So how do we know? TOK website for IB students. |
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So how do we know? TOK website for IB students. |
Read the Guardian article on cortical colouring by clicking on this hyperlink. What issues or questions regarding the role of sense perception as a tool to gather knowledge can you raise after having read the article? What does the article make us think about in terms of the limitations of sense perception as a way of knowing? Does this have implications for how we rely on our senses when we want to gather knowledge in different subjects? You should illustrate your answers with further examples from the real world (eg from documentaries, articles, things you have come across in lessons).
29 Comments
Maeva Tori Arnaud
9/14/2017 01:28:32 am
After reading the article, I realised that everyone sees colours in different ways, we all have different interpretations to different colours, and that our memory plays a big part in us seeing different objects, such as fruits and plants.
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Hye Jin Hong
9/14/2017 07:31:10 pm
Sense Perception is a very big term for us as human beings. We each have perceptions of how we view things and how we interpret them through our own ways, own view and understanding of knowledge itself of how we see things the way things are. Colours are one of the biggest sense perceptions, we also see that we can physically see colours differently, but with perception and thought of how we perceive them what they are.
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Won Jongbin
9/14/2017 10:25:00 pm
Reading the article, I now understand that people have different perceptions and views on certain colors.That a lot of what is coloured is actually our brain remembering how the object should look. This begs the question whether or not we can effectively rely on our senses to gather knowledge. I believe there are certain implications to relying on senses alone. For example, imagine I see a large animal, and its colored grey. From this I could identify this as a elephant, however, someone else may see this object from a different light, and hence their interpretation is different to mine. Often times we must consider more than our senses to gather true knowledge.
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c
9/16/2017 02:10:09 am
What our senses perceive is influenced by our past experiences with the subject in question. When we think of a banana, we will think of it to be yellow, even when we see a picture of it in black and white. This has led me to believe that a limitation of using sense perception to process knowledge, is that we might be biased when doing so, and thus less likely to see the "truth" in some cases.
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Seobin Kim
9/17/2017 06:07:09 pm
After reading the article, I realised that everyone have different interpretations on colours and that colours we see is actually influenced by our brain. This questions whether we can fully rely on our sense perception as it can differ by different levels of knowledge people have and what they believe is true.
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Victoria
9/18/2017 05:50:04 am
An important idea that this article highlights is that it is not that objects are perhaps fundamentally of a certain color, but that it is simply our interpretation (our cones’ sensibility to certain wavelengths of light but also memories and color constancy) that makes it seem to us as if it were that color.
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Jane
9/18/2017 07:28:07 pm
After reading the article I have several questions, the main one being will we ever know if our own colours are different to other people's colours. I find it extremely interesting to learn that our sense of perception sometimes relys on our memory. When we look at a banana we expect it to be yellow on the inside. So if a black and white photo of a banana was shown to us we would expect it to be yellow, however if it was actually red on the inside would we believe it? Probably not. This is interesting as we can question if our memory of colours is reliable, can we rely on our sense of perception of knowledge to tell the difference of colours.
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Trinh
9/19/2017 06:35:24 am
After reading the article, I understand that our sense of perception is not always accurate. This is because we do not only see things and colours by the reflection of wavelength in our receptors but we also rely on knowledge and memories. Therefore, there are many limitations to it. It leads to people having different views and interpretation of many things. For example, one's perception of the colour blue might be different from another's. This emphasises that we should not always rely on only our sense of perception to decide whether something is true or not.
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BeomJun
9/20/2017 03:34:29 am
Reading this article I now understand that we use our previous memory of the object to determine the color of the object that was seen. After knowing this phenomenon I was quite shocked because our vision is one of the main sense that we use in our life. This was making me wonder whether we should start to use our other senses more than vision so we could see the reality instead of our thoughts about the image that was based on previous memories .
