Author: Mason Keller

Have you ever wondered why we feel the pain others feel when getting injured or rejected, or the happy feelings someone gets when their significant other proposes? The answer to that question would be mirror neurons. Mirror neurons in the brain of animals and humans activate during observational learning, they fire when someone performs an action and when someone watches someone else perform the same action. We watch someone do something we experience it with them. When someone scrapes their knee on the concrete we somehow feel that pain even though our knee is perfectly ok. Mirror neurons help us experience and feel the things others we watch and observe are experiencing and feeling. This one movie I watched called Frozen was about three people who get stuck on a ski lift. They are stuck there for days in the freezing cold up on a ski lift with no one there to help or rescue them. The one character decides to try and jump off the ski lift. He lands and breaks both of his legs. The scene shows his knees all bloody with the bone sticking out while he is screaming in pain telling his friends on the lift how he cant feel his legs and how the bone is sticking out. Watching this scene and even writing about it makes me extremely uncomfortable, the feeling I get in my stomach thinking about that and the weak, weird feeling I get in my knees is a reaction I get because of mirror neurons. Even though my knees aren’t broken and my bones aren’t sticking out I still feel as if they were. I am observing and watching someone else experience an injury like this, a pain like this, and the mirror neurons in my brain activate making me feel a feeling as though I was the one in that situation. There are so many feelings and experiences mirror neurons make us experience, a way for us to understand others pain, others happiness and sadness. All of these feelings we feel and don’t know why we feel them are because of mirror neurons.

Sensory Adaption is diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation. My roommate and I have an air freshener plug-in device in our room. The first time we plugged it in, the room smelt amazing all day. Even though the perfume wasn’t as strong the following day, we could still detect it. Over time, as we smelled it less and less, we began to believe it stopped working or had run out of smelling juice. However, when we checked, it was still functioning and still had a lot of smelling juice left. One day when our friends visited, they instantly commented, “Wow, it smells really good in here, what is that.” My roommate and I couldn’t understand why they could smell it but we couldn’t until something clicked in my brain. Our senses had become so accustomed to the smell of the air freshener that it eventually seemed to vanish. This is an excellent example of a sensory adaptation that really helped me understand this idea. We were constantly stimulated by the smell of the air freshener, so over time our sensitivity to it diminished. Our nose’s sensitivity to this particular fragrance decreased as a result of the frequent stimulation that came from smelling it every time we were in our room. Other people’s sensitivity to that smell persisted because they weren’t always in our room and didn’t have that constant stimulation. Similar to this is how some people claim that your house might smell a certain way, but you don’t immediately recall any particular smell when you think of your home. There can be a specific scent you sense when entering a new place or an environment you don’t visit frequently. The “scent” of your home may start to fade if you spend a lot of time there due of the constant stimulus. Someone who visits your home might still smell the scent since they are more sensitive to it than you are because they aren’t continually in the house and smelling it. Those are examples of sensory adaptation in relation to smell. Here is an example of a hearing sensory adaptation. While riding the train with mom I said to her, “Wow, I would never want to live right near the train tracks; that would be so loud.” she responded with. “After a month or two in the house, you don’t really hear the train anymore, so it’s not really that horrible.” This mad no sense to me at the time, how could that loud sound just go away? Now I realize that once your sensory system has adapted to the continual stimulus of hearing the train for several months, you will no longer be impacted by its loud noises. Most of the time you don’t even realize that that sense has gone away, it just isn’t there anymore. This is the power of sensory adaption, its all in your mind, it doesn’t even click as to why these senses have just gone away. These examples have fully helped me understand this concept, and I can now apply it to so many things in my life.

-I posted my response in the wrong place over at first

Sensory Adaption is diminished sensitivity as a consequence of constant stimulation. My roommate and I have an air freshener plug-in device in our room. The first time we plugged it in, the room smelt amazing all day. Even though the perfume wasn’t as strong the following day, we could still detect it. Over time, as we smelled it less and less, we began to believe it stopped working or had run out of smelling juice. However, when we checked, it was still functioning and still had a lot of smelling juice left. One day when our friends visited, they instantly commented, “Wow, it smells really good in here, what is that.” My roommate and I couldn’t understand why they could smell it but we couldn’t until something clicked in my brain. Our senses had become so accustomed to the smell of the air freshener that it eventually seemed to vanish. This is an excellent example of a sensory adaptation that really helped me understand this idea. We were constantly stimulated by the smell of the air freshener, so over time our sensitivity to it diminished. Our nose’s sensitivity to this particular fragrance decreased as a result of the frequent stimulation that came from smelling it every time we were in our room. Other people’s sensitivity to that smell persisted because they weren’t always in our room and didn’t have that constant stimulation. Similar to this is how some people claim that your house might smell a certain way, but you don’t immediately recall any particular smell when you think of your home. There can be a specific scent you sense when entering a new place or an environment you don’t visit frequently. The “scent” of your home may start to fade if you spend a lot of time there due of the constant stimulus. Someone who visits your home might still smell the scent since they are more sensitive to it than you are because they aren’t continually in the house and smelling it. Those are examples of sensory adaptation in relation to smell. Here is an example of a hearing sensory adaptation. While riding the train with mom I said to her, “Wow, I would never want to live right near the train tracks; that would be so loud.” she responded with. “After a month or two in the house, you don’t really hear the train anymore, so it’s not really that horrible.” This mad no sense to me at the time, how could that loud sound just go away? Now I realize that once your sensory system has adapted to the continual stimulus of hearing the train for several months, you will no longer be impacted by its loud noises. Most of the time you don’t even realize that that sense has gone away, it just isn’t there anymore. This is the power of sensory adaption, its all in your mind, it doesn’t even click as to why these senses have just gone away. These examples have fully helped me understand this concept, and I can now apply it to so many things in my life.