This is where you can relate some things you were thinking about during spring break that relates to what we are learning in class. This is an extra credit assignment so you don't have to think during spring break, but if you do : -)
Also I was going to put up a picture of spring break, but when I googled spring break for images I realized that I it might not be a good idea to post any of the ones that came up...wow!
Also I was going to put up a picture of spring break, but when I googled spring break for images I realized that I it might not be a good idea to post any of the ones that came up...wow!
Over spring break I watched a new show on Discovery Channel called "Frozen Planet." This show explores life and land on the ends of the earth, such as in the Arctic. One thing that really caught my eye on this show was a creature that I have never seen. I have been searching for what it is called but have not been able to find it. The fantastic part of this jelly fish like creature was that as it would swim little lights on the edge of its body would light up in what I believe was very close to the color spectrum. I started to wonder what advantage this creature has because of its ablility to light up and what the colors that flash means to the animal. Are they chemical signals creating hunger, a specific survival behavior, etc. This was something like I had never seen before and I was excited to be able to link it to class.
Another topic I was thinking about over break was while I was working at a day care with school aged children. I had purchased a book at the book fair called "Eye Bogglers," for the children to read during the week. Really they did not read it, it was full of pictures that were similar to what we have been seeing in our book and in class. I loved this because when the kidos would ask about how a specific picture works I was able to give them some real factual information from class about the picture and why they were seeing specific things. I covered topics such as occlusion, rods, cones, facial detection, and others. Maybe they actually learned something over spring break!
Interesting. Glad you found some relevance to the course in this piece about nature.
My girlfriend's family lives in New Orleans, so we traveled there over break. What made me think about sensation and perception over break was the drive. It's a 17 hour long trip there, and another 17 hours back. It's very grueling, and I drove all of it. It was very interesting to experience the perception of it all. Even though you have basically the same stimuli throughout the whole trip, you must be very attentive to all of them the entire way. Another strange experience I witnessed was throughout the long drive, you get a sense of your senses projected through the car. For example, after a while, your perception becomes that of the car, instead of your body. You adapt to the specific tightness of the steering wheel and brakes, and they become an extension of your movement. After such a long period of dominance of perception through the extension, it becomes almost natural to your body. It seems very strange now as I'm writing it, who knows, maybe I was just loopy from such a long drive, but it was a very interesting experience.
It is really interesting to me that people can drive for that long and not just wreck the car after a while. You go on non-conscious auto-pilot after a while. I've driven by myself from Iowa to Nevada (26 hours) before. Naturally, I made a few stops at some of the breweries along the way. Cheers to road trips.
Over spring break me and my best friend traveled to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to spend the week with my twin brother. We turned 21!!! WOO HOO!! That's besides the point. Any who... to get to South Carolina we flew but flew out of the Chicago airport, therefore we drove from Des Moines to Chicago starting at 2am on Saturday the 10th. It is very dark on the interstate at this time and both me and my best friend tweak out about deer late at night since last summer I hit one of those little turds in the middle of the night on the interstate in her car! We so happened to be driving her car again.. in the middle of the night.. on the interstate. My friend was driving at this point and we both were keeping our eyes pealed for the little hairy craps (deer; sorry, i'm bitter). Keep in mind we were both 3 cups of coffee in with about 4 hours of sleep in us. We were driving along, rockin' out to some country music when all of a sudden my friend SLAMS on the breaks. We went from going 80 to 0 in her pontiac G6 in a matter of seconds. It was sooo scary. It turns out what she had though was a deer was a figure of her imagination. She was completely being over attentive, mixed with being over tired and caffeine driven. As soon as we got over the initial shock of the nothingness that just happened I thought of this class and thanked her for giving me good material to talk about for an extra credit blog! I hope you enjoyed this story.
Glad you didn't smoke another dear on the highway! Iowa is crazy with deer. IT is interesting that once you get amped out and over-stimulated, you can mess up just as if you don't attend to something. Just the right amount is always tricky to come by. Hope the beach and the rest of the time out of Iowa was fun.
Over spring break I traveled to Des Moines for a job interview. On the car ride back the the sun started to set and you are not able to see as well. Now I am not the best driver and tend to let my mind wander off easily. However this was the one time when wandering off while driving paid off. While driving at night I thought to myself that I was now using my rods to see more than my cones because rods are specialized for night vision. I also thought about how the human eye has many more rods than cones, but they are not in the fovea of the eye. Even though it was spring break, I just couldn't get sensation and perception class out of my head.
I always think about rods and bright light when driving at night. It is difficult and I like getting my driving out of the way in the daytime. Also, there is nothing to look at at night and you have to be more careful, because your scotopic vision isn't as accurate as photopic.
