Journal Entry 1 Chapter 14: Perception

The purpose of Chapter 14 was to discuss the different senses, which would be vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Most philosophers and psychologists considered perception as a fundamentally psychological function as the minds link to external reality. They also believed that everything we know comes from what our senses present to us. The eyes and sight were commonly compared to a camera, but because of the eyes constant jiggling back and forth without producing a blurred image, this metaphor isn’t as fitting. Edwin Boring described what he called the “first mystery of vision,” which asks why we have two eyes yet do not see in double vision. This chapter also provided many optical illusions to show how our vision and our brain can sometimes perceive things incorrectly or in a weird way. An example of an optical illusion that was used would be the image of the woman that was created by Edwin Boring, where it could either appear as a young woman or and old hag, and sometimes even switch back and forth between the two. 

This shows how our perception can change, and the implications of this would be that our perception is not always certain; it depends on the cues that it decides to interpret at that moment, where the next it may decide to interpret different cues. A key concept that was discussed in this chapter was the Neural Approach to visual perception, which explained how the brain is able to turn sensory information into vision. They stated that from the rods and the cones, nerve impulses are able to travel along parallel pathways before being sent to different areas of the brain where they will be sorted by things like color, shape, movement, and depth before being sent to specialized receptive areas. This explanation allows us to learn about the workings of visual perception at a micro-level.