Lauren Lewinski April 10, 2015 BIO132 – Sensory Biology Marian Wahl Did you see/hear/smell/feel/taste that? A Study in Sensory Biology Abstract In order to demonstrate concepts learned in the classroom a set of exercises was designed around the concept of sensory biology. Sensory biology is the discipline that studies how organisms gain information from their surroundings. To illustrate how the human body receives information five exercises were assigned, two of the exercises set to explain how the nervous systems adapts to constant stimuli to remain alter to changes in the stimuli. Another was designed to exhibit how different sensory receptors have varying degrees of sensitivity based on where they are on the body, meaning that certain places may have more receptors than others. The final two tests focused on a specific sensory organ, the eye and how it interprets information from reflecting visible light. It is important when studying anatomy and physiology to understand how it works by testing one’s own body. It can reinforce concepts that may be two arbitrary otherwise. Introduction Sensory biology is the study of the observations of how an organism gains information from its environment. Being able to respond to one’s environment is key in order for an organism to survive and strive. Stimuli from …show more content…
The subject placed their hand, palm facing up, on the worktop and closed their eyes. The tester asked the subject to respond with “one” or “two” regarding the number of points they detected. The tester used the two-spot discriminator; progressively moving the two parts further apart to gauge the receptor sensitivity and recorded when the subject said, “two.” The test was replicated triplicate and then moved to the back of the neck, the upper arm and the palm. After completion the tester and subjects switched places and repeated the exercise
Another speaker, Margaret Livingstone delves into the visual aspect of our senses. Livingstone mentions how artists recognize things about vision that neuroscientists are not privy to until years later. Livingstone discussed the differentiation between color and lightness, and how the two contribute differently to a work of art. Color is thought of as “comparing activity” whereas light is thought of as “summing them.” Livingstone indicates that the visual system is subdivided into a ventral system and a dorsal system.
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes three aspects of the psychological process; basic sensations, perception, and the associations of memory (Merleau-Ponty, 1994). Basic sensations receive raw information from the world and transduce them for our perceptual processes. Perception unifies the infinite amount of information about our environment, from our environment, into a meaningful structure. Perception is interpretive, but its presentation of the world is as distal and objective. There are three central features of perception for Merleau-Ponty. First, perception is synthesized independently by the body and not by the mind (consciousness).
For example, he argues, that the experience of temperature can be understood with the analogy of the experience of pain, and just as the pain is not 'in the needle', so the warmth I feel is not in the fire. (2) He then argues in a similar vein that visual experience is reducible to collections of colour sensations because light passes into the eye ball and strikes the retina, in much the same way that a sharp object striking the skin produces a sensation of pain, such as a sensation of blue or red. (3) The sensation being the effect of the physical and chemical properties of the world on the sense organs and is as distinct from the world as photographic images are from the objects which cause them.
In this lab we apply the technique known as a two point discrimination test. This test will allow us to determine which regions of the skin are best able to discriminate between two simultaneous sensory impulses. According to (Haggard et al. 2007), tactile discrimination depends on the size of the receptive fields located on the somatosensory neurons. However receptive fields for other types of sensations are located elsewhere. For vision we find that the receptive fields are located inside the visual cortex, and for hearing we find receptive fields in the auditory cortex. The ability for the body to discriminate two points depends on how well that area of the body is innervated with neurons; and thus conferring to the size of the receptive fields (Haggard et al. 2007). It is important to note that the size of the receptive field generally decreases in correlation to higher innervations. As was seen in the retinal receptive fields, the peripheries of tissue had contained larger receptive fields (Hartline, 1940). In our test we hypothesized that the finger region will be able to discriminate better than the forearm. This means that they will be much more innervated with neurons than the forearm, and likewise contain smaller receptive fields. This also means that convergence is closer to a 1:1 ratio, and is less the case the farther from the fingers we go. We also think that the amount of convergence is varied with each individual. We will test to see if two people will have different interpretations of these results.
3.Name the 4 types of stimulus that excites receptors for general senses. Give examples for locations you would find these receptors. Visual:Cerebral cortex Olfactory: Temporal lobe.
