Perceptual Set

“We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful for us to perceive it”

I think we can all agree that the way you or I view the world is different from, a sheep, for example, might view it. It’s useful for us to differentiate between human faces, but all sheep look the same to me. To a sheep, all sheep look unique and humans look the same.

What we don’t realize, however, is that the way I perceive the world is substantially different from your perception. Why? Because the way an individual experiences an environment is a mixture between sensation and perception. Sensation is the raw sensory stimuli sensory receptors and the nervous system detect from our surroundings. Perception is the process where the brain organizes and interprets that stimuli. Since each brain is unique, each person’s perception is also unique. Every individual has a different perceptual set, or mental predisposition, that influences his/her perceptions. A perceptual set may be influenced by experiences, emotions, expectations, context, or motivation. Let me give you a few examples.

Emotions:
Your emotions color your perceptions. For example, class seems longer when you’re bored. In a scientific experiment, people reported a hill as seeming steeper after hearing sad music.

Motivation:
Try to see a sea animal in this drawing.

Did you see a seal? It’s actually an ambiguous drawing, and can be viewed as a horse, but since I motivated you to see a sea animal, I altered your perception and you saw it as a seal.

Context:
The simple McDonald’s logo on a bag of french fires or the Starbucks logo on a cup of coffee itself could heighten your perception of the taste. It’s possible that Starbucks coffee really isn’t any better, but the context effect of the logo makes us perceive it as such.

So if no two people, or animals, perceive the same environment the same way, what is reality? Is there such a thing?

Perceptual Interpretation

Sensation and perception happen automatically for most of us. In fact, we tend to take the process for granted, and don’t think about how experience, emotions, or expectations alter our perceptions. Testimonies from people who don’t have this luxury make us realize how lucky we truly are.

A long time ago, in a letter to the enlightenment philospher John Locke, William Molyneaux posed the question, “Would a man born blind, and now adult, taught to distinguish objects by touch, be able to distinguish those objects by sight if they were suddenly to see?” Locke answered was no, because he believed one needed to learn to see the difference. This question, though entirely hypothetical at the time, has now been answered by modern science. John Locke was an intelligent man.

Studies have been done on adults who have had cataract surgery to regain their sight after being blind since birth. They show that no, after gaining sight they can’t distinguish objects by sight alone. This is because they don’t have the experience to form the acquired aspects of vison that you or I take for granted. So while they are able to distinguish color and brightness and figure-ground relationships (object of focus vs. backround), they can’t visually recognize objects or perceive perceptual constancy (when the image of a person gets smaller as the person walks away, they perceive the person to be physically shrinking), and struggle with facial recognition. Without touching the objects, they also struggle to differentiate between say, a picture of an apple and an actual apple. The movie At First Sight is a great example of this!

Watch a clip from the trailer. At about 1:22 he experiences some of the things I mentioned.

Another example of the wonders of perceptual interpretation is our ability to adapt to an artificially displaced or even inverted visual field. Psychologist George Stratton wore glasses that caused inverted vision (Left becomes right, up becomes down) for eight days, and he adjusted and became fully functional! In my psychology class, we mimicked his experience on a smaller scale. We put on goggles that shifted our vision field to the right or left or turned the world upside down. Then our teacher threw a teddy bear at us and asked us to catch it. At first, we went by our sensory guidance, and couldn’t catch the bear because of our displaced/inverted vison. After awhile, however, we were able to catch the bear with no problem because we learned to correct for the disparity.

Amazing.

Consciousness

Have you ever gotten in the car with the intention of going to the store, but find yourself driving to school or work instead on autopilot? Why is it that the loud hum of an air conditioner will annoy the heck out of you for the first day of class, but after that you don’t notice it at all? How is it that you are able to focus on your friend’s voice in a crowded party and tune out the other conversations? Cognitive neuroscience answers these questions. These scientists study the link between the brain and mental processes in order to understand consciousness, which is our awareness of ourselves and our environment.

