Sensory Perception

Can you really trust your senses and the interpretation of sensory data to give you an accurate view of the world? Describe and discuss the accuracy and the weaknesses of the human senses as they pertain to think in general and to your own thinking in particular.

What perception means and how is relate to our senses?

According to Joe Stratton (1999) on his book Critical Thinking for college students stated that "perception is the process of selection, organization, and interpretation of the sense-data into mental representation that can be use by the brain and the nerve system to provide content for thought" (p. 17).

We can understand as Perception the process by which we receive and interpret information coming from the environment or ourselves. This information is received through the five senses: Sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. Sensory perception is not sufficient to identify the outside world, it is necessary also the intervention of other processes such as attention, memory, and imagination.

In other words, perception is how we understand and interpret the world. We perceive the world in certain ways depending on our beliefs is like a filter between us and the reality, the memories and experiences that we have stored in our subconscious mind and our capacity of imagination is responsible for how we can perceive the reality. The perception varies from person to person; different people perceive different things in the same situation.

"This sensing-thinking connection is so closely interrelated that our thinking often begins in our senses, progresses through additional sensory input, and shapes itself to our sensing habits; conversely, thinking can shape the way we sense" (Goodpaster & Kirby, 1999, p.44).

There are some reasons that help us to believe in the accuracy of the sensory information, this mean that we are aware, dependent of our mind and perceptually seem to us.

For example if we approach our arm to the fire we can feel the heat, meaning that the information passes through the touch receptors feeling the heat and sensory information reaches the brain, so next time we experience fire close to our body we will perceive that is hot (aware), the same apply to our sense of smell, if we are walking one block from a bakery we can smell immediately the bread in the oven, this information passes through the smell receptor and sensory information reach the brain and bringing pass memories (dependent of our mind), and last example will be our sense of taste, if we ask a person to close its eyes and we given a piece of carrot to try that person can identify what its eating, because the information travel through the taste receptor to the brain connecting the taste with past experiences (perceptually seem to us).

Also there are some factors that contribute with the accuracy of sensory data as Cognitive ability that stated