February, Blog 2

Perception, then, is how a person sees the world, as influenced by the social, political. And cultural experiences that frame and mark her or him. Perception in the watered-down version is simply put, how we see things. We construct in our minds our experience of things. Words for example have the meanings that we give them. If I say book in English you might think of a series of pages bound together that you can read information from, and that is because you have seen a book since you were young. Someone told you what a book was, they pointed at it and said book. Perhaps you have even read one, but if I said buch you might look at me with nothing coming to mind. Someone who grew up speaking a different language, however, would hear the word buch and instantly think of our English equivalent of book.

            If you and your brother tried to recall the same memory and somehow end up telling a similar story but with different details that is another perception you might have. I have gotten in an intense conversation with my brother all about the color of dress I wore that one time when we were little. I said it was blue, he said it was pink. I remembered blue because I was so excited to pick out the dress and wear it, it had become my favorite dress. My brother said it was pink because I was a girl. In case you were wondering the dress was blue, our mother settled it with a photo she so happened to take that particular day. I remembered blue because that was my favorite color at the time, and I was excited to own it. My brother said pink simply because it was a girly color. He did not care to remember that detail. His construct of the childhood memory did not revolve around what we were wearing but around what we were doing. He can recall some different details than I can. Its what we choose to remember and why. He quickly decided that riding roller coasters was a lot more important with what we wore, and I would have to agree. I just remember a few more random details than him.

            Have you ever seen the pictures that have multiple faces in it, and the person next to you can see different ones that you? It takes you a minute after they point out where it is to adjust how you are looking at the photo to see what they see. Reality is full of these moments. You choose to see something one way, either you were taught that way or you developed it for a certain reason. It does not mean you do not have the ability to adjust your perception, just that you mainly see it one way. Your experiences shape how you see things. Take cranberry juice for example, I find it absolutely bitter, my husband finds it sweet. Sure, you could say our tastes buds are different, but you could also say our brains just perceive it differently. Another example is colors. I see different colors than you, why? It is because we do not have the same number of rods and cones in our eyes. We see blue but different shades. Cobalt or ultramarine blue is considered the most ‘true’ blue, but as we both look at it we are able to see different colors. Now, we may see different colors but as we were raised there was someone pointing at the color blue and saying, “this is blue.” So even if we see different colors and your blue could look like my red we still know that this color is blue, all because someone perceived it blue, named it so, and told generations to come that this is a color and it is blue. Perceptions, I wonder what someone would name their color blue if they were never told what it was.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3554564/Do-reality-perception-world-simply-ILLUSION-says-leading-expert.html

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=4zQMQLLVkFYC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=perception+of+color&ots=SRCTGo-ozM&sig=Bu9hj4A0H7HTv756Qa-6-EAXl8U#v=onepage&q=perception%20of%20color&f=false