Our brain runs on a two-track system known as dual processing. Basically, some information is processed within conscious awareness and some isn’t. For example, you don’t consciously process recognizing a friend’s voice and you don’t have to think about how to balance yourself in a chair or walk through the hallways. But when you’re making a decision or doing a math problem, you are aware of your thoughts. You are thinking about your thinking, which is metacognition. It’s kind of scary when you think about it; much our everyday thinking, feeling, and acting we aren’t even aware of! Yet

Without a dual-processing system though, we wouldn’t have the ability to focus. The brain receives approximately 11,000,000 pieces of information per second! Selective attention allows us to not get overwhelmed because we only consciously process about 40 of those. A large portion of those 40 bits are novel stimuli, or stimuli that is pertinent to the task we’re doing. An example of selective attention for novel stimuli is this picture.

You notice the face of the yawning man because his face is different from the rest (novel stimuli).

The other 10,999,960 bits are processed unconsciously. For example, until now, you weren’t aware of the sensation of your back against the chair, what’s going on in your peripheral vision, or the fact that your nose is in your line of vision. Selective attention also allows us to focus on one voice in the midst of several conversations. Yet the other conversations are being unconsciously processed because your focus of attention switches if someone in another conversation calls your name.

Because we cannot consciously attend to 11,000,000 bits of information per second, we become “blind” in a sense to a lot of what goes on around us. Watch this video for me.

How many of you didn’t notice the person in the gorilla suit walking through the players? I didn’t the first time I watched this! Don’t believe me? Watch it again, but this time look for the gorilla and don’t count the passes.

Yep. Inattentional blindness. Scary what we can miss huh? I think dual processing is one of the most amazing abilities of our brain. What all are we missing?? Given that we are aware of only 0.0000036% of our world, I’d say an awful lot.

Source: Source: Myers, David G. 9th ed. New York: Worth, 2010. Print

Personality: Humanistic Perspective

Another theory of personality is the humanistic perspective, developed by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. I mentioned this theory in my Why Everest?! blog, but I’ll relate it more to personality development here.

Instead of focusing on psychologically unhealthy people’s defense mechanisms like Freud, Maslow and Rogers focused on the ways healthy people strive for
self-determination and self-realization.

Below is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

He believed that everyone strived to reach self-actualization (the motivation to fulfill one’s potential), but that it couldn’t be attained until all of the underlying needs were fulfilled. In terms of personality, Maslow believed that your priorities relate to whatever level you are at on his pyramid, and that those priorities shape your personality. For example, if your primary concern is belonging, you will act in ways so that you fit in, wearing the latest styles, using slang words, and hanging out with friends all the time. Your personality traits might be labeled as sociable but self-conscious because your priority is approval from others.

Rogers expanded on Maslow’s ideas. He believed that everyone has the potential for self-actualization in an environment that is genuine, accepting, and
empathetic. A genuine environment means one with kind but honest feedback, where there aren’t participation trophies or friends who tell you a dress looks
just great on you when in reality, anyone with two eyes can see it just doesn’t work. Acceptance is an environment of unconditional love, where people don’t
judge you for making mistakes. An environment of empathy is one where everyone actively listens and doesn’t just smile and nod.

In this ideal environment, people feel accepted, which allows hem to accept themselves. When they accept themselves, they have high and secure self-esteem,
which allows them to love and accept others much easier. And what does that mean? Self-actualization: an open, loving, caring, and self-aware personality.

Personality: The Social-Cognitive Perspective

The social-cognitive perspective offers another explanation for personality development. This theory, originally proposed by Albert Bandura, states that behavior is influenced by the interaction of people’s traits (including thoughts) and the social context. He believed that reciprocal influences and the perception of personal control play great roles in shaping personality.

Reciprocal influences include reciprocal determinism, which is basically the concept that behavior, internal cognition, and the environment all influence one another. So, if you’re sitting in class and the teacher keeps asking questions to a silent room of vacant-eyed teenagers, your “internal cognition”, or thought, is that the class is boring. This thought may cause you to raise your hand and help the teacher out, just for the sake of your own sanity. This behavior changes the environment of the classroom. The teacher may smile, grateful for at least one student who cares. The kid snoring next to you may jolt awake. And maybe, just maybe, you may encourage another kid to participate. When the teacher smiles and kids start to participate in the discussion, the positive environment in turn influences your internal cognition from “This sucks.” to “Hey, this is kind of interesting!” And, the cycle keeps going.

