● when you sense info, it’s not always correct (it’s filtered)

○ info is turned into neural messages

● sensory nerve endings
○ cilia die when you listen to loud music
● our senses are alike in some ways
○ transform physical stimulation into neural impulses - translating
○ sensation is passive
● perception- organization and interpreting raw data, bringing meaning to sensations
○ active
○ collecting, organizing, etc.
● sensation is initial step, perception is the interpretation
○ can be interpreted within the environment (school, what is expected, for example)
● bottom-up processing
○ begins from sensory to emotional response to the brain/thoughts/beliefs
○ turning your nose up at eating snails/tarantulas/etc.
○ allows us to understand/interpret what we might not be able to on first glance
● Top-down processing
○ using what you already know to figure something out
○ thoughts to emotions to sensations
● transduction- converting incoming sensory information
● accomodation- adjusting/adapting
● inattentional blindness-
○ people and basketball and gorilla
○ instructed to focus on something
○ not noticing a certain thing
● selective blindness-
○ solely noticing something
● change blindness-
○ walking next to a stranger and two people carry a piece of wood between them,
and not noticing a new stranger walking beside them afterward
○ failure to notice changes in the environment
● change deafness-
○ don’t notice change in auditory stimuli
● priming can be positive or negative (predisposing someone’s idea of something, either
creates a good, neutral, or positive idea of something)
● interpositioning- putting something on top of something
● selective attention-
○ focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus
○ Ex: cocktail party effect- phenomenon of the brain’s ability to focus one’s auditory
attention to one voice (stimulus) while filtering out others
● psychophysics-
○ study of relationship between physical stimuli and our psychological experiences
to them
 ● sensory receptors- specialized forms of neurons stimulated by different kinds of energy
such as lights, vibrations, and pressure
● sensory receptors to convert incoming stimuli information into electrochemical signals-
neural activity
● transduction-
○ the sensory process that converts energy, such as light, chemicals from
taste/smell or sound waves into neural messages
○ information goes to thalamus then to various areas of the brain
○ steps:
○ detection by a sensory neuron of a physical stimulus (basically like scanning a
barcode)
○ stimulus energizes and converts
● sensory adaptation
○ not feeling clothing all day
● absolute threshold- the least amount of something you need to detect something only
half of the time
○ ex: candle flame, or ticking of a watch, drop of perfume
● difference threshold- comparing the minimum difference needed for two different stimuli
● Weber’s Law-
○ difference between absolute threshold is stimulus must differ by a constant
proportion
● Fechner’s Law- the idea of proportionality, especially when intensity is high
● Steven’s Power- more accurate
● Signal detection theory- predicts how we detect a stimulus amid other stimuli
○ hit- have signal, detect it (baby crying)
○ miss- you don’t notice the signal
○ false alarm- thought there was a notification but there wasn’t
○ correct rejection- there is no stimulus and you don’t experience it
● habituation- like with clothing, you can also have this with stimuli in your environment,
like you can walk through your home without seeing it and be pretty successful

Vision:
● humans are very visual creatures, brain developed that way
● visible light spectrum- some animals can perceive ultraviolet, goldfish can see infrared
● intensity- determined by height
● wavelength- distance from one peak to the next
○ shorter the wavelength, the higher the frequency
● hue- dimension of color determined by wavelength
● structures:
○ cornea: just transparent tissue where light enters the eye, contacts sit on their
cornea. Lasik eye surgery- make corneal flap, flip it back onto itself and make a
hole
■ pupil is not a structure, it’s a space
 ■ if cornea was not there, you could put a pencil through your pupil- it’s just
a space

● iris- expands and contracts

● lens- focuses the light rays on the retina by changing shape- accommodation, like in
Lasik, the actual structure that is reshaped in Lasik; younger the person, the easier to
reshape the lens
● retina- contains sensory receptors that process the information and send it to the brain
● structure of the eye- third bullet point. light passes through lens and hits the retina (rods
and cones) to bipolar cells, then to ganglion cells, then to optic nerve (stepped process)
IMPORTANT PATHWAY TO BRAIN
● rods and cones are both photoceptors. Rods- low-light, changing focus onto periphery of
the eye helps it become more clear at nighttime, more rods than cones
● cones- concentrated in the fovia, color vision is allowed because of how cones work,
know where these are located, sensitive to light
● Fovia- area of sharpest vision, know where the cluster of cones are
● optic nerve- carries information to the brain via thalamus for proper processing
● optic disk known as the blind spot, where the nerve exits the eye and there are no
photoreceptors (rods and cones)
● nearsightedness (myopia)- shape of the eye causes the focal point to fall short of the
retina
● farsightedness (hyperopia) the focus point is behind the retina/past it
● visual cortex- looks at other factors of visual field, takes in everything (color, motion,
form, depth, boundaries)
● color vision- colors are every color but the one is reflected
● colorblindness- more prominent in males, deficiency is more accurate
GESTALT IS A MAIN FOCUS ON THE TEST

