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molivares's picture

synesthesia and blindspots

I am still in awe of how much our perception of the world is processed and “manipulated” by the brain.  First we talked about synesthesia, or the condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another.  When I first saw ‘synesthesia’ written in the course lecture/discussion notes, I actually did not think of synesthesia in science or biological terms. I actually recognized synesthesia first as a poetic device where the description of a sense impression (smell, touch, sound etc) is articulated in terms of another seemingly inappropriate sense (for example the phrase ‘deafening yellow’). But when we tested the McGurk effect, it really struck me how much our perception of what we were hearing changed when we only listened to the video versus when we listened and watched the video.  It makes me question how accurate our perception of the world actually is. Furthermore, the blindspot experiments that we discussed in class made me wonder even more how much our brain “fills in” our understanding and perception of the world. 

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