How Much Can We Trust On Our Sense Perception?

What Is Sense Perception?

Sense is any of the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch, by which the body perceives an external stimulus. There are 5 common sense: Smell, Observation, Touch, Taste and Hear. Thus Sense perception is our way of receive knowledge through this 5 senses. However, all of our 5 sense was not use in their fully potential, there is a balance between each sense. If you are really good at one sense, you will have at least one bad sense, vice versa. Such as blind people are really good at hear and touch while they are bad at Observation.

How Much Can We Trust On Our Sense?

People are suck at multi-tasking, so people also suck at using multiple sense. For example, when we are doing our some job really hard, we can barely hear what the people said around us, although we can hear the content, we may not fully comprehend the meaning of the word because we are focusing on something else. So will other sense cheat us? Yes, definitely. One of  examples is called McGurk Effect. It is a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. The illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound. Here is a demonstration of this effect:

From this video, we can learn that the sound of what we hear from the video changed when the visual imagine has changed. Thus, our sense is messing the information we received in some perspective.

Here is another example, look at the sentence below:

THIS SENTENCE HAS

HAS SOMETHING WRONG

WITH IT.

I think there is no doubt that the sentence I show is: “This sentence has something wrong with it”, but if you read the sentence throughly, you will figure out that I use HAS twice in the sentence. Although the sentence itself imply that there is something wrong among the sentence, people will not revise it because people’s sense has told them that they have already know the sentence. So  our senses tricks us once again.

In addition, one of the most famous example that people sense is cheating us is the moving “still imagine”.屏幕快照 2015-11-09 下午10.14.26

When I first show you the conner of this imagine, it looks like still because there is no interference in this imagine.

屏幕快照 2015-11-09 下午10.14.35

But when we remove a square block, we can feel some motion inside the imagine.

屏幕快照 2015-11-09 下午10.14.43

The more we reveal from the imagine, the more motion we can feel. However, from the first imagine, we can see that the photo is completely still, and we can say that it is our sense messing the information we received once again.

Conclusion

People are really confident about their senses, but the reality is that what we see may not match up to the reality at all, as the previous examples demonstrated, our sense is sometime transmit the knowledge we received wrongfully, or even create the effect of illusion. People should be humble about their sense perception, otherwise we may eventually make some mistake.

Resources:

http://www.theoryofknowledge.net/ways-of-knowing/sense-perception/quotes-on-sense-perception/

http://ispptok.blogspot.com/2006/10/sense-perception.html