Aalok PokharelEnglish 1301-73026Patricia Carpenter1/26/2018What is perception?According to google, perception is the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.
It is the process in which a person identifies, organizes, and interprets the sensory information in order to understand it. Perceptions are not just formed through our senses, but it is also formed through our knowledge, memory, attention and understanding of things. Perception can be divided into two processes: processing through the senses and then processing through knowledge and understanding. The process of perception begins with the occurrence of sensory stimulation which involves being in contact with a specific stimulus.
This might include anything that can be seen, touched, tasted, smelled, or heard. There are many things in the world that can attract our attention through our senses but we do not always perceive each and everything around us. Perception depends on the senses that we experience. In order to perceive something, we must first experience it through our senses. Perception is also based on attention which makes our perception selective in nature. We do not perceive everything that we see, touch, taste, smell or hear.
We perceive things according to our interests or needs or according to the nature of our stimuli. Perception is not just a collection of present sensations and memories of past experiences. It is a combined and meaningful organization of our experience, emotion, and knowledge from the present and the past. Once a stimulus is received, the brain tries to recognize the stimulus and forms a perception of what it is through one’s knowledge and understanding. For example, if we see a person with small eyes and thin lips, we think of that person as an Asian. That person might not be an Asian but we form a perception on the basis of our understanding. Similarly, perception is also derived from emotions. For example, when we look at a flower, we think it is beautiful and when we look at a spider or a snake we are scared.
Different people have different perception. It depends on how our brain processes the information after a stimulus is received. So, perception is not necessarily the truth. One’s perception may not be the same as someone else’s perception. There are certain things that everyone perceives as the same. For example, table, chair, television, etc. These are objective perception in which certain things are perceived by everyone in a similar manner. But, in most of the cases, our perception is influenced by our knowledge, emotion, thoughts and understanding.
These kinds of perception are subjective in nature which may be perceived in a different way by different people. For example, everyone might not be scared of spiders. Perception is a process through which we interpret and understand everything in the world. As everyone has different perception, it helps in understanding the human behavior. We can understand the behavior of a person through their perception as all our emotions originate through perception. Perception is what makes everyone different in their own way.
We should avoid making assumption about things without really knowing it. We should choose what we perceive.
