This past summer, my friends and I decided one night while we were at the beach that we would go get our palms read on the boardwalk. I had always been curious every time I walked by a palm reader in the past, and now that my friends had agreed it would be a fun thing to do, I was genuinely excited to do it. Once my friends and I arrived at the palm reader, I immediately sat down and was told to give my name and age. After doing so, the palm reader began diving into the future of my life, and I completely believed it. The first thing she told me was that I would go into the medical field. This made me perk up since I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I was a little girl. As the palm reader went on, more things began sounding exactly like how I’ve always wanted my life to look in the future. By the end of the session, I was convinced that this palm reader had actually seen into my future and given me a glimpse of what’s to come. It wasn’t until I went home and told my parents what the palm reader had said, that I realized that she was just feeding off of my reactions, personality, looks, and mannerisms to come up with things to say that would most likely align with how she perceived me. The palm reader was using perceptionto come up with the best interpretation of how my life would end up. The American Psychological Organization defines perception as, “the process or result of becoming aware of objects, relationships, and events by means of the senses, which includes such activities as recognizing, observing, and discriminating. These activities enable organisms to organize and interpret the stimuli received into meaningful knowledge and to act in a coordinated manner” (American Psychological Organization, 2018).In my case, the palm reader wasn’t reading my palm, she was reading me, my reactions, my aura, and all of the stimuli she could to predict my future. Humans use perception all the time. Sometimes our perceptions are correct, and sometimes not. However, every time we make a perception, we are using information processing to come to some conclusion. There are two types of processing that can used, bottom-up processing or top-down processing. Bottom-up processing begins with sensory information and works up to how the brain takes that information in. Top-down processing begins with knowledge or expectations and works down to interpret something we see. The palm reader reading me was using bottom-up processing to predict my future based off of the stimuli her brain was taking in. Psychology truly is all around us because our brains are working, interpreting, and processing all of the time. The future my palm reader predicted may not be accurate, but at least the experience gave me a better understanding of how humans use perception every day.
Sources
APA Dictionary of Psychology. (2018). Retrieved from https://dictionary.apa.org/perception
Resnick, B. (2019, August 8). How desire can warp our view of the world. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/8/8/20706126/motivated-perception-psychology