the visual world (e.g., lines and bars, orientation, edges, etc.). Technology often informs and propagates research ideas to keep them moving in the right direction
The blog I found to be most interesting was the blog about binocular instability. Before reading this I was unaware of the disorder. This disorder is very interesting to me, and 15% of the population seems like a lot of people, so I think it is something all people should be more aware of because according to the blog and the article it can cause some severe problems. I also believe more attention should be given to this disorder because some people could have the disorder and not even know it. From what the blog stated there are also some easy ways this disorder can be treated.
I do believe we can adequately learn about sensation and perception from the news as long as the news items are relevant and supported. Everyday something new is developing and the news gives us way to learn about those developments. Also technology is always changing and becoming better which gives us new ideas to treat sensation and perception disorders. The news gives people a chance to learn something they may not have known before. The news is a resource for everyone and if it’s there we should take advantage of it and use it.
After reading the blogs my ideas about sensation and perception have really changed. There are so many different directions you can go with this topic and so many different ideas you can explore. There are also so many topics that I have read about that I didn’t even know related to sensation and perception.
Based on the posts I have become interested in many topics, but I am particularly interested in binocular instability because it is something I was unaware of, and it seems to be an interesting disorder that affects many people. Another topic I am interested in, is selective attention and the idea of yawning and why the chips and even humans tend to yawn more when someone they know yawns or when others they don’t know yawn, and how yawning is contagious.
The article about binocular instability from the post was, “When sight can be tiring and painful.”
There is some other research out there from Arnold Wilkins about visual discomfort. Basically, there are spatial frequencies and patterns (such as certain text fonts and sizes, etc.) that produce visual discomfort in people and in some can induce migraines (if they are already prone to migraines). He gave a talk at UNR which was pretty interesting. They now have colored filters that can decrease the discomfort associated with these spatial frequencies that you can put over your computer screen or piece of paper that you are reading. This link will take you to an article about the relationship between visual discomfort and natural image statistics. The idea is basically that natural images in the world do not cause as much visual discomfort as artificial or man-made images. This makes sense if you think about it.
http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/overlays/2010-194.pdf
The posts that caught my eye where the ones on attention. There seems to be a lot of new research being done on this topic, which is fairly interesting. I think more than anything this is because, as I mentioned in my last post, I can relate to this topic because of my AD/HD. I think a lot of news articles probably cover stories that relate to this topic, but most people don't recognize that they are about attention. The texting and driving article is a perfect example of this. I think this class will make me more aware of concepts of sensation and perception in everyday news articles. I also liked the article about the Argus II device which is implanted in the eye to help people who are blind see. It is very interesting to me to see all of the technology that is being developed to work with the brain in order to deal with certain physical impairments or to supplement working faculties. I am very interested in these because I had previously wanted to be a computer scientist who studied and did work in artificial intelligence, but a lot of people don't think that this is the true end goal for technology (the creation of intelligent learning computers). A lot of prominent researchers in the field of future technology predicting suggest that the end goal of technology will be its synthesis with humans and other biological life forms. While I don't think that this is where we are at yet, having a device that can allow blind people to see is definitely a step towards that biological-technological synthesis. I would like to maybe do research in the ability to connect technology with human brain and nervous system function and how that can augment human ability. After that long winded rant. I think that all of these articles show that sensation and perception can be learned from reading news articles, but you have to be in the mindset to realize that is what you are learning about. The articles take a very applied viewpoint of sensation and perception, so they describe sensation and perception through examples of them. I think that these posts are starting to change my opinion of what sensation and perception is a little bit. What it changes for me is that I didn't realize how much stuff falls under the category of the study of sensation and perception. I think this is very cool and I am looking forward to finding more information about attention as well as the augmentation of the human body with technology.
There's lots of great research about perception and attention out there going on. The ADHD stuff is very interesting, because attention is probably the most important and most prevalent cognitive process that we have.
After reading the posts from formers students, I really enjoyed articles that dealt with technology that was helping people regain some sort of sensation from damaged parts of the body. I read one article that was very interesting to me that dealt with a man receiving a whole new face. A team of 30 medical professionals worked on replacing this man’s face with a donors face. This man now has 90% feeling back on the left side of his face and is able to breathe and eat better. Another article that stuck interest in me was phantom limb syndrome. It’s crazy that our mind can make us feel that an arm that may have been amputated is still there.
I think we will learn all the information we need to know about sensation and perception from notes and reading the book. The nice thing about reading these articles is we can take what we have read and learned in the classroom and apply it to these articles. We will be able to better understand and express how things in the world are applied and have to deal with sensation and perception. Reading these articles will help us master our knowledge and expand it to new levels than just reading a text book and taking notes could.
These posts really haven’t changed my perception of what this class is about. I have a general idea what we will be taking about and I’m sure once we dive into the material I’ll have more input on these articles because I will know the terminology and information needed to have more of an opinion.
