In many fields of study on human anatomy and biological responses, most people have made it a task of psychologists to keenly engage in research on matters pertaining to brain or mental operations. This was expected to be more in anatomy and philosophy but these two disciplines moved this to psychology.
Sensation and perception are two very closely intertwined aspects in human life and behavioral studies. To begin with, sensation can be defined as the process of receiving stimuli from the environment. From a simpler perspective, a change in temperature creates a sensation through the skin which is interpreted by the brain using the aspect of perception. From a linguistics point of view, it can be defined as the unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation. This turns back to the initial definition of sensation being reception of a stimulus by an organism. The other aspect is perception. From a philosophical perspective, perception involves the brain where it is defined as a mental process of coming up with useful information on the data received by sensation. This can be further elaborated to claim that perception involves synthesis or processing of data by the brain to come up with a conclusion on a sensed aspect. From the above elaborations, it is clear that perception relies almost solely on sensation for data to be processed while sensation depends on a similar magnitude on perception to be effective. It is therefore prudent and true for me to conclude that sensation and perception are very important stages in processing of human or other animal senses (Kalat, 2011).
For us to have a very appropriate and vivid illustration of these two aspects of mind or thought, let us view them as thought pieces. Taking them as thought pieces allows us to treat each as an independent entity whereby it can stand alone as a piece that is controlled independent of the other. Taking a look at sensation as an independent thought piece, it is valid to claim that to sensation uses both the CNS and the process of thinking. Once the sense receives a stimulus, it relays the information about it to the brain. The brain initiates a process of thinking whereby it processes the stimulus and initiates a process of thinking whereby a thought about the necessary step to take is created. This is in response to another standalone thought piece or process known as perception. This indicates that sensation can be taken as piece thought that deals with reception and relaying of stimuli to the brains. The other thought piece takes the received stimuli and decodes it according to certain pre-conceived factors about the stimuli. After successful decoding, the perception also assesses the situation and as a though piece helps deduce the best response to the stimuli (Kalat, 2011).
In my paper, my main concept is sensation. This is mainly because it is the concept that explains fully on how we as human beings perceive any stimuli in the environment and makes us very much responsive to the external world. As a matter of fact, it helps us detect any changes thus has the ability to escape from what would have previously harmed us.
Sensation as earlier described deals with detection. This is the main aspect in psychology that helps the brains to develop some response tables and strategies associated with the detected stimuli. For example, a person whose skin does not sense any changes to temperature cannot have the brain develops response structures on changes to temperature. This though piece would then completely disable the whole thought on dealing with changes in the atmosphere. Therefore, absence of this piece would present a very big problem to the person (Heffner, 2009).
In my personal experience, the process of sensation is very important. It can help a person respond appropriately to any changes. As an example, about two years ago, I went out for bike riding with my friends. While out in the field, I saw one of the competitors veer into my lane. It was my sensation piece that made me detect of an impending collision that would see both of us out of the race or even injured. Still on the same incident, my other sense on sight made me detect an alternative instead of moving directly into a crash with the competitor. It triggered a response whereby I had to respond after perception and other decision making thought pieces played their roles.
Learning from events and occurrences like these in my life, I have developed mixed feelings about this piece of thought. To begin with, I have developed a strong positive feeling about it. This is mainly due to the potential of the feeling that makes me think it is very important. To begin with, sensation helps a person to learn of the immediate environment in which he/she is. This helps a lot in making that person know how to respond and keep safe in the environment. For example, it is the sensation from the skin that helps a person to detect adverse weather on top of vision. This is a very important aspect since adverse weather is lethal to the human and other organisms’ bodies. The other advantage is the ability to clearly distinguish a stimulus. Under this topic, I can claim that sensation helps human beings and other organisms know where to go at what time and how to react to which situations. Take for example a person sees an overcoming vehicle and is staggering at the middle of the road. This person is most likely to take to one side and the driver knows how to react. The driver also knows how to judge the distance which is also an aspect highly affected by sensation and judgment (perception) (Heffner, 2009).
Another advantage of this concept is the ability of a sensation organ to develop a pre-conception guiding the brain in its decision making to arrive at the best response mechanism. For example, when a child is left exposed to a source of infrared, the skin senses the heat and the child drifts away from the fire. If that child is not exposed to such a stimulus, he/she might have no pre-conception on how to deal with it later making the brain to have excess tasks while dealing with it once it occurs. A look in philosophy exposes that sensation is very important when dealing with the society. If one does not express any feelings or emotions, he/she is viewed as deviant from the normality. This is supported by the fact that philosophy acknowledges that sensation is a very important aspect in human thinking process. It acts as a data collection mechanism and relays the collected information to the brain for thinking to take place. From a moral perspective, thinking is highly guided by sensation. Without any sensation, deviance sets in and forces a person to be viewed as morally deficient (Kalat, 2011).
However, there is also a negative aspect of sensation. For example, sensation can make a person to overestimate or underestimate a situation. For example, if a person is not exposed to bright light, the brain and other aspects involved in thoughts are not prepared for such a scenario thus the person can easily get harmed when exposed to such great light. This is the same to other sensation organs. Also, the main task of sensation is to detect. Getting used to a certain stimulus may tend to make the body less reactive to the stimulus causing gradual destruction of the sensation organ by the stimuli. This can be experienced in people whole have got their eyes continually exposed to bright light which tends to destroy the eyes. In simple terms, excessive sensation tends to reduce sensitivity of the sensors and in the very end causes harm to the organs and human body systems as a whole (Heffner, 2009).
In conclusion, perception and sensation are very important aspects in human life. They help in thinking whereby they provide information and processing of the information so as to evoke proper response. This is an indication that sensation and perception are two very important aspects on human psychology that must be inculcated correctly in a person.
References
Kalat, J. W. 2011. Introduction to psychology, 9th edition, Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth Publishing Company
Heffner D 2009, Psychology 101, retrieved from http://allpsych.com/psychology101/index.html
