Psychology

• Learn how psychologists study and analyze human behavior.
• Determine the role of nature and the role of nurture in our behaviors.
• Gain greater insight into the behavior of ourselves and others.
• Understand the various theories describing human behavior.
• Develop critical thinking skills and prepare ourselves to be cautious and analytical consumers of information.

Introduction

This week, the role of sensations that includes vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and kinesthetic or the sense of motion and position used by the brain will be considered. Perception is an awareness of what is happening based on what one senses. A level of consciousness is an awareness of the environment that may be altered by sleep, hypnosis, or substances.

Sensation and Perception

Our brains construct our perceptions. Our ability to know where we are, what is going on and other conscious facts are determined by what our brain interprets and decides about the information it receives from what the body is sensing. Being able to "sense" something means it has occurred in a manner that can be detected at least 50% of the time. This is the basic lower limit of sensory perception. The magnitude of the stimuli affects this threshold. Our body can also adapt to sensory stimuli enough to diminish or even eliminate perception of it!

Vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell and kinesthetics (position or motion sense) all provide information that our brain uses. Each of the senses has its own particular aspects that provide unique information for the brain to synthesize. That method is called parallel processing. The brain takes all of this information, assembles it into a coordinated pattern after extracting the essential elements, and then compares that with past experiences.

Your assigned reading details the different sensory receptors' attributes and how the brain reads and interprets their messages. Many of these interpretations create our perception of images. It helps us to understand the cues our brain uses to create these perception messages.

Consider fear. Fear plays a huge role in pain perception. If you know what's happening to you, and you know when you've actually reached the pinnacle of the pain that's going to occur, you will be less afraid, more relaxed, and in less pain. Dr. Grantly Dick-Read examined the birthing practices of a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa, and noted that the women appeared to experience very little pain during childbirth. Rejecting the notion that the women didn't feel any pain, he concluded that the pain was not perceived as intense by them because they knew exactly what to expect during childbirth. Therefore, they were less frightened, and a lower level of fear led to a lowered perception of pain. Today in the United States, many childbirth classes use the Dick-Read method, in which the mom is educated explicitly about what to expect during the birth. Women who are educated in that way do report less pain than women who are not.