Perception Experiment
Take a moment to look around the room. What do you see? Now close your eyes and listen. What do you hear? Finally, sniff deeply, paying attention to any odors. What do you smell? This simple exercise tells you a lot about perception. When you looked, you sensed colors, edges, boundaries, and contrasts, but you perceived objects--perhaps a desk, a reading lamp, a vase of flowers, a half-eaten piece of cake, or a dog on the lawn outside the window. When you listened, you sensed pitches and frequencies, but perceived events--music from the radio, the whirring of a fan, or the barking of a dog. When you sniffed, you sensed invisible vapors in the air, but you perceived objects--the scent of carnations or the aroma of chocolate from the neglected cake. The first lesson, then, is that we sense stimuli but perceive objects and events.
In each case, you made no conscious attempt to transform the information picked up by your sensory receptors. The task was completed in a twinkling--automatically. By the time perception became conscious, the interpretations had already been made. Thus the second lesson is that perception is usually effortless. The multimodal process of perception can be defined as the brain's attempt to describe objects and events in the world, based on sensory input and knowledge. By combining information provided by senses with knowledge derived from the past experience, the brain creates representations of objects and events. Perception is actually part of the continuum of information processing by the central nervous system. The continuum begins with sensation, which blends into perception, which blends into attention, which blends into working memory, which blends into thought. Thus, it is often difficult to define the precise point at which one process leaves off and the next begins.
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