Senses and Stimuli

Articles 5 and 6 are both about the senses and our interpretations of the stimuli that we receive from our different senses, article 5 The miracle of sensation talks about how our senses work, from our vision to our kinesthesis, it explains in detail how each of our sense travel to our bodies, it shows on pictures and in quotes the experience of senses and stimuli in our brain, the next article titled Making sense out of sensation deals with our interpretations of the different sensations that we experience, it talks about how we interpret different senses and how the same sensations can have different meanings to different people, individuals with a different social or economic background can have different experiences about the same stimuli.
One of the stories I could easily identify with is the one where the son is waiting for his father and he was able to recognize the unique sound of his fathers car, even though there were many different sounds in the background, the same used to happen to me when I used to wait for my father to get home when I was a child, I would immediately recognize the sound of my fathers car when I was waiting for him, and I am sure that the other people on the street couldn't recognize that unique sound, because their senses weren't adjusted to do it.
The four most important things that I learned reading both articles are: fist I wasn't aware that when the light goes into the retina and forms an image, the image its actually upside down, this is new to me and it makes me think about the nature of reality itself, if the image at some point is backwards, then probably the whole reality its upside down and we are experiencing it in a different way, reality its really relative then.
The second thing that I didn't know before is that we can actually train our senses to do things that aren't normal, I really liked the example about the black and white photographers, they have to make an image in their brain about how a color picture would look like if it was in black and white, they have to determine where would the different tones of gray would be, and I can identify with this because I like to draw and until now I realize that whenever I draw a charcoal sketch, I am drawing the black and white version of the color image that I see in my brain, its really amazing that we have the ability to change our senses without realizing it.
The third thing that I learned and that really called my attention was our preferences for certain tastes, like our craving for sugars to get carbohydrates or our craving for salts to get sodium, when you see it this way its easy to see why fast food chains like McDonalds have made so much money basing their product on our most inner human needs.
The fourth thing that I learned and that is wasn't aware before is that different cultures react different to certain stimuli, like for instance the smell of certain foods, I cannot stand the smell of curry or lamb, I didn't know why until now, because I never got to experience those types of foods when I was young because of the geographic location of the place were I was born.
Our interpretation of the different senses play a great role in our lives, and in our cultures, and I cant help to see a relation between making sense of our sensations and Schemes because they booth base themselves in previous experiences, and take the role of filters that we use to see the world, hopefully by becoming aware of how our senses work we can let our differences behind and become a more accepting and tolerant world community.