Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: Alan McDougall on 17/06/2016 12:52:43
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My writing Alan McDougall
The normal human sensory system
It is thought that this organizing ability is partly genetically determined and activated by an individual’s early visual experience. Two special abilities of humans, which appear to be tied to our social evolution, are good face recognition and an ability to read the emotions of others.
The human nervous system has evolved to receive only a fraction of the possible stimuli that exist, and it differs from those of other animals in several respects. Thanks to our evolutionary history of living in trees, for instance, we have stereoscopic colour vision.
Yet compared with that of dogs and other animals, our perception of odours and sounds is very poor. Even more removed from human experience, bats find their way about by echoes, and some fish use electric fields, although all of them lack some of our perceptual abilities.
Our dominant sense is that of sight, that is why a human male , unlike most other animals can get sexually excited just by a picture of a strange beautiful human woman. Woman are likewise very visual beings and can fantasize a romance with a handsome man , she has only observed in a photo. Of course the terms I used handsome and beautiful are subjective, what is attractive to one person might not be attractive to another.
Our memories especially our short term memory are extremely limited and it became imperative for us to invent external means, to record, store and recall our memories, especially our long term memories for future reference. Namely, by means of writing, on pen and paper, print media, tape storage and now the colossal capacity of the computer that has given us an almost infinite place to store our memories.
Of course the ability to read what we wrote or interpret what we have stored in different media became an essential factor in our survival and this led to the schooling of children as we now see it all over the world.
If we observe a series of what we perceive visually as normal events and observe something unusual or abnormal, it always seems to remain in our visual field and memory longer, even though it might have happened at exactly the same amount of time or even faster. This is called the "Odd Visual Effect".
Ultimately tools like the internet might contain a complete copy and easy method of access to that knowledge, of all human activities and history down through the ages. This will allowed us to immensely free our minds for other tasks to create a new human species of highly advances superhuman or homo-sapient-superiors beings, that will have the ability to leave earth and explore the universe.
Attention blindness, is a memory and storage limitation of the human brain. Something we all are subjected to, but are mostly unaware of, until we are asked as an example, witness in court, for a crime committed and the necessity to recall exactly how that event played out before us that day.
Many accused persons have been wrongly jailed for life or even executed for this lack of accurate perception. Most witnesses do not lie, they report what they thought they had observed, which at times are far off of what actually happened on the scene of the crime.
Within the huge electromagnetic spectrum, we humans are only able to only use a tiny slit minute part of it, with our very limited visual sensory perception capacities. The same goes for our other sensory organs such as auditory vibration used by us for hearing, etc. I could go on but leave it at that for now.
Age makes a difference, with an 80 year of age person having a much less sensitivity to stimuli than a young person. A young child can hear sounds far outside the octave range of adults, even young adults.
The traditional five senses model , namely sight, sound, smell and taste is credited to Aristotle, but is very limiting and not at all accurate or complete.
What is called the five human senses can really be subdivided down further, into fields such as pressure sensitive, intensity of pain,, the ability to balance,, thirst, hunger,
Time
A case in point is the highly improved sensory ability of the world champion boxer Floyd May weather, he is able to slow down time, or observe, relative to his clumsier opponent, in slow motion, and react before he has even become aware of the coming punch. Sadly time and age reduces his advantages and this is why he should retire from boxing and be remembers for all time as one of the greatest boxers of all time, maybe even the greatest.
In one of his experiments the scientist, Eagleman had volunteers perform a backwards bungee jump free-fall while he transmitted a rapid succession of numbers to an LED on their wrists. He found that during the fall they were successfully able to read the numbers, which under normal conditions would have appeared too fast. I have to say, that is one of the most interesting and original experiments I've heard of lately and seems to conform that times slows down in a crises.
Smell
The sense of smell is closely connected to or memory portals as well as fragrances are to our emotions. Think of the fragrance of a beloved person and you will know what I mean.
There is now real evidence that people missing one sense don't just learn to use the others better. The brain adapts to the loss by giving itself a makeover. If one sense is lost, the areas of the brain normally devoted to handling that sensory information do not go unused they get rewired and put to work processing other senses. This is called cross modality by the sciences who study this phenomena.
An exception to augmenting human sensory perception is the case of autistic people, their problem is too many confusing sensory inputs, which leads to extreme agitation in these people.
