Topics in the News?
What I would like you to do is to start applying what we are learning in class to real world matters. Some might ask, "What good is learning psychology if we can't apply it to real world matters?" So that is what we are going to do with this topical blog assignment.
What I would like you to do is to either go to NPR (http://www.npr.org/ ), the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/ ) or any news site listed at the bottom of this page (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ listed in their news sources) and read, watch, or listen to something that is interesting to you and relates to what we have been learning in the class.
Please respond the blog by BRIEFLY telling us in essay format:
What your topic is and what the piece you chose was. Why you picked it (what made it interesting for you) and what did you expect to see. What did you find most interesting about the piece
Next discuss IN DETAIL how it relates to the class using terms, terminology, and concepts that we have learned so far in class. Include definitions.
Please make sure you use the terms, terminology and concepts you have learned so far in the class. It should be apparent from reading your post that you are a college student well underway in a course in psychology.
Include the URL in your post.
Make a list of key terms and concepts you used in your post.
Let me know if you have any questions.
--Dr. M
After reading chapter 11, I wanted to find an article that focused on music and speech. I found an article entitled “Music Therapy Intervention in Medical Settings. In this article, they are trying to explain the impacts of how music can reduce pain levels in patients and help restore speech. They explain that music has benefits such as reduction of anxiety, agitation, stress, blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension, improved respiration, decreased length in hospital stay, improved mood, management of pain, and positive participation in treatment. It also provides opportunities to enhance socialization, communication/language skills, self-expression, motor skills, attention, and memory.
The article then transitions to examples of music therapy in a hospital. The first patient was a 45 year old women who recently had a stroke and suffered damage to her brain in the inferior frontal region (Broca’s area). The music therapist used songs to try and help this women form sentences. In four days she was singing simple sentences and saying her name. The speech therapy was helping her immensely. Two other patients suffered injuries that created intense pain. When the music therapist sang songs to them, they reported noticing pain less and actually enjoying themselves. The music was changing their mood which in turn was helping them cope better with the pain.
I picked this article because I thought it related to the chapter’s focus on speech and music. I think it’s amazing that different pitches that we create with our voices through articulation can bring out such amazing sounds. These sounds that are so good that they can even help reduce pain even. Even simple melodies that we create can help some with their speech just like in the article. By finding the correct tempo to match up the words of a sentence, the speech therapist was able to help this lady form simple sounds into words. I find that incredible that this is possible. While reading this article, I couldn’t help but think if there were reasons that this music therapy was helping these individuals. Could it be that we are perceiving the music and focusing on hearing it which caused us and our brain to draw more attention to that instead of the pain they were suffering? I honestly think it’s possible for us to feel and perceive things that are more important to us and have them over rule the rest. So if we perceive the music as joyful, then we block out the pain for a bit. I think this article is really important to sensation and perception because it shows that we are able to overcome things without the help of medicine and other things like that.
Terms- tempo, articulation, melody, pitch.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronna-kaplan-ma/music-therapy_b_1333406.html
Love some huffington post. Totally biased toward the left end of the continuum, but that's where I'm at! Music therapy is awesome and works for a lot of people. Cool topic.
I chose a recent article published in Science Daily, which discussed a Northwestern University study that found biological evidence showing that lifelong musical experience has an impact on the aging process. I chose this article because in chapter 11 of the textbook we learned about how our brain perceives sounds through our auditory processing system, and it spent a great deal of space discussing music in particular. Due to the headline of the article, I expected the study to find that musical training can improve one’s ability to distinguish different speech sounds later in life, and help individuals avoid neural timing delays.
I found that by measuring the automatic brain responses of younger and older musicians and non-musicians to speech sounds, researchers in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory discovered that older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage to be the most interesting piece from the article.
"The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians," said Northwestern neuroscientist Nina Kraus. "This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions."
The new Northwestern data, along with recent animal data from researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, strongly suggest that intensive training even late in life could improve speech processing in older adults and, as a result, improve their ability to communicate in complex, noisy acoustic environments. Previous studies from Kraus' Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory suggest that musical training also offset losses in memory and difficulties hearing speech in noise, which are two common complaints of older adults. The lab has been extensively studying the effects of musical experience on brain plasticity across the life span in normal and clinical populations, and in educational settings. However, Kraus warns that the current study's findings were not pervasive and do not demonstrate that musician's have a neural timing advantage in every neural response to sound. "Instead, this study showed that musical experience selectively affected the timing of sound elements that are important in distinguishing one consonant from another."
As we learned in chapter 11, experience is important for auditory perception, especially perception of speech. In contrast to vision, experience with speech begins very early in development, with infants gaining significant experience even before they are born. We also learned that perceiving musical sounds and speech sounds are related, therefore, greater experience with musical training can improve our ability to distinguish and perceive speech sounds throughout our lives. Musical pitch is one of the characteristics of musical notes, which are the sounds that make up melodies. Pitch is the psychological aspect of sound related mainly to the fundamental frequency. In order to understand musical pitch, we need to understand octave. An octave is the interval between two sound frequencies having a ratio of 2:1. When one of two periodic sounds is double the frequency of the other, those two sounds are one octave apart. Musical pitch is typically described as having two dimensions, the first being tone height-related to frequency, and tone chroma-related to the octave. Tone height is a sound quality whereby a sound is heard to be of higher or lower pitch. Tone height is monotonically related to frequency. Tone chroma is a sound quality shared by tones that have the same octave interval. These basic components of understanding the properties of musical sounds are related to understanding the basic components of perceiving speech sounds, as well.
Musicians are able to discern between varying notes and sounds due to their trained hearing and experience with sound perception. The analysis of speech spectrograms has found that phonetic segments overlap, a phoneme's sound can change depending on what phonemes precede and follow it-this is referred to as coarticulation, phonemes do not have a single, constant pronunciation, and a particular word is not pronounced the same way by specific individuals. These findings show the complexity of perceiving and correctly understanding what other individuals are trying to communicate to us. In order for humans to effectively communicate with each other, we need a strong ability to accurately perceive and distinguish between varying sounds, pitches, tones, consonants and vowels in our environment. Musical training can improve and strengthen our ability to distinguish the subtle and numerous differences between all these sounds, thus allowing us to more effectively communicate with other individuals. Not being able to communicate with others at an elderly age is a common complaint of senior citizens. Perhaps pursuing musical training can provide a solution to individuals desiring to avoid this communication disadvantage and neural timing delays.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120130172402.htm
http://www.unb.ca/courses/dvoyer/3745/pdf/speech.pdf
Terms: speech sounds, neural timing, speech processing, acoustic, neural response, consonant, auditory perception, pitch, fundamental frequency, notes, spectrograms, phonetic segments, phonemes, coarticulation, pronunciation, vowels
Alright, solid sources, good research you chose to read. I like it!
