Watson 1 Katie Watson Professor Presnell English 1103 25 November 2012 I tried turning up the radio because of voices

,trying to drown them out, watching t.v. but it didn't help my hallucinations. i lost depth perceptions. God started teaching me. Turn off the radio, that it lulled me to where i wasn't paying attention, turn off the t.v. ...same thing, i couldn't read because it put me in imaginations, i couldn't write bec ause of the same thing. This is what i had to do. Go to the park or out side in a peacefull enviornment. Use your scences to feel the sun on your face ,the wind on you, listen to the birds or what ever is around you...you can do this with your eyes closed but don't use imaginations to hear all of this and feel these things.God told me that i had all the tools...He wanted me to use them. (Shallovercome) If youre like most people, you probably think sensation and perception are the same thing. In fact, theyre actually two very different, important steps in the process of defining what we consider to be reality. Sensation is the first step; its out sensory organs response to stimuli such as light, sound, and smell. Think of how many things you are sensing at this very moment. How light is it in the room youre in? What does the air feel like? Hot or cold? Dry or humid? What does the chair youre sitting in feel like? Now youve suddenly become much more aware of your surroundings. When we stop to consider everything our bodies are sensing, its amazing

Watson 2 that our brains dont have a complete systems failure. Thats where the 2nd step, Perception, comes into play. David G. Curry, a researcher for the American Society of Safety Engineers and his associates examined the difference between sensation and perception, and how each one affects our understanding of the world. Perception is the process through which our brains choose what parts of the information gathered by our sensory organs is actually important, so we can easily focus on specific things, instead of having to sort through the massive amounts of unimportant sensory information. Basically, you can think of perception as selective attention. However, the powers of perception dont end there; once the brain has chosen what information to pay attention to, it then processes and encodes that information. The way our brains do this is affected by different factors such as our past experiences. Thats why two people can experience the same stimuli in very different ways. For instance, a tune played on the piano may remind someone of their grandmother, bringing back pleasant memories and causing them to relax. The same tune may remind another person of hours spent practicing piano as child, and cause them to be agitated. So how differently do you view the world from the person sitting next to you? How much of our own realities are lived within our minds? Look to William James, the father of American Psychology, who said Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses form the object before us, another part (and may it be the larger part) always comes out of our own minds. If you are loosing reality....hug a tree...know it is a tree,look at the texture of the tree, put your tongue on that tree if you have too then say "it's a tree". know the table in your house by feeling it ...know the color, go underneith it and feel it ...then say "it is a table". Here is a pointer...the things you see, like table ,chairs, fridge, and also can touch it and use

Watson 3 it...these are real. People who sleep walking to the point where it is all a dream....it is harder ...they need an extra hand to guide them to the real things to do sences.(Shallovercome) As children, we are all taught the five senses: touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell. Robert Demaree, the director of choral studies at the University of Wisconsin in Platville, explored each of these five and examined how being in tune with our senses affects things we do in our daily lives. He applied this knowledge to singing, but it can be applied to everything we do. However, Demaree didnt stop at just the five well known senses, it turns out that there are actually four additional senses to the traditional five. The first two are thermoception, the sensation of temperature, and noiception, the sensation of pain. Both of these could be considered sub categories of touch. The other two are Equilibrioception, our sense of balance, and propioception, our awareness of our bodies within space. When you add in these last two, it changes our understanding of the way sensation and perception work. Neither fit in with the two step process. For each, the sensation and perception go hand in hand, with each piece of information gathered, processed and put to use outside our conscious stream of thought. We dont even think about either of these things unless our attention is drawn to them. Hidden in the shadows only to see a glimmer of light through a small window. not to feel the sun on my face but a hope. I was always on the inside of a box looking out. I lost all my sences ,the world around me and what my body was telling me. i lost depth perceptions and i couldn't speak clearly. i would say words like..base-a-ball..that meant bye I'll see ya...or Jamie...that meant Jay it's me. I feel sorry for elderly people, i know what

Watson 4 they are going through and i know they are trying to comunicate with you.(Shallovercome) Even with these exceptions, the basic process of sensation and perception remains fairly straight forward. Or is it? What happens if something goes wrong on either end of the process? There are people who have conditions that leave them unable to gather information from certain senses. Think of blind and deaf people. But what about the perception side of things? Can there be malfunctions in the way our brains process and encode the sensory information theyre receiving? Sometimes this happens with the condition of Synesthesia. People with Synesthesia, or synesthetes, experience a crossing of wires in the brain that causes their senses to get jumbled and blend together. For example, a synesthete might see sounds, experiencing different notes as individual colors. The closest experience can be compared to for someone without the condition is the way our senses of smell and taste are linked. For instance, those smells that are so strong we can taste them. Synesthesia is a bizarre condition that wasnt recognized as true sensation until recently. In 1999, Psychologists Edward Hubbard and Vilayanur Ramachandran began testing to see if Synesthesia can considered genuine sensory experience. First they had to rule out the other theories explaining the condition. In their experiments they debunked the previous explanations that Synesthesia is merely a heightened ability to form metaphors, or that the association between the two senses is caused by memories. Once they did this, they were able to move on to identifying the neurobiological factors that cause the senses to get jumbled, and prove that Synesthesia is a true condition. So what does all this mean? Could the world we see not be the real thing? How do we know whats real, anyway? The information our brains gather comes from sensory organs like our eyes, nose and ears. If they are all working correctly, we should have a clear understanding

Watson 5 of the world around us. However, most of our world is formed within the confines of our heads. With so many people creating different worlds in their heads, in the end, whose version of the world is correct?

Works Cited Curry, David G, John E Meyer, and John M McKinney.American Society of Safety Engineers. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Nov 2012. Poliniak, Susan. "Teaching Music-February 2012." Digimag R.R. Donnelley. 2012: n. page. Web. 3 Nov. 2012. Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Edward M Hubbard. "Hearing Color Tasting Shapes." Scientific American. 21 2005: n. page. Web. 5 Nov. 2012. Shallovercome, . "My window became my way out." 28 2010. N.p., Online Posting to Schizophrenia. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. Shallovercome, . "tangible." 06 2010. N.p., Online Posting toSchizophrenia. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.