What

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Whats that smell? Do you hear that noise? Taste
this! Look at me! Feel this, isnt it soft?

• We use these phrases because of our senses.
  Without us even knowing, our sense organs (nose,
  eyes, ears, tongue, and skin) are taking in
  information and sending it to the brain for
  processing.
• Both people and animals get all of their
  knowledge from their senses, and that is why our
  senses are so important.

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Prologue to Senses

• Human life would be very different without the
  ability to sense and perceive external stimuli
• Imagine your world without the ability to see,
  hear, smell, touch, and feel
• Psychologists are interested in sensation and
  perception as inputs to and outputs from the
  brain

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Sensation Receiving messages about the
world
Sense Organs Sensory Receptors
Neural Impulses

• There are five types of senses

Occipital
Gustatory
Olfactory
Auditory
Tactile
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Sensation Receiving messages

• Stimuli What messages can be received?
• Anything capable of exciting a sensory receptor
  cell can be defined as a stimulus
• Examples include sound, light, heat, cold, odor,
  color, touch, and pressure

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Sensation Receiving messages

• Transduction Translating messages into the
  brains language
• Sense organs transduce sensory energy into neural
  (bioelectrical) energy
• Converting one type of energy into another type
  is the process of transduction
• Your brain only deals with bioelectrical impulses
  so transduction must occur
• what cannot be transduced
• cannot be a stimulus
• Gate Control Theory

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Homeostasis gt Keeping Balance

• Sensory limits How strong must the message
  (signal) be for it to be detected by the sensory
  receptor?
• Absolute thresholds
• Difference thresholds JND also known as Webers
  Law
• Sensory adaptation and habituation
• Study of these sensory limits and phenomena is
  called Psychophysics

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Protection

• The eyebrows are strips of hair above your eye,
  which prevent sweat from running into them.
• Eyelashes help keep the eye clean by collecting
  small dirt and dust particles floating through
  the air.
• The eyelids sweep dirt from the surface of the
  eye, and protect the eye from injury.
• Tears are sterile drops of clean water, which
  constantly bathe the front of the eye, keeping it
  clean and moist.

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Vision Your human camera

• The eye How does it work?
• The transduction of light wave/particles into
  neural energy is carried out by the receptor
  cells in the retina of the eye
• The retina has 2 general types of cells that
  engage in transduction
• rods (for transducing black/white light)
• cones (for transducing colored light)

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Sense-Sational Facts!

• Most people blink every 2-10 seconds.
• Each time you blink you shut your eyes for .3
  seconds, which means your eyes are closed 30
  minutes a day from blinking.
• A new born baby sees the world upside down
  because it takes some time for the babys brain
  to learn to turn the picture right-side up.

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• What is it and how does it work?
• Color is the conscious experience that results
  from the processing of light energy of differing
  frequencies by the eye and the brain
• You are told your colors as a child you could
  have just as easily have been told red is blue.
  So color is created by the brain!! It is
  cognitive!

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Vision Your human camera

• The Trichromatic Theory
• 3 cone types red, green, and blue cones
• similar to the RGB setup on your color TV
• red cones detect red, blue detect blue, etc.
• problems exist in this theory however because
  there is no known mechanism in the brain for
  blending the three colors into the rich hue of
  color that we can see

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• The Opponent-process Theory
• 3 cones types (similar to trichromatic theory)
  but each of the three have opponent processes
  (unlike trichromatic theory)
• Red-green cones, blue-yellow cones, and
  black-white cones Christmas, Spring, Ying-Yang
• After-images and inversions of color, e.g.,
  sunset after-images, attest to the probability
  that the opponent-process theory is correct

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HearingAuditory

• sense that detects vibratory
  changes in air sound waves
• sound waves are changes in air pressure
• throwing rock into still lake will give a picture
  of
• sound waves
  

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Hearing Sensing sound waves

• Sound What is it?
• Sound waves are measured by the frequency
  amplitude
• frequency pitch/note
• amplitude loudness/decibels
• Place Theory
• Frequency Theory

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Sense-Sational facts!

• Children have more sensitive ears than adults,
  and can recognize a wider variety of noises.
• Dolphins have the best sense of hearing among all
  animals. They can hear 14 times better than
  humans.
• Animals hear more sounds than humans.
• When you go up high elevations, the change in
  pressure causes you ears to pop.

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Body Senses Messages from myself about myself

• Orientation and movement senses
• Vestibular organs
• located in the inner ear, there are movement
  detectors and orientation detectors
• semi-circular canals provide orientation
  detection or rotary movement detection
• processes involved in detection of movement in
  vestibular organs

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Body Senses

• Kinesthetic senses
• located in the muscles, joints,
• skin, they provide information about
• your movement in space, posture,
• orientation in space

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Pressure, Temperature, Pain
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Phantom Sense
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Sense-Sational Facts!

• You have more pain nerve endings than any other
  type.
• The least sensitive part of your body is the
  middle of your back.
• The most sensitive areas of your body are your
  hands, lips, face, neck, tongue, fingertips, and
  feet.
• There are about 100 touch receptors in each of
  your fingertips.

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Sour
10,000 taste buds
Bitter
Umami
Salty
Sour
Sweet
Salty

• chemical lock/key sensation

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Sense-Sational Facts!

• We have almost 10,000 taste buds inside our
  mouths even on the roof of our mouths.
• Insects have the most highly developed sense of
  taste. They have taste organs on their feet,
  antennae, and mouthparts.
• In general, girls have more taste buds than boys.
• Taste is the weakest of the five senses.
• Cats cannot taste sweet!

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smell is connected well to our memory
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Sense-Sational Facts!

• Dogs have 1 million smell cells per nostril and
  their smell cells are 100 times larger than
  humans.
• People who cannot smell have a condition called
  Anosmia.
• If your nose is at its best, you can tell the
  difference between 4000-10,000 smells.
• As you get older your sense of smell gets worse.
  Children are more likely to have better sense of
  smell than their parents or grandparents.
• Babies are born with an acute sense of smell.