Blog Entry 1: Preview of Chapter 4

Chapter four of Psychology: From Inquiry to Understanding is about how human senses are relayed to the brain, and how the brain perceives information. After a sensation occurs, the brain perceives the sensory impulses. The brain interprets the impulses with different processing methods, such as simultaneously or in a selective or consistent manner. Paying selective attention to certain sensory channels, sometimes our brain even misses obvious stimuli. This is called inattentional blindness. I believe the most interesting part of chapter four was the description of extrasensory perception (ESP). ESP can be divided into three categories, precognition (predicting evens), telepathy (reading minds), or clairvoyance (detecting the presence of objects or people). Not all people believe in ESP, but those that do will make claims that make ESP hard to falsify. I think ESP is fascinating because it is like a "sixth sense", and it is a mystery that scientists and psychologists are still studying.
A great deal of chapter four was spent describing the senses. The composition of the eye was given, along with how the brain interprets light, depth, color, and motion. Chapter four also described the ear, as well as odors, flavors, touch, body position, and balance. It is easy to see how much "hard science" is linked to psychology in chapter four.