I chose to do my topical on categorical perception. The piece I chose was about categorical perception in crickets. I picked the piece because it put an interesting twist on the idea of categorical perception. I thought it was interesting how Wyttenbach compared the sounds of the cricket to the sound spectrum of bats. This article compares to class because it talks about how categorical perception helps crickets avoid being bat bait by being able to distinguish between the ultrasound that the bats give off and the sound other crickets make. To measure the sounds, the Cornell biologist set up a cricket flight chamber, wired for sound, and computerized data-gathering and a built-in breeze from a fan, to make the cricket think that it is flying while tethered in mid-air. Wyttenbach explains, “We weren’t looking for a so-called continuous perception,” he continued to explain that continuous perception allows human color vision to discriminate hundreds of variations between “blue” and “green”. He continues to explain, “"A more useful ability in some situations is our ability to tell the difference between sounds like 'ba' and 'pa,'…Even though there is a continuum of variation between 'ba' and 'pa' based on voice onset time or VOT, which instruments can detect, our ears don't discriminate. We hear either 'ba' or 'pa' and that's how we label it. That is categorical perception, and it looked like crickets might categorically perceive sounds as either 'other crickets' or 'bats.' ". Concluding from the experiment, Wyttenbach says that the experiment explains that all animals have to solve many of the same problems and regardless of how many brain cells we have, we find interesting solutions.
TERMS: categorical perception
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Sept96/cricket2.hrs.html
I didn't know there was that much to know about cricket frequencies!!! Interesting
The NPR’s cast entitled “The Ballad of the tearful: Why some songs make you cry,” explored Adel’s song “Someone like you” and others like it that trigger an emotional response in the listener. I picked it because it complimented the class discussion this week very nicely. We were talking about why some people relate strongly to the lyrics of music and others relate more strongly to the sound of the music. This song is very powerful not only because of the lyrics but also because it makes great use of melody, chords, and timbre in the music. Melody is the arrangement of notes or chords in succession. Listening to this song, the melody is very powerful. The chords she uses in the song and the combinations of different instruments make this song very beautiful. Because there are many instruments there is great timbre in the music. This is when an instrument is played on the same pitch and loudness but can still be heard as different instruments.
John Sloboda, a professor of music psychology at London’s Gridhall School of music and drama, gave his theories of why people have such emotional responses to music. Slobodda attributed this emotional response to what is called appoggiaturas. This is easiest to understand if you think about the lyrics of Adel’s song and pitches she uses. When she says the word “you” in the chorus her voice dips. This is appoggiaturas. Our brain expects that she will keep the word “you” at the same pitch. When Adel changes the pitch mid-you an emotional response is triggered.
Terms: melody, chords, timbre, pitch,
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/13/146818461/the-ballad-of-the-tearful-why-some-songs-make-you-cry
Interesting! I didn't know Adel was so scientific with her emotional evocation!!!
After reading Chapter 11, and looking at this class over all, I was just tootling around The Huffington Post news website and came across a Disney article; “Disney World Remembers: Even More Lost Rides and Attractions”. It spoke of some old attractions that were great innovations of their r time are now currently left behind by new ones. One of these is Soarin, a ride that is absolutely fascinating and great way to relate to our class of sensation and perception. Simply put this is a rollercoaster that mimics the sensation of hang gliding and all the perceptions that go with it. It combines a good number of concepts covered in class and ones that we experience every day.
One perception that Soarin lets you experience is a topic we have yet to cover. The perception of smell, in this ride, while you’re going through this sensation of gliding, as the scene changes, you can smell the scents of the places. A person can smell the salt on the air from the oceans, and when flying through the orange grove you can smell the citrus in the air, the pine while you glide through the mountains. This is a topic that’ll be coming next week and ties into this week’s topical blog.
Soran is a ride that makes you experience everything in real time and in true experience of the event of hang gliding. The screen that you face is a full screen that curves over your head and under your feet, so you fully experience the realism of the ride. The screen is a reflection of light that is the image that plays off the retina in your eye. The retina being the light-sensitive membrane in the back of the eye that contains rods and cones, which receive an image from the lens and send it on to the brain from the optic nerve. The rods are photoreceptors specialized in night vision, while cones are the photoreceptors specialized for day light vision, visual acuity and color. While watching the screen, it acts much like a movie, we have the use of optic flow in such a situation; the changing of angular positions of points in a perspective image that we experience as we move through our world. With this ride motion perception is activated. This optic flow is even more put into place as the seats you sit on move and flow with the perception of motion. You actually feel like turning in your seat to follow along with the perception that you are driving the hang glider.
Through the whole ride, there are not just the sounds of nature that you hear, but there is also music. All these sounds coming from the ride travel down a person’s ear canal and vibrating the eardrum in response to sound waves. All these sound waves molded into a perception of music using pitch, timbre, frequency, tone height and tone chroma and all these put into complex chords. Chords being the combination of three or more musical notes with different pitches play at the same time. The music designed for the ride, climb as the glider climbs and call and soothing with the motion of wind and area you go through.
This whole ride is a great example of perception that we experience in everyday, put into one ride that makes an experience seem so real when perceptual it isn’t.
Terms: tone height, tone chroma, pitch, chords, frequency timbre, sound waves, retina, rods, cones, optic flow, eardrum
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/13/disney-world-lost-rides-and-attractions_n_1204873.html
Integrating a lot of stuff from the semester. That is good! Interesting topic.
A perceptual topic that is recently in the news is the pseudo-unveiling of the “google glass”. This is google’s recent project of creating augmented reality eyeglasses. Basically, it would act as a passive display across your visual array. By using this, you could do a vast amount of things; much like some programs on recent smart phones. You could get directions, messages from your friends, and even take and send pictures; all in a sleek pair of eyeglasses. The video in the link gives a much better demonstration than I could ever hope to describe. The project glass is in a very early developmental stage, and they are still beta testing the program to kink out all of the bugs. However, the recent ad campaigns (and the flurry of desire from almost everyone) give evidence that augmented reality glasses are in our near future. What makes project glass so interesting for me is the endless relationships it will have in human perceptual experience.
The most obvious difference it will make on our perception is through the visual system. The question that I had while reading about these glasses was how they will be able to project a picture that we can clearly see through our retina. Our retina has accuracy limitations when objects are extremely close to the eye. This is because it takes up so much space in our visual field, and overlaps through many retinal cells; thus making it extremely blurry. How will google be able to account for this? If the object is extremely tiny, will we be able to see it clearly close to our face? I have personal experience is this matter because I was prescription glasses. If I have a smudge on my glasses, or a tiny speck of dirt caught on the lens, I’m not able to see it in detail; they just blur my vision of more distant objects.
