One topic that we covered in class is sensory adaptation. Sensory adaptation is when someone experiences a stimulus and your sensitivity to this stimulus decreases over time usually to the point of you no longer even noticing it at all. In class he related it to putting on a bandaid and sometime later you can no longer feel it. This reminds me of when I got braces and all of the things that lead up to them and the things that come after them. When it was first decided that I needed braces I had to get what is called an expander. Its basically this metal bridge-like object that connects to your two back teeth and slowly pushes them apart spacing out your teeth. And once I had it everyday or every other day I had to turn it with a key which would expand it further. I remember it being extremely uncomfortable and sometimes painful at the beginning of the day and not hurting at all by lunch time. Similarly, when I first got my braces they felt really weird and awkward having all this extra metal in my mouth, but a few weeks later I wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference. Lastly, there’s the retainer and just like the the other two steps (and the couple that I skipped), the retainer is very uncomfortable when you first put it in, especially if you stop wearing it for some time, but once you wear it for some time it does not bother you at all. This is a perfect example of sensory adaptation. Thee are all things that you cannot help but notice at first and then over time you may forget that they are there at all. This is also like selective attention. Your brain assesses that these stimuli do not require any focus and neglects them in favor of more important stimuli.
I accidentally published this to the wrong site on my account initially.
Sensory adaptation is a quite fascinating subject and even more interesting given the fact that we do not even realize it is happening when it actually is happening. This phenomena is something that tends to happen when we are younger, but in reality can happen anytime and anywhere. When we are younger, since we are new to this world, we are not accustomed to a lot of different things and will react in a negative way when exposed. Thinking about it now, I went through many different cases of sensory adaptations, but the one that is most vivid to me is noise adaptation. Every 4th of July, my town, like many other towns, host a short firework show where many are welcomed to come and enjoy the performance. For anyone that has been to these shows, you know that spectators are allowed to be fairly close to fireworks and know how loud they can be. I can remember almost exactly my first time going when I was younger and I was not familiar with how loud and, what I thought at the time, terrifying they can be. As soon as they started lighting off and popping in the distant air, my instant reaction came out of pure terror. The loud bangs made my ear drums nearly pop and I took cover underneath a blanket while while holding my hands over my ears to reduce the noise level. This was probably the most horrifying thirty minutes of my young life and cried to my parents about how I wanted to go home halfway through. The years after this, I got progressively better with the noise without myself even realizing it. The year directly after I still winced every other moment pending the severity of the noise, but sat through the entire thing with no complaints. Then, for every year after the noise was just an after thought as I would go around hanging out and talking with friends without even recognizing the noise in the background. To me it is crazy how these type of things happen naturally without much recognition like your experience with braces.