Question of perception

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by Ghostintheshell, Jan 11, 2012.

  1. Hellenologophobia Registered Senior Member

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    Here's a complete list.

    “Human beings have a multitude of senses. In addition to the traditionally recognized five senses of sight (ophthalmoception), hearing (audioception), taste (gustaoception), smell (olfacoception or olfacception), and touch (tactioception), other senses include temperature (thermoception), kinesthetic sense (proprioception), pain (nociception), balance (equilibrioception) and acceleration (kinesthesioception). What constitutes a sense is a matter of some debate, leading to difficulties in defining what exactly a sense is.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense
     
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  3. wlminex Banned Banned

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    makes "sense" to me . . . .!
     
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  5. Ghostintheshell Registered Member

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    Pain i would classify as a type of touch (physical pain i mean), same for temperature and acceleration. Balance, as mentioned earlier could also partially be grouped under "touch".

    I'm not really talking about the fine-tuned explanations of the main senses that we know of already, more about entirely new, or unrealised ones. I also don't really mean the senses that operate entirely under our levels of consciousness such as pulmonary stretch receptors - i mean senses that act as inputs on a conscious level mainly.
     
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  7. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Human sensory perception has evolved to benefit survival, using only a subset of all the information the world is sending. Clearly there is more. Our evolved intellect collects some of it, and our machines do, too. Both of those involve complex processing to arrive at a detection decision.

    But even if infinite bandwidth were achievable, an infinite energy source, infinite processing power and instant access to every infinitesimal point in the universe, it's hard to imagine any scenario in which all the hidden information would somehow be detected and understood.

    Talk about an unending software project.

    Given the futility of this, it seems that unless the field of metaphysics experiences a breakthrough, we are doomed to face mystery as long as we exist.
     
  8. Reiku Banned Banned

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    My studies of consciousness, (I am like the poster boy here for this subject) would suggest that there is a unified sense; touch, smell, hear, taste, sight are sensory subjective phenomenon of a unified sense which is the being itself. What would constitute a sense therefor, is anything that we evaluate as information. The overall information makes the sense called consciousness.
     
  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Many animals have more than our three types of photoreceptors, so they see a wider spectrum. Birds can see up into the ultraviolet, and that's the secret to being able to tell the sexes apart when they look the same to us: ultraviolet pigmentation. Bees have something like seven types of photoreceptors, and that's how they can tell which flowers have nectar.

    It's hypothesized that some species which migrate by flying (many birds, monarch butterflies, etc.) can sense the earth's magnetic field and that's how they navigate.
     
  10. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    More related trivia:

    All the migratory animals, from insects to whales, have something akin to spatial perception, sometimes traveling thousands of miles.

    Some ants are known to count their steps from food to the nest. Bees do a dance to point to the angle of the pollen source from the hive, and their community can read the information and fly to the food.

    Stationary cows tend to face either north or south.

    Some animals behave unusually just before an earthquake.

    Birds will fall silent during a partial solar eclipse, yet they will sing on a cloudy day.

    Animals that travel in groups have a means of finding direction as a community decision that involves not only spatial perception of a compass heading, but also the ability to sense and respond to movements of the group itself.

    Plants turn their flowers to follow the sun in order to maintain high visibility that attracts pollinators.

    A certain moth protects itself from bats by sympathetic emission of a chirp that appears to the bat as a return signal, effectively jamming the bat's perception.

    Even some primitive cells can swim through water trying to catch food while maintaining a reference to the sun, to which they return in a loop, in order to keep their photosynthesis apparatus working.

    Every color, texture and pattern that evolved due to visual capabilities of predators, mates, pollinators, or rivals, seems to have evolved jointly, so that the one making display (or camouflage) and the one developing the visual acuity (or weakness) is exploited to make the creature most or least visible as needed for survival.

    Bird song has specialized within the audio band into discrete pitches and durations that differentiate one species (or sub species) from another. And the melodies are so memorable to us that we can detect the creatures merely by melodic contours.