Also, even if they somehow make the picture clear, would our attention be able to function properly? Sure we might be able to eventually “drown out” the stimuli after time, but what happens when you’re in the middle of a conversation and a big white message pops in front of your face? Would you be able to ignore that? The only way that this would work properly is if you kept the projected image very constant, and don’t have any pop-up notifications until they are requested.
The google glass is very neat and I would eventually like to try it out. I obviously wouldn’t buy the first model on the market due to a steep price inflation and google’s lack of experience with actual customers using the product. Augmented reality is no longer a part of science fiction, it is an inevitable part of our new future.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/04/project-glass-google_n_1403174.html#s842544
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9c6W4CCU9M4
Terms: Augmented reality, visual array/ visual field, retinal cells, attention
Trippy. Good call on not buying the first model!!! Rip off at first until they get the technology better!
I chose to read an article from NPR called The is only "One Direction" for this boy band: Up. This article talks about the new boy band one direction. The group One Direction is a group of teenage boys that were all single artists on the British show the X Factor. A guest judge made a comment that the boys should from a group and they did. Now they are edging in on other popular teen signers like Justin Beber. I choose to read this article because they are a very popular up and coming group. I hear their music on the radio and wanted to know more about them.
One direction is a popular boy band that features five teenage boys. The boy band image is something that is very important to them. They have to dress, act, and sing in ways that we expect teenage boys to act. Otherwise the way we may not perceive them as a boy band and their music will fall deaf on our ears. The boys often sing in harmony with different group members being at different pitches, but through the use of timbre, we are able to tell which of the band members corresponds to which singer. In the in the background you can hear guitar players playing simple chords. The boys produce there beautiful sounds through their vocal tracts. You can notice that they have higher pitch voices because some of them have yet to go through puberty. Testosterone from puberty causes the vocal chords to be heavier and thus they do not vibrate at such a high freguency. You will also notice that they are very articulate. Their vocals are easy to understand and to sing along to. the auditory system is very fast in comparision to the visual system. The sounds of their voices initially travel from our pinna, through our tympanic membrane and ossicles, to our choclea. Here the choclea helps in hearing sounds with a system of water filled sacks. Then it travels through the auditory nerve and to the brain.
Along with their singing voices, the way we perceive a boy band has a lot of do with the way they dress. We expect them to dress a certain way and if they do not follow this, we have uncertainty. We are able to see them because we are trichromats.
Terms: harmony, pitch, timbre, vocal tract, frequency, articulation, pinna, tympanic membrane, ossicles, choclea, auditory nerve, trichromats,
Crazy. You forgot to add the link!
Unfortunately when I began my news article search I thought I had found this really awesome white noise article about bats but due to expectations I realized as soon as the reporter started speaking that the news cast was “white nose syndrome,” not white noise so I began a different search.
For this week I was interested in continuing to learn about coarticulation therefore I was lucky to find a news a broadcast on NPR that was part of the show all things considered. The broadcast was entitled America's First Celebrity Robot Is Staging A Comeback, which highlighted the life of one of Americas first robots. In class we had discussed coarticulation and how this relates to voice recognition software which is often used by researchers in the field of psychology. I did not know what to expect from this article besides that it was about a robot. What I found most interesting about this piece was the sheer number of people who became interested in keeping the robot in the public eye and cared enough to do something about it. The robot was created by a company that made home appliances, such as ovens and washing machines, called Westinghouse. This robot was displayed at the world’s fair in New York City and is 75 years old.
I realized that this broadcast would relate to class when the caption below it said that it was an earlier form of WATSON. WATSON was created by the computer company IBM in an attempt to create a database searching machine that could beat a human at the popular game show jeopardy. The machine had to contain voice recognition software just as Elektro the robot had to. WATSON and Elektro could both talk. Elecktro was also able to blow up balloons and smoke cigarettes.
Elektro being able to talk was obviously able to articulate rather than have an understanding of coarticulation. Robots speak slowly so that humans can understand them without any problems therefore are very good at articulation. Articulation basically just means producing speech but the main difference between a human and a robots articulation would be that the robot is lacking the vocal tract which humans generally need to communicate speech vocally. Thinking about this made me wonder what a spectrogram of a robots speech might look like. Would it be similar to that of a human or more even, with fewer changes in the frequency and amplitude? Thinking about this topic also further demonstrates my amazement of all of the stuff humans need in order to make our bodies and senses work correctly and how simple a robot seems when it comes to comparing the two.
Website: http://www.npr.org/sections/arts/
Terms: expectations, coarticulation, voice recognition software, WATSON, articulate, vocal tract, spectrogram, frequency, and amplitude.
What was the function of the robot smoking cigarettes? Could the robot feel a buzz? Haha. Interesting.
While I was searching through recent news I found an article from the Huffington Post that caught my attention called, Color Me Creative: Study Says Green Sparks Inventiveness. (My personal email account uses news from the Huffington Post, and this article was one that came through my news feed.)The reason I found this to be interesting was because green is my favorite color, and I wanted to know why they were saying this. Also this topic deals directly with our color perception and our cultural relativism which I enjoyed learning about. I really didn’t think that just by looking at the color green you could be more inventive or creative, so I didn’t think the results would be the great. After reading I was surprised that green can and does have an effect on peoples moods or creativeness. After being in this class I knew that certain colors can have an effect on us, like red being a color of “emergency,” and this is mainly because through evolution and our culture we have come to perceive red that way.
This article related to the material we discussed in chapter five about color perception. The article went over a bit different information than we learned in the chapter, but there was still a relation to the material. The article really wanted to find if colors affected the moods people were in. The researchers completed a study that found when a green light was flashed before a two minute activity the participant were more creative in their answers than if a while light were flashed. They also compared this green light to other lights like, red, and gray. The results were similar to those found with the white light; this is known as the “green effect,” which was also discussed in our text. The green light brings out a more creative side to people. So this would mean our m-cones are peaking. Also this may be because the hue, saturation and brightness of green is not as strong or weak as other colors. The article also addressed the way other colors can affect us, they did mention that red can often times make us feel like we are in danger, because the hue of red is sometimes a bit more harsh, and in our environment it is associated with stop sings, blood, and corrections (cultural relativism).
It is known that color perception is not physical it is psychological, which gives meaning to this article. We are viewing the color with our retina, but perceiving in though our brain. I believe colors do affect our moods and the ways we act. Although the articles results did prove that green does have a positive effect on our moods they found it isn’t a huge impact, and it’s not a reason you should surround yourself by the color green.