Concept of personal control also shapes personality. If you have an internal locus of control and believe that you have control over your own destiny, you are more likely to have a happier and more optimistic personality. If you believe in fate, you are more likely to feel down and act helpless. It’s been proven: to an extent, the more control you believe you have in your life the happier and healthier you’ll be! Don’t believe me? Visit a nursing home. People there have had a string of uncontrollable bad events that have caused them to perceive a lack of control which leads to helpless behavior. In nursing homes where patients are given even small amounts of control, such as which way their bed faces in their room, patients are a lot healthier and happier.

Personality: Freud

Have you ever wondered why some people are the life of the party while others are content to stay at home and curl up with a good book? Why some people are selfish and others are kind and caring? Why some are carefree and others are meticulous and conscientious? Psychologists do, and they’ve come up with several theories. The most famous of these theories is Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective. Sigmund Freud believed the human mind is mostly hidden, or unconscious. He believed personality is composed of three main structures: the id, ego, and superego. The id is supposedly the “devil on your shoulder” or the part of you that wants to fulfill your own selfish desires, especially sexual ones. The superego he defined as your moral compass or conscience…basically the “angel on your shoulder.” Both of these aspects of personality Freud believed to be unconscious, or beneath our threshold of awareness. The ego is the part of your personality that you portray to the world. It mediates the conflicting desires of your id and superego and comes up with a compromise.

Freud claimed that the conflicting interests of the id and superego cause stress for the ego, which the ego deals with by using defense mechanisms. He named 7 of these mechanisms: repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, and denial. Repression is banishing unacceptable thoughts from consciousness, and is the foundation of all defense mechanisms. Regression is a retreat to an earlier stage of development, such as when you sleep with a stuffed animal when you’re sad or with a night-light after a scary movie. Reaction formation is when unacceptable impulses become their opposites (killing someone with kindness, for example). Projection is when you attribute threatening impulses you see in yourself to others. For example, if you really don’t trust yourself you may say to your friend, “You don’t trust me.” Rationalization is self-justifying explanations, such as “I’m
only drinking to be sociable.” Displacement is diverting impulses to others; an example would be snapping at your mom after a rough day at school. Denial is rejecting a fact, such as how some people deny the Holocaust.

Freud’s theory is somewhat outlandish for today’s standards, but it is intriguing! See my next blog for a more modern theory of personality development.

The Wise Words of Disney

You know how everyone says that everything you need to know in life you learn in Kindergarten? I’d argue that really, all you need to learn in life you can learn from Disney.

I could go on and on. Disney isn’t just about fairy tales and pretty dresses and magic. It’s about overcoming adversity, loving yourself and others, never giving up hope, and doing the right thing. And if you can accomplish all of those things, I’d say you’ve had a pretty successful life. Who cares about calculus?!

I Hope You Dance <3

My grandma gave me this book with the CD in the back 5 or 6 years ago. She told me to listen closely to the lyrics, and live by them. Then, I really didn’t think about it too much. I thought the song was pretty, and that’s about as far as I thought into it. But, as I entered the turmoil of junior high and high school, the lyrics became more meaningful to me.  The lyrics “When you get the choice, to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance” gave me the courage to try out for volleyball, even though I’d never done it before, and to sing in front of all of my peers when trying out for a solo. The line “When you come close to selling out, reconsider” helped me to maintain my morals and identity against peer pressure and the desire to fit in. And the line “promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance” reminds me of the Psalm 46:10 “Be still, and know that I am God.” It reminds me that even when things don’t go my way, God has a plan and a purpose greater than anything I can even imagine, if I only trust in Him.” Honestly, I feel as though the lyrics of this song speak for themselves.

The last page of the book my grandma gave me says this, and I’m asking you to do the same thing!!

“Wait..

promise me one more thing:

If tomorrow you wake up feeling

unoriginal

or

frail-hearted

or

faithless

or

tired of this world

please

pick up this book and start back at page

ONE. “

Or just listen to this song. 🙂

Concussions

There are between approximately 1.6 and 3.8 million sports-related concussions in the United States each year. This statistic has led The Centers for Disease Control (C.D.C.) to announce that sports concussions in the United States have reached an epidemic level.

Then why, and in my experience, are concussions treated as nonchalantly as a sprained ankle or the common cold? Coaches say something along the lines of, “Tough break kid. Rest for a few days then you’ll be good as new!” That is, if the concussion is diagnosed at all.