Every person uses their senses to experience their environment differently. It could be because of social and human agencies that influence how they can utilize their senses in a particular way, or it could be how their own personalized hierarchy of senses differs their perceptions in a multi-sensory situation. I want to start by defining what sensory ethnography is, as per Sarah Pink 's explanation found in the beginning chapter of her book "Sensory Ethnography". Pink describes it as an "ethnography to explicitly account for the senses" (Pink 2015 p. 7). It takes the traditional ethnographic approaches used by anthropologists such as participating, living, and qualitative examination and creates a "re-thought ethnography as gendered embodied, and more ... [i]n doing so it draws from the theories of human perception and
Lastly, behavior can also be determined by sensation and perception, the stages of processing the information gathered from the senses. Sensation and perception depicts the world for humans. Without them, humans would not be able to truly experience what is going on around them. The first step, sensation, is the gathering of the information from the outside would through the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. The information is then organized and interpreted by the brain through
Sensation refers to the process of sensing what is around us in our environment by using our five senses, which are touching, smell, taste, sound and sight. Sensation occurs when one or more of the various sense organs received a stimulus. By receiving the stimulus, it will cause a mental or physical response. It starts in the sensory receptor, which are specialized cells that convert the stimulus to an electric impulse which makes it ready for the brain to use this information and this is the passive process. After this process, the perception comes into play of the active process. Perception is the process that selects the information, organize it and interpret that information.
An experience from everyday life that helps to work out perception and sensation is a football game. A ball could be kicked towards the goals. Two people will see the same ball going in the same direction at the same time yet one could say that the ball was a goal and the other could say that the ball went in through the goals for a point.
Vision is a physical sense that uses light to provide information to the brain in order to make conclusions about the surroundings. The human eye is an intricate organ that works best when there is an adequate supply of light. Our eyes have been often compared to cameras in that a camera filters light through the lens, controls the intensity with an aperture and focuses the image onto a film. Light coming into an eye is filtered through the cornea, the iris regulates how much light comes through, and then it is focused by the lens onto the retina.
but the senses are: “ Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to
With each of our senses (sight, smell, touch, taste, and hear), information is transmitted to the brain. Psychologists find it problematic to explain the processes in which the physical energy that is received by the sense organs can form the foundation of perceptual experience. Perception is not a direct mirroring of stimulus, but a compound messy pattern dependent on the simultaneous activity of neurons. Sensory inputs are somehow converted into perceptions of laptops, music, flowers, food, and cars; into sights, sounds, smells, taste ...
Perception is defined as the awareness of the world through the use of the five senses, but the concept of perception is often used to isolate one person’s point of view, so how reliable can perception be if no one person’s is exactly the same? The word perception itself is riddled with different, well, perceptions of its meaning. When some hear the word, they might automatically think of it as something innately flawed, that can easily be fooled by illusions, while others may think of its usefulness when avoiding scalding a hand on a hot stove. I am here to agree with both and to argue that perception is something necessary and helpful, and something that should be scrutinized for its flaws. By looking at perception as a way of knowing in the context of memory and human sciences, it can be concluded that perception can contribute to the acquisition of knowledge by constructing a foundation on which incoming stimuli from the environment are able to be quickly interpreted and acted upon, but perception can also hinder the acquisition of knowledge by wrongly interpreting those stimuli, causing inappropriate reactions.
One sub-system under the sensory system is the visual system; the main sense organs of this are the eyes. The eye is the sensory organ that allows us to detect light from external stimuli. When a light ray is detected, the eye converts these rays into electrical signals that can be sent to the brain in order to process the information and giv...
Have you ever wondered why the sky is blue. Often times I find myself looking up on a clear day, pondering over that question? Why isn’t it green, or red or pink for even that matter. Every day, the human eye blinks more than 23,00 times. The human eye is a complicated organ that performs one of the most important tasks for our body. There are many questions about the eye however. What function do they perform? What happens if we don’t take care of them? How exactly do they work together to help us form images? Exactly how far can they human eye see?