Personal Essay: The Importance Of Human Perception

The Importance of Perception

What is Human Perception? A Perception is the experience we have after our brain assembles and combines thousands of individual, meaningless sensations into a meaningful pattern or image. But, our perceptions are rarely exact replicas of the original stimuli. Rather, our perceptions are usually changed, biased, colored, or distorted by our unique set of experiences. Thus, perceptions are our personal interpretations of the real world.

Sensation and perception work closely together to allow us to experience the world through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin, but also to combine what we are currently learning from the environment with what we already know about it to make judgments and to choose appropriate behaviors.

Because your brain changes sensations into perceptions so quickly, and with very little awareness, you might assume that what you see (sense) is what you perceive. However, the process of

As a result, our perceptions are not a mirror but a changed, biased, or even distorted copy of the real world.

The human perceptual system is wired for accuracy, and people are exceedingly good at making use of the wide variety of information available to them. Rules of organization, which were identified by Gestalt psychologists, specify how our brains combine and organize individual pieces or elements into a meaningful perception.

One of the most basic rules in organizing perceptions is picking out the object from its background. The figure-ground rule states that, in organizing stimuli, we tend to automatically distinguish between a figure and a ground: The figure, with more detail, stands out against the background, which has less detail. The figure-ground rule is one of the first rules that our brain uses to organize stimuli into perception (Vecera,