Philosophy of Perception

This video discusses a rare condition known as Alice in Wonderland syndrome in which sufferers experience an altered perception of size.  Sufferers will struggle to accurately perceive the size of objects, people, and even themselves, often perceiving things as either very small or unrealistically large. Referenced briefly in our first reading, "What Do the Blind See When They Dream," Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is one of many conditions/disorders in which sufferers experience drastic or hallucinatory disruptions to perception, highlighting the ways in which our senses can deceive us.

Being a Beast A passionate naturalist explores what it’s really like to be an animal—by living like them How can we ever be sure that we really know the other? To test the limits of our ability to inhabit lives that are not our own, Charles Foster set out to know the ultimate other: the non-humans, the beasts. And to do that, he tried to be like them, choosing a badger, an otter, a fox, a deer, and a swift. He lived alongside badgers for weeks, sleeping in a sett in a Welsh hillside and eating earthworms, learning to sense the landscape through his nose rather than his eyes. He caught fish in his teeth while swimming like an otter; rooted through London garbage cans as an urban fox; was hunted by bloodhounds as a red deer, nearly dying in the snow. And he followed the swifts on their migration route over the Strait of Gibraltar, discovering himself to be strangely connected to the birds. A lyrical, intimate, and completely radical look at the life of animals—human and other—

https://study.com/academy/lesson/self-perception-theory-definition-and-examples.html This link relates to how perception can be pointed inward upon ourselves. Addressing this is the Self Perception theory, which plays the idea that people create their attitudes by observing their own behavior and then making an assumption on what attitudes must have caused it. I found this video to relate well to perception, but also to exemplify just how powerful our brains truly can be. An interesting concept, I thought. I hope you do too!

This video relates to time perception. Upon research, I found that how we perceive time changes depending on the situation that we are in. One example of this is when frantic music is played in the car, the driver tends to drive at an increased speed as a result, as time has somehow seemed to speed up.  I thought this was a great example of how our senses and perceptions play tricks on ourselves. Whether it be an evolutionary benefit, or merely just our senses acting up, the changing of time is a common occurrence that exemplifies the sometimes unreliability of what we are perceiving.