I think I’m most interested in learning about how are mind perceives things around us through our senses. I want to know how we are able to see things and how our mind is capable of producing images in our head. There’s a lot I want to take away from this class so I’m excited.
I think the cool thing is that in addition to learning from the book and notes from class, you get the experience of being able to seek out information on the internet about the topics in the course. Also, you get to learn from the other student's posts on the topics as well. The best thing is that if the course is a success for you, the concepts will become so ingrained that you will start to apply the concepts in your everyday life and notice things you hadn't before.
I like a lot of the post from these blogs because the dealt with everyday things. The ones that were the best organized were the ones that I liked the most. I felt like there were a lot of interesting topics discussed.
I think that reading the news proves to be a great way to learn about sensation and perception. These things are a part of our everyday lives so its only natural that they can be observed in the news. '
Although I still do not beleive that reading these post changed my thought about what sensation and perception is, it has caused me to think more about different instances of sensation and perception.
The one topic that I found really interesting was the phantom limb and pvs. I found the talks about pvs to be interesting because I can definitely relate. I have a habit of leaving my phone at home, and even when I do not have my phone I always feel as if my phone is vibrating.
The phantom limb and phantom vibration are interesting topics indeed. The cool thing about the course is that all S&P topics relate to everyday life. Every experience is based on the detection of elements from the external world which our brain uses to form an internal perception of that stimuli.
The post I found interesting was the post from Kluesnek. Kleusnek's post was about complete facial transplants, which struck me because I did not know you could transplant an entire face. I just found it interesting because it was something I didn't know was possible, and I never heard about it before. I heard of a few different things about facial transplant but I never heard of somebody getting a complete transplant that involved the muscle, skin, nose, lips, and anything you can think of transplanted from a donor to a somebody else. It just seems strange and unheard of so naturally I found it interesting.
I think we can adequately learn about sensation and perception from the news. The reason I think we could adequately learn sensation and perception from the news is because like many things psychology plays a huge role in the news, and sensation and perception is one of the big players in the news. Sensation and perception plays probably the biggest roles in our everyday life so it should be easy to connect sensation and perception to the news.
Reading the posts still hasn't changed my idea of what sensation and perception is, because I already had a good idea of what sensation and perception were from previous psychology classes, but I'm sure there will be something that changes my idea of what sensation and perception is.
As of right now there aren't any specific topics I'm interested in learning, but there probably will be later on when I do develop a better understanding of sensation and perception. Hope it will be a fun and interesting semester.
A whole new meaning to the phrase "face-lift". I wonder if you would recognize yourself in the mirror initially after such a procedure? Eventually you would adapt to the new configuration, but would you still feel like you?
I like the articles in week 12 better then the articles in week 9. People used more terms and seemed to know exactly how they wanted to write. The article in week 12 that I found interesting was the article on phantom limbs.
This is something that I would like to learn more about. I remember once when I had surgery on my wrist I was only put partly under and they only numbed my arm up to my shoulder. I was awake and talking to the surgeon about when I should lay my arm down because I could still feel it upright and bent at the elbow. He told me that my wrist was already open and that my arm was laying down already I found this mind boggling at the time and I still think about it when I see people with amputations and things, wondering if that is what they feel at times?
In the past I hadn’t thought about the sensations that are all around us. I think that this will be a interesting way to learn about all the different things in the news and around us, it will give us a different way to think about things. I can’t wait to get to know all the things there are to learn in this class I think that it will be interesting!!
See the links on other replies to the above posts for more on phantom limbs.
After reading through these posts, the one that stood out to me was the post concerning binocular instability. This article described binocular instability as a disorder that causes the eyes to wander; which includes sufferers have difficulty focusing on things and often experience headaches and frustration as a result. Another aspect of this post discussed that this disorder can also affect children and their literary success. Children affected with binocular instability have difficulties reading because they may struggle to focus on the words on the page which can ultimately lead to lower literacy scores. It also talked about this being a rather unknown disorder and that probably more people are affected with this than are reported. This stuck out to me as important because having this disorder drastically effects the lives of those suffering from it, which makes it all the more important to spread the word. In saying this, I believe that diseases like this are crucial to being included in the news to get the attention they deserve. Perhaps those who suffer from this do not realize that this disorder even exists, which is why broadcasting this information in the news is imperative.
I do not think that we can adequately learn about sensation and perception from the news alone. Having said this, I do believe that reading about something in the news is a good starting point for many of us. I say this because the news isn’t always 100% accurate and therefore it should not be the fundamental source of all information. The news gives blips about studies that we can go on and research more for ourselves. These posts have not affected my opinion of sensation and perception; however I do enjoy reading about these topics in a news-type setting. I am excited to learn more about binocular instability and other visual disorders.
See the above reply to the post about visual discomfort. If you find the instability stuff interesting you might like the visual discomfort stuff as well.