After reading the article green is still my favorite color, but it’s not going to make me think I’m more creative than others because I like to see green over other colors. I believe a case could be made for all colors and how they affect our mood, either positive or negative. I think it also just depends on who the person is and what colors the enjoy viewing.
Terms: color perception, m cones, hue, saturation, brightness, cultural relativism, green effect
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/03/green-colors-creative_n_1386190.html
This is the kind of phenomenological aspect of color perception, I guess? One of those things that color vision scientists cringe about! haha. Interesting though!
My first intention was to find something that was more related to the previous chapter or two so I looked into the npr site first when I saw the title Kathleen Edwards Tiny Desk Concert. I thought this was perfect to do my topical writing assignment since it was musically related. It was about a fifteen minute video that included a lady by the name of Kathy Edwards who sang a few of her songs while playing the guitar. She also had a backup singer to help her with vocals and an accompanying guitar player as well. I was interested in this because of the musical aspect, but also because of the title of the name. The most interesting thing I found from the small concert was how she uses music to sooth listeners. All of the songs were warm in sound and had different aspects of music that give a deep understand of what she is trying to say in her messages through the use of lyrics.
Kathy uses the use of music as a form of expression. The idea behind her songs is to incorporate emotions, positive ones that help to relate to people and send a message. Music is comprised of sounds across a range of frequency. While listening to the tiny desk concert I noted the concept of pitch. This was the perceived frequency I experienced while listening to the video. Between Kathy and her accompanying guitarist they incorporated the use of chords, where they played three or more notes simultaneously. With Kathy’s style of music, one that is meant to sooth, she used many different sounds of consonance. Had she used dissonance, there would be a more unpleasant style of performance, one that includes less well-designed ratios. With the various simultaneous notes played that formed a chord, she used a fluent melodic style in her songs. This means that the different chords played were in a repeated succession. The average tempo, the speed of her musical sounds, was moderate to slow. She never incorporated a very great tempo speed, one reason I believe her music was perceived as so much more graceful. The music from the concert also incorporated the use of a rhythmic style, or at least one I perceived to be a rhythmic style. Rhythm is sometimes hard to distinguish, even though rhythm can be heard in all sorts of context, not just music. There may not have been exact frequencies within the two singers and two guitars playing simultaneously, but they were fairly close. As I have come to learn, timbre is the ability to distinguish two different sounds even though the pitch and the loudness of the pitch are similar. Visually it is much easier to rely on the eyes to distinguish where the sounds are coming from, but I feel even without visual access to the video I would have still been able to easily identify the use of multiple sounds at once. This particular mini concert included four songs. This made it easier to distinguish the start and end of each song. The reason for this is seen in terms of attack and decay. The start of sound where amplitude increased and they began to play encompassed the use of attack. When the song gradually came to an end and the amplitude of the sound started to decrease until a stop at the end of the song, I was able to distinctly identify this as decay. The way I chose to listen to Kathy’s concert was through the use of headphones plugged into my laptop. Had I actually been at the concert and positioned to one side of the area the performers were standing, there would have been an interaural time difference. The interaural time difference states that depending on your own placement to where the sound is located it is going to reach one of your ears, either the right or left, first. However, since I was using a neutral stimulus device in the usage of headphones, these sound frequencies were received in both ears at an equal time, or very close to equal. Overall I was glad with the decision to choose a blog related to the sounds of music. I found a lot of interest in this small concert because it was something we most recently covered in class and my knowledge of the different sounds and terms of sensation and perception were fresher in my mind. With that said, I could not help but notice where my attention was during the whole duration of the video. Since there are so many inputs happening at once mechanisms in the nervous system help to retain processes of information to a subset of things. While my brain was focused on the visual images happening right in front of me on the screen, it was still wondering the whole time looking at different objects in distinction. Most notably, my selective attention that was tuned into a half empty bottle of tequila placed on the shelf directly behind the members of the band. My attention was limited to this subset that happened to be a bottle of alcohol. Even though the primary focus was set on the band, this bottle appeared to be a distractor from my attention. It was something other than the target, the band, which shifted where I looked. I feel that this was something very unexpected that I never thought to notice, but ended up beneficial because it allowed me to use even more concepts and a greater understanding in sensation and perception in the real world.
Terms: pitch, chord, melody, tempo, rhythm, timbre, attack, decay, interaural time difference, attention, selective attention, distractor.
URL: http://www.npr.org/event/music/149644692/kathleen-edwards-tiny-desk-concert
Cool. I didn't listen to the music, but hopefully it was good and an interesting experience for you.
My topic was symptoms that one should never avoid when dealing with their eye. Some of the symptoms that were listed were silver or copper colored arteries, a mole on the eye’s inner layer, leaky blood vessels, inflammation and interior blisters. I selected this article because anything that related to my health that I can monitor strikes interest in me. I expected some of the symptoms however I did learn about some new ones such as a mole on the eye’s inner layer. I found an unknown fact that eye doctors can actually can spot signs of patients having high cholesterol before any other health profession can.
This subject relates to our class enormously due to the fact that we’ve learned a lot about the how our eyes are able to perceive images and also the actual physical parts of the eye such as the lens, cornea, aqueous humor, pupil, iris and many more. We also talked about different conditions that may affect our vision such as astigmatism, hyperopia, myopia and emmetropia. Astigamatism is a visual defect that is caused be the unequal curving of the refractive surfaces of the eye. A hyperopia is a common condition in which light entering the eye is focused beyond the retina. Myopia is a common condition in which light entering the eye is focused in front of the retina and distant objects cannot be seen sharply. Emmetropia is a condition in which there is no refractive error because the power of the eye is perfectly matches to the length of the eyeball. Many of these disorders effect our visual system however these symptoms that I have researched about affect our visual system as well just as much. They affect our visual systems by affecting our eye which is essentially a vital part of our visual systems.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/EyeHealthResource/eye-symptoms-ignore/story?id=16006004
Terms: copper colored arteries, lens, cornea, aqueous humor, pupil, iris, astigmatism, hyperopia, myopia, emmetropia, retina, refractive power.
Interesting. Have you ignored these symptoms and then got checked out after having read this article? Would you share this information with people you know?
I chose to write my blog post on the article entitled, “World’s quietest room, anechoic chamber in Minneapolis, Absorbs Sound,” found on the huffington post website. This article is about the quietest room in the world, located in Minneapolis. The room provides visitors with complete silence, but people cannot stand to stay there for longer than 45 minutes. The problem with this absolute silence is that even the slightest sound is amplified. When this happens, people become incredibly aware, even paranoid, about their surrounds; this includes the possibility of hallucinations. The room is so quiet, that a person is able to audibly hear their own heartbeat.
