Skip to main content

Home/ All Things TOK/ Group items tagged nose

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
anonymous

Basics - Primal, Acute and Easily Duped - Our Sense of Touch - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...09angi.html

Sense Perception illusion

shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 10 - Cached
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Aug 10
       
      The tactile map is not the territory...we always change what we come into contact with by our very presence; the observer effect.
  • The signals from the various touch receptors converge on the brain and sketch out a so-called somatosensory homunculus, a highly plastic internal representation of the body. Like any map, the homunculus exaggerates some features and downplays others.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Aug 10
       
      Even our internat tactile maps of ourselves are not the true territory of our bodies.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But on some tactile tasks, touch is all thumbs. When people are given a raised line drawing of a common object, a bas-relief outline of, say, a screwdriver, they’re stumped. “If all we’ve got is contour information,” Dr. Lederman said, “no weight, no texture, no thermal information, well, we’re very, very bad with that.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Aug 10
       
      Touch, like all senses, is best used in concert with the others.
  • Touch also turns out to be easy to fool. Among the sensory tricks now being investigated is something called the Pinocchio illusion. Researchers have found that if they vibrate the tendon of the biceps, many people report feeling that their forearm is getting longer, their hand drifting ever further from their elbow. And if they are told to touch the forefinger of the vibrated arm to the tip of their nose, they feel as though their nose was lengthening, too.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Aug 10
       
      We'll discuss illusions in class, I've never been able to get the Pinocchio illusion to work but we can try it.
  • People who watch a rubber hand being stroked while the same treatment is applied to one of their own hands kept out of view quickly come to believe that the rubber prosthesis is the real thing, and will wince with pain at the sight of a hammer slamming into it.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Aug 10
       
      This one we can try in class, but I lost my prosthetic hand last year.
  • Biologically, chronologically, allegorically and delusionally, touch is the mother of all sensory systems. It is an ancient sense in evolution: even the simplest single-celled organisms can feel when something brushes up against them and will respond by nudging closer or pulling away. It is the first sense aroused during a baby’s gestation and the last sense to fade at life’s culmination. Patients in a deep vegetative coma who seem otherwise lost to the world will show skin responsiveness when touched by a nurse.
  • “Touch is so central to what we are, to the feeling of being ourselves, that we almost cannot imagine ourselves without it,” said Chris Dijkerman, a neuropsychologist at the Helmholtz Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “It’s not like vision, where you close your eyes and you don’t see anything. You can’t do that with touch. It’s always there.”
  • For all its antiquity and constancy, touch is not passive or primitive or stuck in its ways. It is our most active sense, our means of seizing the world and experiencing it, quite literally, first hand. Susan J. Lederman, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Canada, pointed out that while we can perceive something visually or acoustically from a distance and without really trying, if we want to learn about something tactilely, we must make a move. We must rub the fabric, pet the cat, squeeze the Charmin. And with every touchy foray, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle looms large. “Contact is a two-way street, and that’s not true for vision or audition,” Dr. Lederman said. “If you have a soft object and you squeeze it, you change its shape. The physical world reacts back.”
anonymous

What the Nose Knows | The New York Academy of Sciences - 0 views

www.nyas.org/...PodcastDetail.aspx

Sense Perception smell scent nose podcast

shared by anonymous on 22 Sep 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 22 Sep 10
     
    The science of smelling and scent.
anonymous

Dog Helps Rape Victim, 15, Testify - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ps-rape-victim-15-testify.html

human science emotion sense perception fair trial

shared by anonymous on 09 Aug 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 09 Aug 11
     
    "Prosecutors here noted that she is also in the vanguard of a growing trial trend: in Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana and some other states in the last few years, courts have allowed such trained dogs to offer children and other vulnerable witnesses nuzzling solace in front of juries. The new role for dogs as testimony enablers can, however, raise thorny legal questions. Defense lawyers argue that the dogs may unfairly sway jurors with their cuteness and the natural empathy they attract, whether a witness is telling the truth or not, and some prosecutors insist that the courtroom dogs can be a crucial comfort to those enduring the ordeal of testifying, especially children. The new witness-stand role for dogs in several states began in 2003, when the prosecution won permission for a dog named Jeeter with a beige button nose to help in a sexual assault case in Seattle. "Sometimes the dog means the difference between a conviction and an acquittal," said Ellen O'Neill-Stephens, a prosecutor there who has become a campaigner for the dog-in-court cause. "
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page