Sensation & Perception

Musical support: Roy Ayers – Sound And Sense

Do you see what I mean?

"Vision", or seeing, involves more than just gathering images with the eye. Sensation is the process of bringing information into the brain for evaluation while PERCEPTION is that process of making sense, or meaning out of the raw sensory data. Sensory organs and their first synapses are akin to the hardware of a computer, while more elaborate perceptual processing could be seen as software that gets programmed and customized over time.

Effective perceptional processing reveals the capacity of the nervous to learn - and perception is a learned process, which is to say our "percepts" are based on past experience. Some may refer to these as "schema" which resemble our tendency to organize incoming raw sensory info into meaning units. The units can be simple, nearly sub-conscious (e.g., movement, color) relating to one perceptual field. But schema may be complex subjective concepts (e.g., beauty, slavery) that are interpretations of simpler perceptual input. "Schemata" may refer to the overall inventory of schema you have and sometimes schemata includes the process whereby we create, store and retrieve and perceive them. But if we don't develop the schema for something, we can't really "see" it - it escapes our perception. Story of villagers asked to describe a scene in a movie. Eskimos and all those words for snow.

Both sensation and perception rely on (or reveal?) the plasticity of the nervous system, but also rely on the integrity of their respective pathways to ensure. A simple act of recognition requires matching a percept in the present with one stored in the past.

Perceptual Differences

Our perceptions are effected by SO many factors such as early environment, culture, health, etc.

Attention, or our ability to concentrate mental energies on specific cognitive operations such as perception, is critical. Something so simple as counting a moving object involves so many mental process and region of the nervous system:

You will often see exactly what you are looking for. Or you see "see" what you "set". In Simons and Chambris' (1998) laboratory study of the invisible gorilla video, nearly half the participants who correctly counted the number of passes missed the gorilla.

These tools for perception that are essential for making any kind of meaning out of world are also limiting what we can "see". So, please be aware that your perceptions are YOUR reality, but not THE reality.