Sensation and Perception

Notes from my morning commute in obvious need of development.  

The illusion of a continuous reality. Gestalt the feeling that we have complete and discrete experiences unedited at the time but ultimately prone to the distortions of memory, or do you think that too is concrete ?

Count the passes video (take the test)
Magic tricks
Optical illusions
Hearing your name at a party
Touch your nose touch your toes
A shot in the dark (random firing of nerves )
The visual blind spot
The "event window" .1ms-10mins
The shifting baseline or what it means to be adaptive.

Sensation is not perception perception is not understanding understanding is not action.

The physiological responses of our sensory apparatus are regulated by a feedback loop with our brains. Nowhere is this more clear than in hearing. A person with normal hearing at a noisy party is still able to concentrate on a nearby conversation but if your name is spoken a cross the room there is a good chance you will pick it up all while hearing very little of what is going on In-between.

The important thing about this gestalt is that it is seamless until it breaks down. Showing someone a blind spot is fairly easy. But no matter how many times you see things vanish into it you will still not see that it is there. The amount of time it takes each of your senses to reach your brain depends on where the sense takes place. There is a recent example that should become as famous as the blind spot. We will call it the temporal continuity illusion. Touch your toes, now touch your nose (like in the children's song but without the rest) now touch them both. Funny didn't it feel like you touched them both at the same time when you touched them both at the same time? Bu there is a difference in how far that sense data must travel. So either the graininess of your sense is such that you can't feel things below that threshold (a measure of your perceptual present and its limits) or your experience of time is being rewritten to make the sense data synchronize.