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N
9/20/2017 04:18:09 am
After reading the article, i’ve came to a conclusion that our sense of perception plays a huge role in how we perceive the world and gather knowledge. For instance, when presented with a black and white image of a rose, our brain naturally fills in the image with the red, the colour most strongly associated to a rose. The article stated that based on our memory and colour constancy, our brain has encoded the specific colour (red) to certain objects (rose) - therefore yes a typical rose might look red but will we ever really know if the rose is ‘red’ like the way its supposed to be? This raises the idea that if the colours we see are based on our memory, then everyone would have a slightly different ideology of how colours look. For instance my 'red’ can be different to someone else’s idea of ‘red’. This makes me think that to an extent, there’s certainly limitations to the informations we obtain as our sense of perception can alter the way we perceive thing and lead us to never truly knowing what an object "real" colour is supposed to look like.
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Daniel Han
9/20/2017 05:51:38 am
The experiment shown in the article shows how previously obtained information affects visual processing in our brain. The participants were asked to perform a motion perception task with black and white pictures of objects that had strong association with a certain colour. Despite the fact that the participants were only concentrating on the movement of the object, their brain encoded the colour that the objects should be.
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Daniel Han
9/20/2017 05:55:11 am
The experiment shown in the article shows how previously obtained information affects visual processing in our brain. The participants were asked to perform a motion perception task with black and white pictures of objects that had strong association with a certain colour. Despite the fact that the participants were only concentrating on the movement of the object, their brain encoded the colour that the objects should be.
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Aryan
9/20/2017 07:14:54 am
The way I understood it, his article effectively illustrates the brain's job at 'simplifying' the world around us. The article mentions that our brains will perceive a colour to be the same, regardless of the conditions around the object. This claim got me thinking whether we will ever see the world around us the way it really is - the brain could have been simplifying the inputs we get from our other senses as well, not only just the colours, just to be able to keep the world around us comprehensible.
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Trang
9/20/2017 08:28:52 am
Before reading the article, we had already established our doubts on whether or not our sense of perception is the same from one person to another since we do not know how other people see, hence the ‘is my red your red?’ question. After the article, the research has brought us further into our questioning by giving us even more variables that can affect a person’s sense of perception, past experiences and memory.
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Keminda
9/20/2017 09:02:15 am
After reviewing this article, I have realised that everyone perceives things in different ways. This can mean that different people interpret different things in different ways. Therefore, this poses a huge question as to whether our knowledge we take in from our sense of perception is actually reliable and true for everyone.
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CT
9/20/2017 05:05:24 pm
I think that the article brings up a very interesting and relatable subject as it links to real-life situations. For example, in real life, when kids colouring in their colouring books, how do they know that, say, a strawberry is red? And how do they know that the colour they think is red is actually red? Despite the fact that our brain identifies the colour red as red, we only know that the colour red is called "red" as we learn it from teachers/parents. This links to one of my childhood incidence when my teacher thought I was colour-blind because I couldn't distinguish between colours but actually, it was just because no one has ever taught me how to identify colours up to that point. This shows that our memory and sense perception work together to help us identify the colour and giving it a name as we were taught. However, one point of the article states that each person perceives colour in a different way. This would lead to a problem because my colour "red" wouldn't look the same as other people' colour "red". This is probably why sometimes we find ourselves arguing with our friends about whether the colour of a teacher's blouse is blue or purple. As we can see, since the colour we think is "blue" may not necessarily be "blue" for others, what we see and think that we see can only be fully valid for ourselves.
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Jin Ho
9/21/2017 12:03:08 am
After reading the article, I have realized that our brain simplifies much of what we sense. This article tells us that our brain will perceive a colour the way we know it to be regardless of the environmental condition around the object. Participants of Bannert and Bartels' study were able to name the right colour of objects which were black and white. This tells us that our brain is able to predict the colour of objects through memory.
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Stuart
9/21/2017 06:07:41 am
After reading this article it makes me question whether or not if mostly everyone see's the same colours as each other or do we all have a slight difference to the way we perceive colours onto an object, like does one see a darker shade of red while another see's a lighter shade of red? or What if you are looking at a red car and the colour you see is what you call red while another person sees another colour but also calls it red? Therefore, this shows that everyone distinguishes things in different ways and makes us question our judgment if what we think or see is true is actually not, or it is actually true but only to ourselves and no one else's.
