Perception

Posted on August 5, 2008 by Madalin Szemkovics
Filed Under Basics |

Perception is the process through which objects and activities are reflected as wholes to our mental processing. We often explore an object’s properties using more than one analyzer, so the perception takes care that the characteristics we receive are always forming a whole, for a particular object.

Without it, each physical analyzer would send different aspects of the object to the brain, and it would result a fragmented image for that object, which would be our final representation.

Perception usually begins when a new stimulus enters the environment, then continues with including it into a category (by selecting informations from past experience) and identifying the object individually (requires more informations from the memory). After all the processing is done, the product is sent to the last stop for understanding the surroundings: representation.

The perception is also guided by certain rules that have a major role in its optimization. One of them refers to the ability of completing partially-perceived structures from our memory.  For example, if you grab a pen, show it to someone and ask him what does he see, he’ll answer ‘A pen’, not ‘Half of a pen’, as he really sees.

Also, we tend to perceive objects in a selective manner, influenced by our limited ability to understand only parts of the dinamics around us. This is how optical illusions are created. Most of the information that is not selected by perception is stored in our subconscious, and this is how subliminal messages work (messages that are perceived only by our subconscious).

Our perception is constantly modified by our emotional status at a given time, as well as by our needs and interests. We don’t perceive solely the objective characteristics of things, but also their meanings connected to our goals. For instance, if we like blond hair, when we see someone, we’ll tend to focus our perception on their blond hair. Hypnosis, NLP and many other manipulation and therapy techniques are based on methods that change our perception, but those are subjects we’ll cover in future articles.

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