Each entity/person view their aspect of reality in a unique way and try to describe what they have experience in the best manner they can, given the limitation of various tools of communication , such as speech, hearing, taste, feel and smell.
The human body can in some ways can be equated to the world wide web or internet, where all sorts of impulses messages are constantly been sent back and forth via its own internal huge network of neurons and hormones for it to react and take action in the correct way to specific stimulus. This in turn becomes the information base to the brain, organs and other structures both external and internal to maintain it in a stable harmonious state of health, safe from outside interference or danger to for its continued survival, within its environment, both near and far.
The reality we perceive is a but a fraction of the entire environment surrounding us because The Universe or evolution has designed us to only react or act to very specific impulses in order to sustain us as a viable and successful species on planet earth.
Thus; we are internally programmed to perceive only a narrow band and range of the environment of our vicinity due to an embedded limiting ingrained factors programmed into our sensory organs which only respond to sensory signals, that are essential for our continued survival as a viable sentient entity on planet earth.
As an example take the life of a frog and you will observe that although its eye sends host of messages to the cortex of its brain its brain is programmed to only react to the movement or vibration of its food source, which is mostly insects, and ignore or block out what is redundant information to its continual survival as a successful species on planet earth.
The frog is not concerned with the detail of stationary objects of the world around it He will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is determined only by size and movement. Another example of this is the security metal detector gate found in most airports, it will only beep when it senses metal and let any other object pass through.
I will not go into detailing sensory substitution, where for instant a blind person who has damaged or non functioning eyes but an undamaged visual cortex might be able to masters the skill of substituting his touch to his visual sensory cortex, by consciously transferring information/impulses from his touch receptors to his visual cortex for him to interpret and perceive as a sort of sight.
In blind persons, we can see that they can often learn to receive tactile information, their undamaged visual cortex can be also activated and they perceive it as a type of sight. Some blind folk have mastered how to use their hearing to perceive their location by emulating the ability of the bat family, by use of a click sound and resulting Echo and by this means be able to even ride a push bike to get around.
The human sensory organs such as the eye for sight ear for sound nose for smell skin for touch tongue pallet/nose for taste are very limited and can easily be fooled. However we humans the most highly intelligent sentient beings on our planet and have over the ages invented and created artificial means and methods to increase the range and sensitivity of our very limited five senses far beyond the barriers of the very normal limited range we have.
To name just a few of these instruments or tools we have the huge earth based or space located telescopes microscopes radio electron microscopes hadron supercolliders amplifiers computers television the internet and much more that I cannot bring to mind at this time.
Our autonomic nervous system keeps us alive by functioning with meticulous precision without us ever having to think about it and ensures continuous harmonious health of the body without any conscious direction from us. (until something very obvious goes wrong in the system).
Only then can we go on to create an extra safe location in the structures of our brains to store all these memories in new files namely in our temporal lobes.
The temporal lobe in the brain is the main area for memory storage and is there that one can find a lot of corrupt garbage memories, that must be purged by a method I will discuss later in this essay. However a great deal of our memories are located randomly over a large areas of the surface of the brain, by the programming intrinsic to evolution..
It hugely significance that we remove all the files in our brain which contain hurtful garbage in our memories, much of this which can be a specific frightening event or profound hurt in you past or maybe a person or persons you simply could not find in your heart to forgiveness. .
We hardly ever take in or notice exactly all that is happening around us and mostly dismiss much of what the brain takes as extraneous or redundant garbage because again this is the way evolution has programmed us to operate and maneuverings in our world.
Most of what I related in the above chapters is to get over to the reader the limitation our sensory abilities are if we consider the whole electromagnetic spectrum of which our eyes/brain only perceive a tiny part of it.
Another limitation of human perception and awareness is what is referred to as by learned psychologists and even street magicians, namely "attention blindness" something we all suffer from but are mostly unaware of until we are asked as to be a witness for example a crime committed in our presence and have to recall exactly in detail how that life threatening event enfolded before us that day.
Many accused persons have been wrongly jailed for life or even executed for this lack of accurate perception witnesses do not lie but they report what they thought they had observed which might be far off of what really happened on the scene of the crime.
Always be aware that each and every act or failure to act has an effect on a whole host of people.
The typical list of senses includes sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. To these five physical senses, we can attribute a sixth: mind. Naturally, with six senses there are six perceptions. Perception is the unreal part, the workings of mind.
