PSYCH101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Rodney Dangerfield, Human Nose, Precognition

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Richard Ennis

Document Summary

Sensation: physical sensing of environment, physiological, relatively objective, learning & experience. Perception: mental interpretation of environment, psychological, relatively subjective, learning & experience. The process of sensation can be seen as three steps: the. Reception-- stimulation of sensory receptor cells by energy (sound, light, heat, etc) Transductio n-- transforming this cell stimulation into neural impulses. Transmissio n--delivering this neural information to the brain processed to be. Smelly facts: only 3% of sensory neurons. Compared to 30% devoted to vision: only about 200 researchers worldwide, human nose one of the least sensitive in the animal kingdom. Yet we can detect one billionth of an ounce of odour in the air. Smelly facts: smell was our first sense. Humans have a poor sense of smell for an animal. Even so, humans have 350 different types of smell receptors allowing us to detect about 10,000 different odors. The right chemistry: breast-fed infants, signature smells, sexual turn-ons and turn-offs.