After all the craziness had died down from St. Patrick's Day, I was walking around downtown Chicago with my best friend's younger brother and he steered the topic of conversation to a documentary about transhumanism and the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Though I have not seen the film or read any of his books, I am familiar enough with the name to at least have a basic idea of his theories. In light of this discussion, I began to think about how much we romanticize human perception. There's nothing wrong with this, of course - it's a bit unnatural to talk about higher-level interpretations of senses in terms of their most fundamental electrochemical reactions. However, looking at things from the point of view of a transhumanist, would there really much of a difference using artificial organ if it accomplishes the same type of tasks on a molecular level? at what point do we really start to differentiate between "human" and "machine" in this way? It is also pretty funny to make this sort of distinction since so many people are already uber-reliant on portable electronic devices in order to function on a daily basis. will these lines continue to blur until these sorts of things actually become part of us? and if so, will we then really be any less human than we were before the merger, when we were still literally separate from but figuratively attached to these devices?
Good point. I think you'd like Natural Born Cyborgs by Andy Clarke. Pretty good book. I think the thing that differentiates is that which we don't have a very solid grasp on. That phenomenological feeling associated with consciousness. You think you're conscious, I think I'm conscious, but how do I know you're not a machine just typing these posts week to week? The problem of other minds is interesting and is relevant to the phenomenological attributes of conscious perception.
For Spring Break, I went to Cancun, Mexico with my family. It was mine and my brothers first time out of the United States. It was an awesome trip & I wish that I was stil there!! Anyways, when we got to Mexico I was amazed by how green and how blue everything was. In the ocean, it was actually a pretty color of blue and not the brown river/lake water that I'm use to seeing. It made me think about our class by how I was perceiving the water color. I also noticed that their stop lights are very different from ours and their street signs are as well. Before this class, I would have not paid attention to these "little" details, but instead focused more on my surroundings and the tourist areas. But since I've taken this class, I paid attention to the "small" things and realized how different similiar objects can be. Personally, I hate airplanes and am terrified of them. The 3 hour flight there wasn't that bad because there were t.v.'s on our flight so I was able to calm down and focus on that. On the way back, we still had t.v.'s but we also went through a thunderstorm. I instantly realized that my body had completely tensed up...I was gripping the handles, clenching my teeth and it felt like my throat was closing. When I realized that I was doing all of this, I took a couple deep breaths and closed my eyes to calm me down. Thankfully, the plane made it through the thunderstorm with no problem and we landed safely.
Mike Webster (prof at UNR) would say you had been adapted to the color of the environment in Iowa at winter time (gray, brown, possibly some snow). Then when you go somewhere that is actually nice and has a different spread of natural colors, the colors you are not adapted to (the Mexico ones), look extra-vivide and splendid because your visual system hasn't adapted to it yet in a manner typically only achieved after prolonged exposure to an environment (like an Iowa winter, which from my past experience was just terrible and I don't miss winter in Iowa at all...summer, now that is a different story).
I had the privilege to be able to go to Africa for a week over spring break. Needless to say it took me a long time to get there and it seemed like and even longer time to get back. While I was there I could not help the fact that I had a lot of thoughts about perception and they came from a lot of different experiences that I had.
The last day that I was in Africa we were able to go on a safari. As I looked at these animals I thought a lot about the fact that most of them are hunted by some other animal. So as I saw zebras and wildebeest I knew that the ones that were still alive, and also bigger were the ones that could perceive the approach of a predator the best. That was something really cool to think about. Our tour guide also share an interesting fact with us and that was that wildebeest have very poor vision. He said that because of their poor vision they must depend on zebra to know when to migrate. I felt that that fit right in to our talk on vision. The last thing that I thought about was the vision of the pilots who were flying all of the planes I was on. Since we learned that pilot's depend on a lot of cues while landing I wondered if pilots who flew for shorter distances of time were able to pick up better on those cues of if there was any difference at all.
Cool trip. Sounds like you're hooked on S & P! It happens, and you'll never view the world with the same kind of "eyes" as you did before you took this class. It's awesome, and it makes you feel like you have priviledged access to something we all have and all use all the time, but are too busy being wrapped up in the cultural and environmental contingencies and irksome obligations to really appreciate any of it.
After reading the first 7 chapters in the book, I went camping last weekend with some friends and I started to think of perception when I was watching the fire. I could understand my selective attention, because there was smoke but I was so intrigued about the wood burning and the colors of the fire. I then realized I was thinking of other people’s actions like my friends moving sticks in the fire, which made it bigger and then I wanted to take action and move sticks to watch it burn too. We also played a game called dizzy bat, which consisted of me spinning around and trying to hit the ball when I was done spinning. My perception was fuzzy and my balance was off which was horrible! I didn’t like not being how to focus on the object to hit or perceive what was coming toward me. Perception happens wherever I am, but now I am slowly appreciating my balance, attention span, and scenes around me.