Journal 1: Chapter 14 on Perception

Within Chapter 14 the main purpose was to try to explain how we take in and process the external stimulus around us. The book and lecture discusses how we take information in through our 5 senses but then gets into how it is processed from there. It is explained through two approaches, the neural and cognitive approach. The neural approach focuses on how we take information and turn it into an image or what we see in our minds. While the cognitive approach is more concerned with the processes we go through in our brains in order to identify large and small changes within stimulus as well as how the approaches work together. A key concept within this chapter has to do with recognition of objects. There are many steps in which our brain has to go through to say that yes a thing with four legs and a flat surface on top to recognizing it as a table. Without this concept we would not have common words to communicate with each other and would be describing things in excess.  A large assumption that can be confusing is that everyone perceives external stimuli the same way. Everyone's reality would be identical and the viral white and gold or blue and black dress scandal would not be a great debate. This assumption is largely disproved by psychologists today but also discovered in patients with processing and cognitive disorders. One of those conditions being face blindness or prosopagnosia. 

Prosopagnosia, or face blindness is the inability to see faces. Oliver Sacks's was a neurologist interested in studying this condition. He wrote a book called "The man who mistook his wife for a hat". In this book he describes how many people do not even realize they have this, they just adapt because it is how they have always perceived their surroundings. The concept of perception and neural processing has so many aspects that it can become overwhelming. Although there are many diagnosis now for different processing and recognition errors I am sure there are rare circumstances that are still unknown for how some individuals process their external surroundings.