1. Sensation & Perception: Our Other Senses

2. Goals  Describe how our senses of touch, taste, and smell interact to form our perceptions.

3. Touch Basic skin senses = pain, cold, warmth pressure
(other sensations are combo of these four)
Receptors located in our skin = detect touch sensations
More sensitive = more receptor cells = larger areas on somatosensory cortex in the brain

4. Touch
Our brain significantly affects whether, and how, we perceive pain.
Gate-control theory = pain sent through small nerve fibers in spinal cord, while non-pain is sent through large nerve fibers
Non-pain fibers can close the “pain gates” to the brain

5. Gate Control Theory

6. Kinesthetic Sense
Tells us where our body parts are in relation to one another and to our environment
Coordination
Receptors located in our muscles and joints
= Proprioception

7. Vestibular Sense Tells us where our body is oriented in space.
Our sense of balance.
Located in our semicircular canals in our ears.
Am I vertical? Horizontal?

8. Taste is a Chemical Sense
Receptor cells on the tongue’s surface respond to chemical structure
Five tastes
Sweet  Energy source
Salty  Sodium essential to physiological processes
Sour  potentially toxic acid
Bitter  potential poisons
Umami  proteins to grow & repair tissue

9. Taste Receptors
Inside each little bump on the sides and top of your tongue are 200 or more taste buds, each containing a pore that catches food chemicals
In each pore, 50 to 100 taste receptors project antenna-like hairs that sense food molecules

10. Taste Receptors Taste receptors reproduce every week or so
# of taste buds decreases with age
Smoking & drugs also affect taste buds
Expectations influence brain’s response
Linda Bartoshuk et al. (1994)
25% of pop. = “supertasters”
25% of pop. = “non-tasters”

11. Olfaction – Our Sense of SmellSmell
Smell is also a chemical sense
Olfactory receptors in upper nasal passages detect molecules in the air
Odor molecules come in many shapes and sizes, so we have many different receptors to detect them
Some odors trigger a combination of receptors in patterns that are interpreted by the olfactory cortex
Odor molecules combine to produce the 10,000 odors we can detect

12. Sensory Interaction Taste and smell interact to create flavor
If your sense of smell is blocked, foods will not taste the same
Synaesthesia  one sensation produces another
Hearing a sound and seeing a color
Number and a taste sensation

13. Smells are primitive Pheromones!
Why can we recognize long-forgotten odors and their associated memories?
Connection between brain area receiving info from nose and limbic system

14. Extrasensory Perception (ESP)
Claim that perception can occur without sensory input
Clairvoyance = perception of events happening somewhere remote from perceiver
Precognition = perceiving future events (i.e. psychic)

15. Extrasensory Perception (ESP)
Telepathy = perceiving another’s thoughts
Telekinesis = moving objects with one’s mind
Is ESP real?
Difficult to test
Research has not replicated results, therefore no evidence exists