The sound measurement of this room is -9 decibels. A decibel is a unit of measurement for the physical intensity of the sound. The typical quiet room is about 30 decibels, so one can understand how this quiet space would be so alarming. The attack, the start of a sound, is very alarming to those inside of this room because of the extreme change in decibel level. The intensity and amplitude of a sound determines the sound pressure. Intensity is the amount of sound in a unit and amplitude is the magnitude of the sound pressure.
To explore in depth the reasons for the hallucinations, the brain must psychologically acknowledge several other functions before the sound is recognized. First, the loudness must be assessed. Loudness is a result of the intensity of the sound wave. So the more intense the sine wave, then the louder the sound. A sine wave is a pure sound, which is rare in daily functions due to the disruption of other sounds. Therefore, because of the extreme quiet in the room, the sound is perceived as even louder.
Another reason for the alarming aspects of this quiet room, is because of the equal-loudness curves. The equal-loudness curve compares the perceived sound pressure (decibels) to the other loudness in the space. Due to the fact that the room has no other sound, there is nothing to compare the perceived sound to. This is related to the concept of audibility threshold, in which the lowest sound pressures are determined.
As humans, we constantly perceive sound. Even in a quiet room, we are exposed at least some decibel of sound. This is why I chose to write about this topic. The concept of a totally silent room is intriguing, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the initial processes involved with perceiving sound in a room of negative decibels. As it turns out, we struggle to accurately perceive sound when we have no other sound to compare with. I learned that even though many people claim to need an entirely quiet room, but it turns out that it is not as peaceful as it sounds.
Terms: decibels, intensity, attack, loudness, sine wave, amplitude, equal-loudness curve, audibility threshold.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/04/worlds-quietest-room-the-anechoic-chamber-minnesota-minneapolis_n_1403476.html?ref=culture
Really cool article!!!! May induce hallucinations? Crazy!! How long do you think you could stay in there? Could you beat the 45 minute record? I think I might be able to handle it for about an hour!!! I'll challenge myself next time im in the Twin Cities!! Field trip??? On Otto's tab? haha.
The article I chose deals with space perception and visual illusions. It is entitled "Perception and Putting: How Does Tiger 'See' Augusta?". I chose this piece both because it is very current (the Masters golf tournament began today) and because I thought the idea of applying knowledge from this class to sports would be fun. The title of the piece led me to believe that it would have something to do with visual cues golfers such as Tiger Woods use to line up and aim their putts. This was true, but it was presented in a way that I did not expect. This is what I found most interesting - how a referenced study used visual illusions to delve into the psyches of golfers.
Because Tiger has been much maligned since his sex scandal rocked the golf world three years ago, the author posits that his putting struggles are likely attributable to a psychological state that is affecting his confidence. This phenomenon may also be attributed to an increased ability to focus on a target using what is termed the "quiet eye" - looking directly at an object without moving one's eyes around. Because targets perceived in the fovea (dimple in the center of the retina) appear larger than those corresponding retinal points out in the periphery of the eye, it is thought that a "quieter" eye may allow athletes to perceive their intended targets as larger.
In order to correct this program, he references a recent study conducted at Purdue University, in which golfers' visual perception was manipulated in order to increase their confidence and subsequently, their performance. This was accomplished through the use of what is called the Ebbinghaus illusion, in which a few large circles projected around the hole made it appear perceptually smaller, and several smaller circles made it appear larger! This illusion altered the normal metrical depth cues golfers would normally use to determine the width of the hole for which they were aiming. In doing so, the Ebbinghaus circles alter the perceived relative size of the hole. This led to the theory that a hole that appeared perceptually larger would lead to increased confidence and putting accuracy, with the opposite effect hypothesized for holes that appeared stronger. This notion was then supported by data from experimental testing.
I thought this study was really cool because it all was based so soundly in logic. Athletes with higher emotional or psychological distress are likely to be able to focus less on a target, whether it be a putting in golf, shooting free throws in basketball, or aiming for the strike zone in baseball. Less focus would presumably reduce foveal acuity and lead to perception of a smaller target and decreased confidence. This would then affect subsequent performance and could lead to a vicious cycle of more emotions and less focus!
Terms: space perception, visual illusion, fovea, corresponding retinal points, metrical depth cue, relative size
You forgot the link! Seems like it was an interesting article though!
Since the title of chapter 11 is music and speech perception I figured I could not go wrong by looking at an article called how musical are you? Initially I was pretty interested in this because is resemble a lot of the conversation that we had in class on Tuesday. We talked a lot about how much experience with music to actually have a solid knowledge of it. We also discussed whether or not individuals needed to have hands on experiences with instruments or if music appreciation classes could suffice.
What the article went into detail stating is that being able to play an instrument is just one aspect of being musical. It also stated that everyone is subject to musical gains just from simply being exposed to it in any kind of environment. This is not to say however that those who spend more time with it do not become better however because they do. Scientist get most of their knowledge on the perception of music simply comparing musicians with non musicians. The main point of this article was that researchers added a musical test to it.
In the musical test ones music engagement, thoughts of importance, and identity from music were all assessed to get a better understanding of how the world thinks of music. Out of curiosity I decided to take the test to see what it was all about. The test was composed of four sections. The sections were called group the music, match the beat, tap to the beat, and melody memory. In the group the music section you were given tiny snippets of music and were to group them according to what gene they were in. In the next section you were supposed to find the beat in a piece of music and recognize rather the superimposed beep was on beat with the music or not. Next you were supposed to tap the space bar along with the rhythm of a song. The last section was called melody memory and you given two similar melodies with different pitches and you were supposed to figure out whether or not they were just similar or exactly the same.
What I learned from this entire experience was that although I am not a musical genius I do know a decent amount about music. My scores showed that I was about in the middle of the pack on most things. From this article and research I would boldly say that music appreciation is a valid way to learn about musical perception.
Key terms: melody, tempo, rhythm, pitch
http://www.bbc.co.uk/labuk/articles/musicality/
Cool article. I'm not very musical at all!! Oh well!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wray-herbert/tiger-woods-masters_b_1405427.html
http://pss.sagepub.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/content/early/2012/03/02/0956797611428810.short?rss=1&%3bssource=mfr
I found an article in the Huffington Post about music. After reading chapter 11 I was feeling the music talk and wanted to keep that flow going. My eye got caught by an interesting title, "Sonic youth hate mail: 13 year old says 'they're worse than Rebecca Black'". This title first interested me because one, I am not sure who is worse than Rebecca Black, and second, it illustrated the idea that humans like to hear good sounding music and rhythms, obviously. First of all, Rebecca Black's music (granted, I have only heard the 'friday song'), is pretty bad. It's bad because she really has no tone, and her rhythms are the same over and over again. She sticks with her melody too much and doesn't give good variety. This 13 year old talked about the band not sounding in tune. He obviously could hear the timbre of the different instruments well, which isn't too difficult in a band setting. He says that the guitars weren't even playing actual chords, which are three or more notes played at a time. I am not sure if this young child knows his stuff, although he does say that he plays in a small band. I listened to the video of this band and didn't really hear any tone issues. Granted, they played a lot of the same chord progressions over and over, but that is fine, our ears like to listen to things that sound familiar. I thought this was a very interesting and hilarious post!
