Sensation and Perception
Sensation refers to the ability to notice a stimulus and sometimes turn it into a personal experience.
Perception (perception) is the giving of meaning to a sensation noticed. Example: a possible sensation is feeling a hand touch you; perception is understanding this sensation: is it an expression of affection or is it customs looking for suspicious objects? Sensation and perception are central: everything we feel, think and do depends on them. There are five scientific methods for studying sensation and perception:
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Thresholds For example: What is the softest (loudest) sound you can hear (without damage)?
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Scales – measuring private experiences.’Quale’ (mv. ‘qualia’) is the philosophical term for a personal conscious experience of sensation or perception: do you see the same color of red as I do or do you taste the same flavor?
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The signal detection theory – measuring difficult decisionsFor example: Is the abnormality on the mammogram really breast cancer or something benign?
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Sensory neuroscience – How does our perception of the world depend as much on the activity of our sensory nerves as on the world itself? For example: After biting into a pepper, a burning sensation develops in the mouth. Yet there is no temperature difference compared to the moment before eating the pepper.
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Neuroimaging – a picture of the brain
Thinking feeling always has the limitation of previous experiences plus the translation the brain makes with all the possibility of distortion of meaning.
For example: a picture of a house can be presented to one eye and a picture of a face to the other eye. The result is “binocular rivalry”: images competing for perception. Sometimes you see the house, sometimes the face but never both.Discernment vs. Awareness
