Chemical Senses

General Overview

During this class I was introduced to the world of perception. Perception included many things I did not know, and things that are considered part of the perception world that I would not pin point as part of these lessons. For example, I always wondered where optical illusions came from, how one's blind spots are created, how and why we taste what we taste using our chemical senses, and things like how are ears are set up and why we hear the way that we do and how motion can effect every part of our lives and our senses.
We also learned why learning about perception is important to our everyday lives. Perception and all its angles come into play with our future careers and graduate school. It can also help if you are going down the medical route in life and filling out applications do be an ear doctor or and eye doctor. The most important thing that we learned is helping us to understand how a person views the world regarding language processing, color vision, and depth perception. This class will help explain in detail a major part of how we work as humans.

Favorite Part

My favorite part of this semester was a section in Chapter 15 which was about chemical senses. This section was interesting because I never knew how odors and tastes were detected. The Olfactory! I actually got a laugh out of this because my sister taught me a trick to help me remember what an olfactory system has to do with, and that is a persons sense of smell and how it works. The way that she showed me to remember it is to remember how things can SMELL like an old factory. The olfactory system is extremely important because it opens the door to the primary section of the environment. I learned that when it comes to humans compared to animals we rely differently on these senses. Animals are considered macrosmatic which means that the rely on their sense of smell to survive where-as humans do not. We as humans are considered the opisite whis is labled microsmatic.

Extension/Creativity

Detecting odors also are important because it helps to measure our threshold so that and odor to us can actually be detected. Identifying an odor is involved with our olfactory reseptors in our nose and when combinded with our taste reseptors, we end up with FLAVOR! The olfactory system is important to our survival in a small aspect. It helps us choose what we eat or drink and weither we like it or dislike it. This is how our olfactory system helps with everyday life outside of the classroom.