Terms: tone, timbre, chord, melody.
http://www.spinner.com/2012/04/06/sonic-youth-kid-letter/
What does a 13 year old know about music? haha. I tend to agree with this person, however, I think sonic youth is not very good, but maybe I "just don't get it". Seems like people try to get into music that is a bit hard to appreciate just for the novelty. I like stuff that makes me smile and spaces me out! Interesting article. Punk kids and their opinions!
My topic of choose is on the cognitive effects of odor perception.
This topic is interesting because although it is generally accepted that the adaptation/habituation of odor perception is influenced at both the peripheral (receptor) and central (postreceptor) levels previous studies reporting the effects of cognitive manipulation have not sufficiently controlled experimental conditions with respect to the peripheral and central properties of odor perception. It is extremely difficult to study intrinsic biological processes in olfactory perception in terms of the relative contribution of the peripheral and central processes to the adaptation/habituation of perceived olfactory sensations.
This topic is interesting to me because I work in a restaurant, live in a town with factories and wear perfume. Those three don’t sound like they go together but they do because they all have very distinct odor. The ability for me to notice these smells differ by the amount of time I spent near the odor. This phenomenon is called cognitive habituation. When you live with an odor we cognitively habituate to it and no longer react to it, or we show very little response to it. The restaurant I work at is Carlos O’ Kelly’s and when leaving you smell like Mexican food really bad. I never notice but the second I get home my friends suggest that I get rid of the clothes. A few hours later my room is filled with the awful smell. The receptors in my nose though had adapted to the smell but after a short break I regained the ability to smell what they smelled. This is called receptor adaptation. The town I live in is the same way we have a cookie factory on one side and a satellite factory on the other. One factory smells good and the other bad but I never notice them in the summer but when I come back for breaks the smells are almost overwhelming. This is also receptor adaptation but is spaced out more over time. Now my perfume is another story. I have a friend that gets headaches from perfume so when I am around him I cannot wear it. I can safely say that any perfumed odor would rank very high in the unpleasant category on the odor hedonics. The odor hedonics is a test that is a rating for how unpleasant, familiar, and intense a person finds a given odorant.
Chapter 13 in on olfaction which is the sense of smell and that is how it relates to sensation and perception.
•JM Wolfe, KR Kluender, DM Levi, LM Bartoshuk, RS Herz, RL Klatzky, SJ Lederman, & DM Merfeld (2009), Sensation & Perception, 2nd Edition, Sunderland, MA: Sinauer [ISBN#9780878939534].: This source is that sensation and perception book and I used it for word definitions. I know that the definitions will be what we are talking about in class instead of an untrusting site like Wikipedia.
•http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/2/163.full.pdf: The source was a journal article that was on a study that investigated cognitive effects on odor perception. The study demonstrates the effect of the cognitive state on the perceived intensity by developing an experimental setting wherein the peripheral adaptation process was reduced and central olfactory processes were emphasized. This source states that the effects of cognitive manipulation have not sufficiently controlled experimental conditions with respect to the peripheral and central properties of odor perception.
•http://www.gamequarium.org/dir/SqoolTube_Videos/Science/Human_Body/Smell/magic_school_bus_makes_a_stink_9694.html: The magic school bus show is great for learning about different topics, including smell. Flora Whiff, the famous expert on smell - whose nose knows - comes to school to judge the First Annual Smell Search. Ms. Frizzles class creates a unique smell that is bound to take first prize, but Janet, determined to win herself, changes their smell to an odor only a skunk could love. The kids discover the secret to what makes things smell. Now can they find a way to make sure their creation doesn’t make a big stink? Ms. Frizzles class explores Janets nose to learn how we smell. Your kids investigate how well their own odor detectors can identify smells.
TERMS: receptor adaptation, cognitive habituation, odor hedonics, cognitive manipulation, odor perception, olfaction
JM Wolfe, KR Kluender, DM Levi, LM Bartoshuk, RS Herz, RL Klatzky, SJ Lederman, & DM Merfeld (2009), Sensation & Perception, 2nd Edition, Sunderland, MA: Sinauer [ISBN#9780878939534].
http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/2/163.full.pdf
http://www.gamequarium.org/dir/SqoolTube_Videos/Science/Human_Body/Smell/magic_school
I think the crazy thing about olfaction is that when you smell somthing, some of that substance is actually in your mucus membranes!!!! So any chemical that we interact with is actually in our nose creating that perception of a good or bad, or whatever smell. Kinda gross and intersting at the same time!
I chose an article from the Huffington Post, “Using Music in the Classroom to Educate, Engage and Promote Understanding”, which I felt most appropriate and connecting to the chapter of Music and Speech Perception. Listening to music affects people’s moods and emotions. Music can have powerful effects on mood or emotions for many individuals. Some clinical psychologists practice music therapy to improve mental and physical health. Music has been found to promote positive emotions and reduce stress or pain.
Nicholas Ferroni, an educator and historian who mentors lower income student with deep personal commitment and care writes an article to reviews how educators have been using music to educate for many years. Teachers have played varying music from protest songs from anti-war movements and discussed the meaning of lyrics as a classroom project. Some students are able to understand this form of teaching better than a classroom lecture or a history book. The aspect of music having a personal touch to teach and engage students in learning has been found beneficial in gaining stronger levels of comprehension and retaining information. This is the goal of educators and students as well. Ferroni was recently named one of the 100 most influential people in America for his commitment to education with his campaign, “Teach the Truth” as he incorporates more minority groups into his curriculum.
Ferroni feels that music is the one constant to which everyone is attached, and that everyone understands. Without music, life would be silent and sad. He is able to engage, educate, differentiate and increase understanding and retention by using music; something everyone has some attachment to. Students are introduced to emotional attachment to music and learn about themselves, and utilize music in the classroom throughout the year. He has found music to be an effective learning tool, an engaging way to involve students and “teach the way they learn”. By using music and having student create historical soundtracks and play lists, he has a great success with nearly all of his students regardless of their learning levels.