Though the senses are necessarily limited, this is not the largest problem we have with them. The largest problem we have with the senses is the amount of attention paid to the information received. Even though the mind has to fill in gaps, it also neglects the vast majority of information provided to it. Most information goes into the subconscious and never enters conscious thought. The difference between conscious and unconscious is not a difference that can be mapped on a picture of the brain.
Neurons literally take turns participating as either. Neurons that are merely transmitters of information, including those that regulate bodily functions, are not part of this process. As with other cells of the body, they justifiably cannot be categorized as conscious or subconscious. They are purely functional; obeying the direction or reacting to the choices of neurons that do participate. We should detour temporarily into the workings of the nervous system so we can get a firm grasp of conscious and subconscious.
The nervous system is highly fascinating. Unlike any other cells constituting the body, neurons are completely independent. They have their own circulatory systems, they digest, and they think, they remember, they grow and they even kill each other. We are born with one set of neurons, and the neurons we die with were all there when we were born. No one knows exactly how long a neuron can live. There is no ideal body that can outlive the neurons; not including those circumstances where neurons die of "unnatural" causes (unnatural being anything other than their own old age).
Old age is a function of decay, to which neurons are extremely adept so long as they have the nutrients and stimuli to combat it. Each neuron is an independent entity; limited only to the contacts its axons and dendrites make. In essence, we can view the nervous system as a large pure democracy. Just as in a real democracy, though everyone can vote, typically only those involved with or affected by the subject will vote. Also, as in a real democracy, some votes carry greater weight than others do (here we are distinguishing from the ideal democracy). In reality, a democracy (applied to a nation, not a convenient population) is always regulated by a sample of the population (less than the whole).
Most often, democracies are regulated by pluralities. Plurality is a business term applied to stock voting, but is also applied in politics. When several options are provided in a vote, there may be no individual item that receives a majority. There may, however, be a single item that receives more affirmation than the others may, and is hence adopted. This would be called adoption through a plurality vote. To have a plurality means to have the control.
We know by scientific experiment that the human brain works incredibly fast. However, visual impressions are so complex that their processing takes several hundred milliseconds before they enter our consciousness. Scientists have now shown that this delay may vary in length. When the brain possesses some prior information, that is, when it already knows what it is about to see (A sort of precognition).
Until now, neuroscientists assumed that the processes leading up to conscious perception were rather rigid and that their timing did not vary.This flexibility and dynamism of the human brain and the variations between the brains of different individuals as well as the non psychical part namely the mind or soul; I believe exists, has led to explore ways of overcoming the barriers of human sensory perception.
The traditional five senses model , namely sight, sound, smell and taste is credited to Aristotle, but is very limiting and not at all accurate or complete.
What is called the five human senses can really be subdivided down further, into fields such as pressure sensitive, intensity of pain,, the ability to balance,, thirst, hunger,
A case in point is the highly improved sensory ability of the world champion boxer Floyd May weather, he is able to slow down time, or observe, relative to his clumsier opponent, in slow motion, and react before he has even become aware of the coming punch. Sadly time and age reduces his advantages and this is why he should retire from boxing and be remembers for all time as one of the greatest boxers of all time, maybe even the greatest.
Time?
In one of his experiments the scientist, Eagleman had volunteers perform a backwards bungee jump free-fall while he transmitted a rapid succession of numbers to an LED on their wrists. He found that during the fall they were successfully able to read the numbers, which under normal conditions would have appeared too fast. I have to say, that is one of the most interesting and original experiments I've heard of lately and seems to conform that times slows down in a crises.
The sense of smell is closely connected to or memory portals as well as fragrances are to our emotions. Think of the fragrance of a beloved person and you will know what I mean.
There is now real evidence that people missing one sense don't just learn to use the others better. The brain adapts to the loss by giving itself a makeover. If one sense is lost, the areas of the brain normally devoted to handling that sensory information do not go unused they get rewired and put to work processing other senses. This is called cross modality by the sciences who study this phenomena.
Of course the question of what is a normal state of consciousness, is open to speculation. The best definition I can give is a state of normal awakeness and full awareness of daily situations.
An exception to augmenting human sensory perception is the case of autistic people, their problem is too many confusing sensory inputs, which leads to extreme agitation in these people.
Any Comments?
Alan
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