Psychology -- Sensation, Perception, And the Senses

Sensation and Perception

Ordinarily, healthy human beings perceive their external environment through the five senses: the visual sense (sight), the auditory sense (hearing), the gustatory sense (taste), the olfactory sense (smell), and the tactile sense (touch), in addition to other types of specific sensory abilities made possible by those five sense and their interrelations (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2008). Examples of the other types of senses linked to the five primary senses first identified by Aristotle are nociception (pain reception), equilibrioception (balance reception), kinesthesia (limb position and motion reception), thermoception (temperature change perception), the awareness of the passage of time, and of directional travel (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2008).

Sensation and Perception in Relation to the Five Senses

In the human brain, signals from all five primary senses are received and interpreted in ways that permit those perceptions to provide information about the external world (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2008). The visual sense involves transmission of signals from the eyes through the optic nerve cells to thalamus in the midbrain and to the primary visual cortex of the occipital lobe (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2008). The auditory sense relies on differentiated structures in the form of auditory nerve bundles in the ear that route different types of sounds to different parts of the brain for interpretation.

The olfactory and gustatory senses are closely related and both transmit information to the cortex and to the amygdale and hippocampus (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2008). Generally, structures in the nose produce chemical responses to specific scents which they transmit directly to the olfactory cortex for interpretation. The tactile sense is provided by nerves located throughout the body, especially within the layers of the epidermis. Because of the importance of being able to respond quickly to dangerous sensations, nociception and thermoception transmit signals that directly stimulate spinal reflexes without requiring conscious perception or signal processing (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2008).

Reference

Gerrig, R., Zimbardo, P. (2008). Psychology and Life. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.