I picked two from the Week #12; Jbower2523 wrote about how a device can now be directly connected to the optic nerve to help people with severe blindness see, and swanson who talked about empathy in chimps. I liked jbower2523’s article because they really gave a lot of information about how the eye worked, the condition that caused blindness in this case, and how the implant device worked. They were able to fit a lot of information into a paragraph and yet wrote it so that it was understandable without the reader having to go look up meaning to words. I also liked swanson’s because it was something similar to a report I heard on the John Tesh Radio Show.
I think that if you listen to or watch the right shows that you can learn a lot about sensation/perception. It may not always be as accurate as reading the actual report or anything but it could inform you enough or even just get you curious enough to do a little digging of your own.
Still not yet. Between my science classes and my other psychology classes, nothing has yet to grab my attention. Not that that is a bad thing or anything.
In general I like hearing stories about advances in technology and new findings that have just come out. That’s why I liked Jbower2523 and swanson’s articles.
Technology has definately informed the field and the questions we have been able to ask and answer about the brain.
Right off the bat I loved the first article that talked about a facial transplant. This may seem a little silly but I loved the movie Face Off and ever since watching that movie I’ve always wondered if that would ever be possible! From the looks of this article, it seems as if it is! It may not be as glorious as John Travolta made it look, but it sure is marvelous how far our medical field has come. I liked this post also because it involved improving a life of another and involved a lot of science. I think we can learn something from the news in regards to sensation and perception. Do I think we can learn about it adequately? No, unless I am reading all of the wrong articles. Only record setting or bizarre news is printed that deals with sensation and perception but if the news adequately explain sensation and perception then I think I would have had a better understanding of it prior to this class. Reading these posts has changed my idea of what sensation/perception is. I think I will continue to learn about sensation and perception every day. This time these articles have taught me that there is truly a lot of science that can be used to explain how we sense certain things and also perceive them. In the news article it said that unfortunately the man wasn't able to recover his eye sight so I would be interested to learn how our strength of a certain sense improves if we lack in another area. I look forward to learning more in depth with our five senses.
Definately a movie we all probably used to watch when it re-ran on tv! Faces (and probably voices) are the main perceptual units we have to identify not only another human, but an identity, a "self", and there's alot of information that can be retrieved once we recognize a face.
I liked all the posts that dealt with hearing, especially the post that talked about the “soundbite” which helped allow people to greater auditory hearing through the mouth. A dental hearing aid was interesting to me because this is something very new to me; I have minimal knowledge on the topic, but at the same time, great interest in how something like this can work! Another post I really liked was the about the chimps yawning. This post was right before the dental hearing aid post on the week 12 link. I believe there is a lot we can learn from reading the news about sensation and perception. The news is a great source of information that millions of people are interested in. Being able to read articles and view television or internet videos helps to better gage the information of various topics that we will discuss in this class. The previous year’s students were able to write blog responses on pieces of information learned from the news. Even if it is something new or minimal that deals with sensation or perception concepts, we are able to pick apart important pieces of information and can further research the importance of these concepts on our own. The blogs have changed my idea of sensation and perception because of how unusual and greatly advanced technology has come to increase our senses and how we perceive things. I learned so many different things about tools that help people develop better visual and auditory skills. The complexity that is involved in sensation and perception gives me a very different outlook on how things are around the world. A lot of times I never stop to think about what it is I’m hearing, or what I take the time to look at and why. These topics are very intriguing because it allows me to evaluate things in a whole different way. I had mentioned above the chimps yawning blog and feel I would like to learn more information about that. Yawns have always been something curious to me. I understand yawning because of being tired, but why/how they can be contagious I would like to learn more about.
The auditory aids are pretty interesting. Being deaf in one ear, I've always wondered what it would be like to have a cochlear implant or hearing aid device. Would it completely change my auditory experience of the world? I feel like it would be way too much stimulation and I wouldn't be able to sleep because I would hear things that I usually do not. Who knows. The point is that you can relate these topics to your own life quite easily after you start to learn about them and integrate them into your internal model of the external world.
After reading the previous posts I really liked reading about the facial transplant news article. I thought it was very interesting that even the person with a burnt face could regain some of his sensation in the face after this procedure. I was concerned that a person that has had a tragic incident would not be able to regain sensation in their face but this news article proved me wrong. The forehead, eyes, skin and other features would be able to regain 90% of sensation in the face. This procedure is very unique and is incredible that science and the medical field are able to give this person back sensation in their face which is important. People do not realize how important their sensation and perception is to them until they lose it completely. I can learn adequately about sensation and perception after reading this news article because it is possible to regain sensation after losing it. After reading this post it has changed my idea of sensation and perception because it shows that technology and the medical field is always growing to perfect loss of senses. I really enjoyed reading this and I would like to learn more medical discoveries that help those with sensation difficulties.