Hearing:
● if there is no air, there is no sound. you need air to allow sound (changes in air pressure)
● Frequency- determine pitch; high frequency means the higher pitch, low frequency are
lower pitched
○ mosquito ringtone- very high tones that only teenagers and younger children can
use
● Amplitude- how loud something is
○ exposing yourself to high amplitude sounds kills your cilia
● outside of the ear- collects sound waves, called pinna or oracle
● cochlea
○ basilar membrane
○ hair cells- loud sounds kills cilia, and they do not grow back; 100,000 of cilia is
still not as thick as one human hair- very delicate
● eardrum-
○ tubes in your ears- if you have many infections, you damage your eardrum and
three middle bones (vibrations are not conducted to the cochlea), drain fluid from
behind eardrum
● just understand the flow of the ear
○ actual size of middle ear bones- smaller than a dime
■ stop growing some soon time after birth
○ stapes is the smallest bone in the body
● sound localization - the Jacob Larison experiment
○ echolocation - seeing when sound bounces back
● sound is purely psychological, it has to be taken in
● conduction deafness -
○ an inability to hear as a result of damage from inner/middle ear structures
○ can replace the bones or get a hearing aid
● sensorineural deafness -
○ due to a deficit in the ability to transmit impulses from the cochlea to the brain
○ hair cells get damaged, loud noises can cause this kind of deafness also
○ helped with cochlear implants
○ some people believe that cochlear implants should not be a thing, because
deafness should be allowed to happen as it is
● cochlear implant-
○ a microphone, selects surrounding sounds and turns them into electric impulses
● Tinnitus-
○ ringing/roaring/buzzing in one’s ears caused by infections or loud noises
○ not an actual sensation, but rather it’s a false signal coming from the middle ear
● place theory-
○ tries to explain hearing as far as where in the cochlea you experience the
vibrations
○ doesn’t explain all aspects of hearing
 ○ certain areas where the vibrations are had explain pitch
● frequency theory-
○ rate of nerve impulses traveling the nerve matches the frequency of tone, thus
enabling sense of pitch

Touch/Smell/Taste
● touch
○ Gate Control Theory of Pain- just a theory, a plausible explanation
■ when we receive pain signals, you can override them to a certain degree
■ pain signal- small nerve fibers
■ large nerve fibers- touching your arm, the brain can’t process both at the
same time (they can’t fit through the ‘gate’ at the same time), distraction
○ pain medications-
■ depends on the type of pain you’re experiencing
■ we all have different abilities to handle pain- some have high tolerance,
how pain signals are routed make a difference with how you deal with
them
■ you’re mainly just inhibiting the signals
○ galvanic skin response
■ not in textbook
■ an increase in the electrical conductivity of the skin that occurs when
sweat glands increase their activity
■ measure arousal due to emotional responses
● that causes sweat, picked up by electrodes on the skin (easier for
the current to travel between electrodes)
■ lie detectors
● smell and taste
○ sensory interactions- principle that one sense may influence another
○ both chemical
● taste
○ gustatation
○ specialized neurons that take info to brain
○ tongue map is a myth
○ menthol is a taste that is also considered the experience of cold, whereas hot
food also gives you the experience of heat, which in turn gives you the
experience of whatever you’re talking about
■ peppers
● smell
○ olfaction
○ smells are combinations of olfactory cells being stimulated (some more sensitive
than others)
■ combination of certain receptors (rejuvenated every so often)
■ we don’t have to relearn smells
○ olfactory bulb
 ■ pigmented section of receptors, scientists don’t know why
■ carries smell to the brain*
○ know how the smell functions work*
● kinesthetic sense
○ awareness/movement of body parts
○ you don’t need vision, your sense tells you about the position/motion of the body
parts
○ kinesthetic learning- putting things back together, etc.
○ kind of like muscle memory
● vestibular
○ sense of balance
○ can be tricked, also relates to sense of motion
○ semicircular canals give you info about motion/balance
○ fluid in canal is still moving when you spin
○ if the cilia get stuck, inner ears still send signals that you’re in motion, then it can
throw off your health (roller coaster thing)
● embodied cognition-
○ the influence of bodily sensations/gestures/other states on cognitive preferences
and judgements
Module 18
● light’s wavelength is the distance from one peak to the next, and the wavelength
determines color we experience
○ amplitude determines intensity
● the eye
○ light enters through cornea, which bends like to help focus
○ light then goes to the pupil
■ surrounded by the iris, which dilates or constricts in response to light
intensity
○ then it hits a lens in your eye, which focuses the rays onto the retina
■ focus is done through a method of accommodation, changing its
curvature and thickness
○ the retina doesn’t see a whole image
■ receptor cells convert particls of light energy into neural impulses to the
brain, which then reassembles them into an upright image
● eye to brain pathway
○ after entering the retina’s sparse layer of outer cells, it reaches the rods and
cones
■ light energy triggers chemical changes that spark neural signals in nearby
bipolar cells
■ bipolar cells active neighboring ganglion cells (axons twine together like
the strands of a rope to form optic nerve)
■ after stopping at the thalamus, then the info goes onto the visual cortex,
which is in the occipital lobe at the back of your brain
○ optic nerve
■ information highway
■ can send 1 million messages at once through its 1 million ganglion fibers
○ blind spot
■ an area with no receptor cells, where the optic nerve leaves the eye, but
your brain fills the hole