Psychology

Sensation and perception are two experiences humans sometimes take for granted.  Without them, living things would not be able to experience the world, the experience of being alive. Sensation and perception allow living things to make sense of the world, enabling them to make contact with the world. In essence, sensation and perception enable living things to understand mental processes and behavior.

Psychologists define sensation as the immediate experience of all sensory stimulation (Morris and Maisto, 2002). These include raw data as experienced by the sense organs, i.e. smell, sight, touch, sound, and taste (2002).  Sensation occurs when a type of receptor is stimulated. These receptors act like locks that, when exposed to a strong stimulus, open up.  But as aforementioned, these are raw data and for these to become meaningful, they need to be processed. This is where the process of perception comes in.

Perception is the act of organizing and interpreting sensory input, putting meaningful patterns in the process (Morris and Maisto, 2002).  To help create patterns for these sensory inputs, perceptual organization is needed.  Gestalt psychologists comprising German experts introduced a set of laws that explain how perception organization occurs. Under the law, perceptual units under which objects are organized must follow four principles- proximity (nearness of objects to one another), similarity (resemblance in shapes, color, pattern, and size), closure (tendency to close any gaps in a figure), and continuity (patterns and links) (2002).

What seems to be most intriguing after learning sensory and perception is the concept of extrasensory perception (ESP).  The ability to perceive and know things without using ordinary senses is baffling anyone, from the sceptics to the trained researchers.  Having telepathy or precognition negates the science of sensation and perception. There are some that attest to its existence but there long term researches on it seem to still be shaky.