It was interesting to learn that listening to music may affect moods and emotions. When hearing pleasant sounds, the response is positive as well. Altering and the use of the music’s melody, rhythm, pitch, or tempo can have powerful and positive effects beyond emotions and moods, into changes in heart rate, respiration, blood flow into the brain that are thought to be involved in reward and motivation. The pitch in music is the psychological aspect of sound related to perceived frequency, while the tempo is the perceived speed of the presentation of sounds. Music is a powerful human invention and teaching tool.
Terms: music therapy, melody, rhythm, pitch, and tempo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicholas-ferroni/music-in-the-classroom_b_2072777.html
I chose an article from the Huffington Post written by Deepak Chopra, “Feel Like a Butterfly, See Like a Bee? The Mystery of Perception.” The author talked about the sensory abilities and how every person has a different mix of reality. Many purpose the question: “how do we know that what we are seeing is true perception and not hallucinations?” The answer is that honestly, when a person perceives we differ in how we use our visual cortex. There are many perceptual disorders that does not allow people to see the “normal” colors or objects as other individuals.
Non-psychiatric hallucinations is a disorder that was detailed in this article about the loss of sight in the central visual field due to macular degeneration. Hallucinations are very interesting and I learned more on how the brain uses electrical impulses to change how a person perceives, smells, tastes, and hears. When an individual has hallucinations, that is their “reality” and what they believe is REAL or truth in the environment. Most people would believe this to be a mental disorders (which is what it is diagnosed as) but how can we judge if a person really believes that is their REALITY? Everyone has cones in their eyes that allow million of colors to be intruperted.
Colors can also vary between persons, and is fascinating knowing one persons blue could be another persons purple. According to this article 2%-50% of women have 4 cones which gives them a super color vision. This is interesting because most women do not get color blindness like men do. And the most interesting part of color vision is that it varies across species such as the cat.
A cat can perceive 10,000 colors and there can also be gender differences between these species due to viewing colors in their environment. In some monkey species it was found that the males would only be able to see 10,000 colors like the cat and the female monkeys could see many colors like humans. The fascinating discovery of different perception of color is continuing to grow in research.
All in all, our eyes give us the ability to make our background and environment our reality. Perception is so important in everyday life that many individuals take their “reality” for granted. This article relates to many of the color and vision chapters in the book that I have previously read.
vocab: perception, cones, color vision, color blindness, hallucinations,reality
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/feel-like-a-butterfly-see-like-a-bee-the-mystery-of-perception_b_2663424.html
I found an article on the BBC website entitled “How to hack your taste buds”. This article discusses why consuming one flavor can and often does affect the taste of the next flavor that you consume. Although we have not yet gotten to the information about tasting there were some interesting things in the article. One example given was the taste of orange juice soon after brushing one’s teeth. I personally have brushed my teeth and then realized I had forgotten to take a pill or vitamin. When I accidentally take it with a drink like orange juice the taste is very bitter.
The article begins by stating that our tongue is definitely not a blank slate. The article states that researchers are not completely sure how exactly this works. There was a researcher that proposed that for instance when a person eats an artichoke that the cynarin or sweet part latches onto the sweet taste receptors but does not actually activate them, then when a he takes a drink of water the cynarin is washed away releasing the receptors and this causes the sensation of sweetness.
In the case of toothpaste the issue occurs when the detergent sodium lauryl sulphate foams during teeth brushing. Because the membranes of our cells make up contains fats that the SLS tampers with the ability to taste sweet and creates a bitter taste to sweet drinks.
The most interesting aspect was the West African “miracle fruit”. This is a little red berries that if consumed make anything sour taste sweet. The scientific name is synespalum dulcificum. Apparently there are tablets of it online for purchase. I found it online for about $14 and I may have to try them. I wondered how this would affect the supertasters? If they used this would it make it easier to eat foods that are very sour? That would be very interesting to try.
Although this is a subject that we have not yet come to in the class, I found it really interesting and thought it was a real world application for the study of sensation and perception. I found myself looking ahead and forward to chapter 15.
Terms: supertaster, sensation, perception, receptors, taste
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141214-how-to-hack-your-taste-buds
What was your topic and what the piece you chose was?
My topic was on the Huff posts, it was about early bed time and the effect on the brain activities, and brain illness.
Why you picked it (what made it interesting for you)
This post was interesting to me because i tend to sleep at inalienable hours, my sleeping pattern isn't as the same it was when i was in high school, the change over time gave me some problems like tiredness,drowsiness through the day, and eating at random times at night, i wasn't sure weather my sleeping pattern had something to do with it or not.
what did you expect to see. What did you find most interesting about the piece?
What i expected to see about this post was correlated with what i actually saw, it went on about how there are different chemicals in your brain that work in a cycle, if they're imbalance, then that's what brings trouble to you with sleeping, eating and just doing your regular daily routines.
This article stated that if we eat our meals when we're supposed to eat them, our bed time routine would be where it's supposed to be, which would also help our brains function the way they're supposed to function, and also would work in our favors because we would have lower chances of getting brain illness, such as insomnia, schizophrenia and such. the researchers talked about our ultradian rhythms, this is basically the chemicals in our bodies, the clock work of our bodies, the circadian clock, which is the twenty four hours timer that we have automatically in our bodies that monitors our waking moments and our resting moments, this is the clock that tells you to go to sleep when you're tired but yet isn't resting, and it's also the clock that wakes you up randomly on weekends when you're sleeping in because you've reached the limit of your rest time. because of many different things, and different chemicals that we inject in our bodies, those things interfere with that clock, blocking off and stopping it from doing it's own job.
Our daily activities are also influenced by the ultradian cycle, which has four regions that it works on, those are our bodily temperature, our physical movements, our daily consumption of food and everything else and our sermons hormones, this would explain why we eat about three times aday because there's four different type of cycles in our body through out the span of 24 hours in our day.
basically if this cycle is off balance, the neurotransmitter would be activated to the brain, telling it that the chemicals are imbalanced, this happens often, but it would most likely happen to someone who's bipolar, or schizophrenia than a person who has a normal function brain.
As a result of all this, we're only supposed to do so much in our daily routines, when we overwork our bodies, or over eat, our physical state, signals the brain, telling it that it's time to shut down and rejuvenate. an example would be that if you worked out for three hours, after you're done, you'd be really hungry, after eating, all you want to do is sleep and rest. this is because the neurotransmitters sent their signal and informed certain parts of the brain to let your body know that it had enough. In order for your brain activities to work well, or function normally, you need to rest well everyday, meaning normal bed times, normal meals, and a good amount of sleep will take care of your brain in the long term, which would give you less risks of depression, bipolar disorder and other worse brain illness.
