Transcript Brain Functions: PERCEPTION

Please read the packet at your table!
Brain Functions:
PERCEPTION
1. Perception is the process of attaining
awareness or understanding of the
environment by turning the raw input of
the senses into meaningful experience.
2. Sensory processing is "hardwired" into
the brain, with the different senses
processed in different brain regions.
<------Touch
<-----Sight
Smell ------>
^
l
l
Hearing
3. However, brain processing short-cuts
and errors can result in misinterpretations
of reality!
What is this?
In the Stone Age, assuming ambiguous stimuli had meaning
and intent resulted in increased survival & reproduction
4. Humans' brains evolved very
strong pattern-seeking
tendencies, especially for faces
and animal shapes.
(Why these in particular?)
Pareidolia:(pa-ree-DOE-lia)
a type of illusion or
misperception involving a
ambiguous stimulus being
perceived as something clear
and distinct.
Some pareidolia is sort of famous, like these of devils in
the smoke of the burning World Trade Center on 9/11
The "Face on Mars" got everyone stirred up in the 70's
and sold a lot of books relating the "facts" of Martian
civilization.
1976
2006
These pictures show that your brain finds more meaningful images when it has less
information to go on. The picture on the left was taken with a low resolution camera in
1976, while the one on the right was taken with a higher resolution camera in 2006. Blur
your vision and look at the 2006 photo. Look familiar?
This grilled cheese sandwich sold for $28,000 on Ebay
because it supposedly contains the face of the Virgin
Mary.
toast Virgin
1930's German-American movie star
Marlene Dietrich.
Some pareidolia is just plain cool.
Audio pareidolia and priming
Misperception can also occur from
your brain combining information from
two or more senses.
This is called "The McGurk Effect"