Final Project post

This class has provided me with a better understanding of how our senses work together to give us perception of the world. The topics covered in this class include what career opportunities apply the studying of perception, medical applications, and understanding how you perceive the world through each sense. The perceptual process is dynamic and continually changing. The process includes stimuli, electricity, experience and action, and knowledge. There are two different types of processing: bottom-up processing and top-down processing. There are different levels of analysis: psychophysical and physiological. This class provided the basic brain structure to illustrate how the senses work. The primary receiving areas in the brain are vision, audition, and tactile senses. This class goes over the basics of neural signals and action potentials. It provides a breakdown of vision and explains different vision impairments. Optical illusions and other visual attention tricks are discussed. The class provides insight into how we move through the environment and do other things such as reaching and grasping. How we perceive color, depth, size, and sound is discussed. It goes into detail about the auditory system and speech perception. Tactile acuity and how pain is perceived is discussed. This class explains how different chemicals in the environment interact with our senses. Finally, this class shows us how perception is developed from birth to death.

My favorite part of this class was learning about how vision works and how optical illusions can play tricks on perception. I liked the discussion of visual angles and how you can play around with different angles and things will seem different than they actually are. This is interesting to me because I like photography and finding ways to capture different perspectives. I have a few examples of this from pictures I have taken.

This class has helped me understand concepts outside of class. I have a better understanding of how vision works. I am near-sighted and have been thinking of getting lasik surgery. This class has helped me to better understand the cause of myopia and how lasik works to correct it. I have also thought about the concept of how brain damage occurs in different areas of the brain. Learning about aphasias has helped me to better understand what some of the people in my life have gone through.