Personally i thought this was a great article to read, especially being a college student, we get wrapped up in so many things that we forget to rest sometimes when it's the best things we could do for ourselves.
TERMS: Brain Activities, Brain Functions, Correlations,
neurotransmitters, Insomnia, Brain Illness.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/24/sleep-mental-health_n_6738216.html?utm_hp_ref=science
I chose the piece from BBC on the optical illusion of a dress appearing different colors to different people. I chose this piece, because it has created a huge fuss from Twitter all the way to national news programs like CNN. I expected a fairly in-depth explanation of why this illusion was taking place. The article did explain this decently well but not to the extent that I was hoping; It seemed to focus more on the pop-culture aspect of the story.
This story related to the class, because it is an example of people receiving the same sensation inputs (the detection of a stimulus) but reaching different perceptions (the act of giving meaning to a detected sensation) of the same object. The explanation offered by the article says that this illusion may be due to colors of nearby objects and their reflected light falling on the object in focus, in this case the dress. The illusion in this photo is that the pictured dress appears to be black and blue to some yet white and gold to others. Some people are even able to watch the colors switch between the two right in front of their eyes if they stare at it long enough. The article mentions that the strange lighting in the picture could be to blame for the color confusion. This explanation implies that the phenomenon is most likely occurring within the retina, a light-sensitive membrane in the back of the eye that contains rods and cones, which receive an image from the lens and send it to the brain through the optic nerve. There could be infinitesimal differences between each individuals eye anatomies, but those differences are apparently great enough to cause this extremely widespread perception debate. These differences are most likely within the cones within peoples' retinas. The rods are photoreceptors within the retina that is specialized for night vision, but cones are photoreceptors within the retina that are specialized for daylight vision, fine visual acuity, and color. There has thus far been no data on perceptible differences in these eye structures that may cause such perceptual confusion, but there is a good chance that may change now that this phenomenon has spread throughout the masses. Some people, on the other hand, believed at first that this was some way of showing who was colorblind, that is, who has difficulty or entirely lacks the ability to perceive certain or all color differences. This has essentially been brushed off by experts as people who are ignorant on the subject attempting to make sense of the illusion. About 1 in 12 men are colorblind, according to the article. We would expect those people to see the dress colors differently, but that does not explain why the rest of us seem to have such differing perceptions. This is a wonderful example of how we may all see different colors without realizing it, because it is so apparent and so easy to externalize for so many people. "It is possible that people could literally be seeing different colours but it's impossible to know what is in someone's head."
Terms: Perception, Sensation, Retina, Rods, Cones, Colorblind
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-31656935
Assignment link: http://www.psychologicalscience.com/perception/2012/04/topical-blog-week-12-due-thursday.html
Read all about it here: Topics in the News
“Relating the real world to our classroom”
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130732146
My topic is from the URL above which is about being diagnosed with a rare eye tumor and the subsequent total loss of vision titled, “Oliver Sacks: A Neurologist Examines ‘The Mind’s Eye’”.
I chose this piece because I had heard of Oliver Sacks before in one of my introduction classes. He is a British neurologist, writer, and chemist who is a professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine.
The main focus of the article/show is about his book, The Mind’s Eye. It’s a nonfiction piece (which I happen to personally love nonfiction book/stories) and that is just one of the things I first noticed about the piece. Nonfiction because, Sacks is the one that is diagnosed with the eye tumor and it’s his account of losing half his vision - and by extension, his stereoscopic vision. Oliver had to learn to adapt to a world that appeared to be entirely flat through his eyes after the tumor.
According to the piece, The Mind's Eye (the book), Sacks looks at how blind people use other senses to "see" the world, and how people with aphasia and visionary disturbances learn to compensate with their other senses. He also writes about the case studies of other people who learned to compensate and adapt after neurological disorders robbed them of their ability to recognize faces, read or see.
I don’t know what I expected to see but I do know what I experienced during and after I listened to this 37 minute show/piece. And I even continued to look further into Oliver’s story and what has happened since then.
On a more personal note, I thought of my mother and how she coped with macular degeneration. What she experiences as her vision worsened without explanation and then after the explanation it still got worse. Her loss of vision has been a major effect on her health. Again, it made me realize how difficult her life must be on a daily basis.
I was interesting to find out that in order to compensate, Oliver currently tries to keep objects to the left of his visual field and rearranges the furniture in his house to compensate for this new development. He's also found that his other senses helped him compensate to his newly flattened world. He also said that "steps and curbs just looked like horizontal lines on the ground. There was no sense of near and far. No sense of depth. Sometimes what was near and what was far would be conflated.” He also said, "going down stairs was particularly dangerous. I had to sort of feel out each stair with my foot because it looked flat. And sight is so dominant that sometimes my eye would argue with the foot and say 'Look. It's flat and that's that. You don't have another step." (directly from the piece I selected)
I didn’t realize how difficult people with certain problems have to face on a daily basis.
People who can’t recognize faces, read, and/or see can also be linked to our text and some of the terminology we have already learned like vision acuity (measure of the finest detail that can be resolved by the eyes), visual angle (the angle subtended by an object at the retina), and spatial vision (from Chapter 2, pg. 42) also it talks about aging-related macular degeneration (AMD - a disease associated with aging that affects the macula), macula (the center part of the retina that has high concentration of cones, pg. 42) which can be linked to the inability to recognize faces. Scotoma is also from Chapter 2, and that is the blind spot in the visual field. This piece also reflects part of Chapter 4 like with examples of agnosia (failure to recognize objects in spite of the ability to see them, pg. 88) and with terms like Gestalt (literally “form”) and congenital prosopagnosia (a form of “face blindness” apparently present from birth, as opposed to “acquired prosopagnosia,” which would be the result of an injury to the nervous system.
Another link to our text is from Chapter 6 where it talks about stereoscopes and stereograms (pg. 166) which is directly related to this piece as well. And lastly chapter 7 with terms related to (FFA) fusiform face area and parahippocampal place area (PPA) - a region of extrastriate visual cortex in humans that is specifically and reliably activated more by images of places/faces that by other stimuli.
Terms: Diagnosed, eye, tumor, loss of vision, Oliver Sacks, birth, face blindness, nervous system, prosopagnosia, congential prosopagnosia, Gestalt, neurologist, writer, chemist, neurology, medicine, stereoscopic vision, blind, aphasia, vision, senses, eye tumor, vision acuity, visual angle, spatial vision, agnosia, macula, age-related macular degeneration, disease, blind spot, cones, retina, visual field, vision, stimuli, visual cortex, fusiform face area, parahippocampal place area (PPA), images, seeing, and macula degeneration.
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130732146