PSY100H1 Lecture 1: Lecture 1
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PSY100H1 Full Course Notes
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Fundamental insights: reality is a story, told to us by our brains. We only have access to a limited subset of reality: the limitations of our sensory- perceptual system are due to: the sensitivity of our sensory mechanisms, our attentional capacity. Refer to figure 1. 1 on lecture one: perception is a process of creative story-telling and inference making. We have to fill in a lot of gaps. But how does the mind perceive reality: perception can be thought of as a process of pattern-matching (note: this isn"t correct but it"s a useful starting point ) It is as though our brains look for a correspondence between patterns that have been stored in it through our past experience, and the pattern of sensory stimuli it is currently experiencing. It"s decoding reality, although this isn"t entirely true. We have seen a gorilla before so we know its characteristics. Reality is a story, told to us by our brains.