    Female mosquitoes appear to select their mates by the spectral content of their buzzing.

    Other insects that we hear using the audio band include crickets and cicadas. Compare these with whale song, and a common element is frequency modulation, which mitigates the natural damping of a particular environment (generally at a particular frequency), to increase the odds of transmission.

    Snakes do well with olfactory and infrared perception. Other reptiles are very quick in optical band perception, fast enough to catch flies.

    Many animals leave scent trails to navigate, such as mice, and others do so to mark territory.

    Animals perceive threats, running from sounds or smells, striking at movement, or raising audible alarms to the community.

    Taste and smell appear to have evolved from fish who have a similar capability.

    Hounds can take a scent and track a moving target hours after it passed though the vicinity.

    A hawk can dive and catch a rabbit seen from its perch 10 to 20 stories high.

    A sparrow can catch a bread crumb before it hits the ground but will not even attempt to intercept a decoy such as plastic.

    Some aspects of perception tend to be logarithmic. Humans experience logarithmic compression of amplitude and frequency. Thus we maintain a degree of sensitivity to subtle changes of muted sounds, responding similarly to large changes at high amplitude; and we preserve the sensitivity to subtle changes at low frequency, while responding similarly to large shifts at high frequency. These features enable us with a relatively wide the dynamic range and frequency response.

    Voice spectrograms show that we perceive and differentiate between phonemes according to whether they are periodic (voiced) or not (unvoiced). Within both groups, features can be seen in the spectrograms that our aural perception is capable of recognizing in real time. Many voiced phonemes contain sets of tones, resonated in the vocal tract during speech, to produce usually two or three tones in a group, with characteristic contours visible in the spectrogram, that upon hearing we are able to recognize and distinguish in real time.

    It has been said that aural perception is to visual perception as differentiation is to integration.

    The thresholds at which we perceive changes in sensory stimulus are sometimes called differential limens of perception.

    Some people, including many classical composers, associate color with sound, and some report a vivid color perception that is analogous to shimmering colored lights, one of various forms of coupling between perception and sense known as synesthesia.
     
  11. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Yet Helen Keller had more going for her in this regard than fully sensate individuals.
     
  12. scheherazade Northern Horse Whisperer Valued Senior Member

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    Our awareness of 'being aware' is an interesting 'sense' to me, in that it allows us to conceptualize ourselves following a perceived course of action prior to embarking upon it, and to contemplate several options simultaneously before deciding.

    Our five basic senses can be refined into subsets based on which nerve centers in our brain are activated by various stimulation detected. As brain mapping technology becomes more advanced, this will become more self-evident, my hypothesis.

    These subsets of senses can interact with each other in varying combinations to create an extraordinarily wide range of senses which we are probably not consciously aware that we use everyday. There does seem to be a range of variability between individuals when it comes to their basic perception with proprioception, thermoception and nociception being quite evident in my own observations.

    The ability to extrapolate from existing data to realize potentials as yet not experienced would seem to be another 'sense', the 'What If' sense, if you will humor me.

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    In the meantime, we use the word 'intuition' to capture some part of these senses and mockingly attribute most of the rest as being from the land of 'woo-woo'.

    I would suggest that science is only beginning to recognize that many of our best fantasy works were but paving the road for today's technology.

    Were my grandmother alive today, she would certainly remark that, "Toto, I have a feeling that we're not in Kansas anymore..."

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  13. Reiku Banned Banned

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    This is true.

    Actually, something many people don't know is that a Bird's Magnetoreceptors are due to the quantum mechanical phenomenon of the zeno effect.

    Pfft... and they say quantum mechanics has no place for consciousness...
     
  14. Reiku Banned Banned

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    By the way, I am not suggesting magnetoreceptors have anything to do with consciousness. Just saying that if a Bird uses quantum mechanics, why not the brain in the mechanical explanation of perception?
     

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