A lot of the time, concussions aren’t diagnosed. One of my friends, who is a key player on our football team, told me he’s blacked out during a game for a few seconds, but kept playing because “It was no big deal. The team needed me.” In fact, until last year at my school, there wasn’t even a system in place to ensure that the students who were returning to a sport after a concussion were fully recovered!

The reality is, concussions are dangerous and serious. If you don’t buy into the media stories about all of the effects on football players, let me give you a few personal examples.

I got a concussion playing indoor soccer in the fall, but because I didn’t pass out on the field, it wasn’t diagnosed right away. In fact, I didn’t realize something was wrong until a few days later, when I started to get headaches. Then I would forget to do simple things, like turning the faucet off after washing my hands. Homework became impossibly difficult because I couldn’t focus. It took me hours to read a four page packet! Then I started getting headaches if I watched TV or tried to read a book. I lost my appetite for about a month and lost weight. It was awful.

My cousin, who’s my age, also had severe concussion a few years ago, and while he is doing fairly well now, he still gets severe headaches every once in awhile and has to have special arrangements for tests because it’s hard for him to focus.

My neighbor’s concussion was even worse. He hit a pothole while riding his bike, and even though he was wearing a helmet he hit his head hard and suffered a severe concussion. He’s not even recognizable as himself anymore; his brain is so screwed up. He lives in assisted living because his family can’t take care of him. There are days when he wakes up and for some reason can’t walk. Some mornings he doesn’t know who he is. He has hallucinations. He will never be himself again, and will never be able to function normally in society, just because of a concussion.

I guess what I’m trying to tell you is to be careful. Don’t let a coach blow off a concussion or force you to play too soon. Before you play a sport, or put your child into a sport, (especially sports like soccer and football) research the concussion rates and weigh the pros and cons. Brains are so much more intricate and delicate than most of us realize. If you break a bone, it hurts, you get an x-ray, wear a cast, and you’re healed. Much of the brain, however, is a mystery to modern science. Your brain controls everything you do. It allows you to run, to talk, to eat, to sing, and to smile. Your brain triggers the release of hormones and neurotransmitters that regulate processes such as digestion, alertness, mood, heart rate, and pain tolerance. Your brain processes sensory input, controls your decisions, and is the basis of your personality. You can live a relatively normal life with a broken bone. You can’t with a “broken brain”. For me, even though soccer is a passion of mine, I decided to give it up. To me, it wasn’t worth risking my life’s potential for a few more years of a high school sport. Is it worth it to you?

To help you in your decision, I encourage you to use these resources that I used to help me make mine. When on the Mayo Clinic link, explore the links on the left-hand side, such as symptoms, complications, and causes.

Concussion Rates by Sport and Gender
High School Concussion Statistics
Mayo Clinic Concussion

Throat Singing

Isn’t that fun? The Bulgarian Women’s Choir has such a unique sound! While Eric Whitacre uses drawn-out dissonant chords to pull at the heartstrings, Bulgarian music is all dissonance. With the way the notes are stacked, even a major chord, like the one from “Happy Birthday” (which is used in this song) can make you cringe. Basically, almost every chord clashes, yet they fly by so fast that it sounds right. It grabs your attention and makes you listen, but you’re not sure what you’re listening to, because there’s so much going on!

Songs by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir are some of all-time favorites to sing! Basically, you throw every “correct” singing technique out the window and sing “ugly”, which, in and of itself, is thrilling. But don’t get me wrong, these songs are almost impossibly hard, if they are to be done correctly. Listening, it may sound like a bunch of gibberish, but take a look at the complicated score and you will be proven wrong!

My choir is singing “Bre Petrunko” right now, which is the song in the video above. Every note I sing sounds wrong, even if it’s right, simply because it clashes, and the jumps in the transitions are hard to get! Not only that, but I have to be consistently counting by sixteenth notes in your head if I want even a hope of staying on tempo, and of coming in at the right times! And the whole song is crazy fast! All of that put aside, singing Bulgarian takes a special technique, called throat singing. Once I knew the notes and the rhythms, I had to completely change the way I sang them! Instead of supporting my voice with my diaphragm, I had to support it with my neck muscles, which feels quite strange.

All the hard work is worth it though, we finally get a section right. It’s hard to believe that the same choir who just sang Whitacre can open their mouths to sing Bulgarian two seconds later! Awesome.