Philosophy of Perception

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8P0Gc_Bbns This video shows how smell can influence when we taste food through Retronasal Olfaction. Retronasal olfaction is when you smell the scent of the food you are eating while it is already in your mouth and the perception of the odors affect what you taste. I found this interesting because most people would not know that you can still smell when you are eating. When the food is in one's mouth, the aroma goes through the retronasal passage and then is treated the same way scents are delivered through the nostrils. This is a cross modality which also shows the binding problem.

Our brain processes information through fast and slow thinking. During the first half of the semester we focused a lot on how we perceive information, and what is occurring in our brains as we are taking it all in. The video begins as it shows a basic contrast between fast and slow thinking. Something that would take a matter of seconds to draw a conclusion would be fast thinking, such as looking at a picture and analyzing the situation at hand. In contrast, a complex math problem would utilize slow thinking as our brains are working out the problem; it is not automatically known. The video emphasizes how our fast thinking is quick to make assumptions without looking deeply enough into a situation. It is up to us to let our conscious system (slow thinking) compensate and deeper analyze. This is seen with optical illusions. We need to use our conscious system to sort these illusions out for what they really are. Learning this importance of conscious thinking shows us that our first

Wine E adventure: Taste Perception: I have an experiment which was created to to show a demonstration of how your sense of taste, or more accurately what your brain interprets as the taste of something, is depended on more than just your taste buds. The taste of food is based on sight,smell and taste. To our brains, “taste” is actually a fusion of a food’s taste, smell and touch into a single sensation. Although sight is not technically part of taste, it certainly influences perception. Interestingly, foods and drinks are identified by the senses of smell and sight, not taste. Food can be identified by sight alone but we don’t have to eat a strawberry to know it is a strawberry. The same goes for smell, in a majority of cases. Researchers have found that the color can predominantly determine the taste of food or drinks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN3U1MWJsdo In this video, it discusses and gives examples of how blind people see and also other types of blindness.  I found this video to be interesting because it goes into detail what the blind see when they dream and how depending on your previous vision or not has an affect of what you can "see" when you dream.