CogBlog 3: Perception

Duck or rabbit? It's all in how you perceive it.

Perception as a whole is caused by our senses being stimulated. Everything we touch, see, hear, smell or taste from our environment has to be perceived by the brain for us to identify what is going on around us. In some situations, all or most of our senses are used to accurately perceive a single or multiple stimuli we are presented with. With complex environments that require this kind of perception, it can be like a multi-piece puzzle. For example, entering a busy restaurant invokes multiple different stimuli that can be perceived as soon as walking through the establishment’s door. You can see the restaurant's decor, hear music and people chattering, and smell the aroma of the food. When all theses different stimuli  are perceived together, we get a picture of what the restaurant is overall as an environment.

So what would it be like to encounter an experience where one or more of your senses was unable to work properly? How would these missing senses affect how you perceived the environment? I am a very active concert goer in the hard rock and heavy metal scene. I love going to live music performances and I attend multiple concerts a year. For me, concerts are full-sensory experiences, with all of my senses typically being stimulated in someway during the course of the event. Taking away even one of my senses during an event like this would impact my ability to accurately perceive what is going on around me, although differently with each individual sense.   

Without sight, I couldn't see the band, the crowd of attendees or the venue the show is being held at. This is a huge impairment that would require my hearing and touch to work overtime to make sure I was going in the right direction when walking around, or even worse; making sure I don't walk straight into a mosh pit or a spot where one is likely to occur.

Without being able to see or hear, staying clear of mosh pits at concerts could become more difficult.

Without the ability to hear, attending a concert would be completely redundant. I could visually perceive the band on stage, the lights, the crowd, and the venue, but without knowing the tune of the music, a large part of the entertainment of the concert is gone. Not being able to hear the crowd is also a disadvantage at metal shows in particular as the sounds that come from a crowd can be warning signs of where mosh pits are opening up or where crowd surfers are traveling in the mass of people (trust me, that is an element you always want to be aware of at shows so you and the others around you don't get injured on accident). My perception of sight would become my most important asset in this situation as it would be the next best sense to use for detecting what is happening around me.

Without the ability to touch/feel, I might not know if I am getting uncomfortable by where/how I am standing or if I have gotten injured by a multitude of possible things such as other people or flying objects from others in the crowd. Smell and taste might not always apply to a concert I am attending, so losing my ability to perceive these senses would be the least damaging to my experience. That being said, being able to smell different things in the air such as food, smoke and various scents wafting around (especially at outdoor concerts) and being able to distinguish if you are drinking water or alcohol from a cup can be important stimuli to perceive if the situation calls for it. In that case, my perceptions of sight and hearing would be utilized more to make up for a lack in these senses.

Overall, losing any sense that contributes to overall perception would have a negative effect on a concert setting. In this particular setting, the inability to see and hear would cause the most sensory impairment which would alter someone's perception greatly towards the event. Even some senses such as taste and smell that don't seem readily important in an environment like this could be crucial to have in case something happens. The perceptions we perceive with full sensory experiences such as concerts use up more factors than some realize we use in everyday life. It's amazing how the removal of just one sense that we use to interpret our environments can alter our entire perception of something. This alteration could mean that our other senses have to go into overdrive to compensate for the holes in our perceptive field. It is also important to keep in mind that everyone perceives their environments differently. Something that might be an annoyance to one person might not even phase another. So many elements go into creating our own perception abilities and you never know how it all could change until part of your sensory abilities aren't there anymore to contribute to the forming the big picture.