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Oli
9/21/2017 07:07:39 am
Reading this article has made me realize the the nature of how we truly perceive reality is in fact, just an illusion. In terms of colour, our brains are only capable of interpreting electromagnetic wavelengths of light within the visible spectrum, thus how we perceive the world is only one of many possible interpretations. The true appearance of reality, which constituted the whole electromagnetic spectrum, would be very different from our own perception. This article therefore gave me a sense of perspective to how limited our sensory organs are in comprehending the true nature of the world around us. Is your red the same red as my red? - red in fact may not even exist, but merely be an invention within our own minds. For this reason, this article made me doubtful to if my own perception of reality was just simply false.
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McGee
9/21/2017 07:13:50 am
The article has brought up a deeper understanding of the limitations in human perception for me. We are limited by the limitations in our optic capabilities as well as our overall cognition, therefore we could never definitely be assured that our eyes respectively see the same color, or perceive the same color, not to mention our interpretation of the world in general. For example, if my interpretation of the color red is actually your interpretation of the color blue, how will I know that if all your life, my red is your blue?
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Amber
9/21/2017 07:40:31 am
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Flatoes
9/21/2017 08:10:51 am
We have had doubts that sense perception isn't really a great tool for us to obtain knowledge from the world. After reading the article, I am more certain that sense perception is hindering us from acquiring knowledge.
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Atchareeya
9/21/2017 05:01:26 pm
This article on cortical coloring shows us humans do rely on many different parts of the brain as well as our memory in order to identify the colors of different objects. The article shows how sense of perception is limited as a way of knowing as sense of perception relies on one’s way of thinking as well as memory thus the question of accuracy and reliability is raised because “your red might not be the same as my red” or different colors can be perceived different ways according to different people. Furthermore, sense of perception is also limited as a way of knowing as, although it can be accurate according to one person, it will still be subjective and very varied among different people. In a way, sense of perception way also make us more close-minded, because when we are studying something new, our brains may not absorb the information or process the information in an “incorrect” way because of the memory of what we have studied before contradicts this new information in which we have received. On the other hand, we do rely a lot on our senses when we gather knowledge in different subjects, by senses, especially in cases where experiments or trials of something is involved e.g. we use our sight to observe an experiment, smell and taste to differentiate between different substances, hearing to gain new information as well as understanding etc.
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Sam
9/21/2017 06:12:16 pm
I thought the article was really cool but a bit scary at the same time. I've actually wondered about this before because I have a friend that's color blind.
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Bob
9/21/2017 06:19:07 pm
The article has opened my eyes to many things. I've realised that sense perception is not always an accurate method of gaining knowledge. The participants in the experiment believed that they were seeing colours instead of seeing the black and white image. Actually, this not only applies to the sense of sight but I think that every sense is affected by your own bias in some way. For example, our memory and past experiences can affect the way we taste something or hear something. If you have eaten a meal in the past, and then ate it again, you would know if you gained satisfaction or not (if you personally liked the meal or not). Also, if you hear a new sound, your memory might relate this to another sound, even though they are distinct. Even though sense perception is not always reliable, if combined with other methods, it can still be useful to gain knowledge.
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Tom
9/21/2017 06:43:56 pm
After reading this article, I began to doubt my senses. Things aren’t what they seem to be. For example the relationship between sound and vision, where one sound articulated differently can look like a different sound when for real it is the same sound. This is the same as colour. Colour can look different as people have memories of objects being a certain colour meaning no matter what lighting the object is under, it will look the same. This is an optical illusion, and depends on the person. For example, someone who is colourblind, and have been their whole life may see an object in a different colour than someone with perfect colour vision. This shows more than one sense is needed to acquire accurate knowledge, such as in this case not trusting your instincts.
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Sam
9/21/2017 06:53:55 pm
I would also like to add that the article challenges the validity of our sense perception. Can we really trust what we see? I find this a little unnerving and overwhelming because often I rely on my sense perception to make decisions. I feel that this article challenges to not by overtly reliant on our senses but we also have to find other means, for example reason to judge the world around us.
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Eliza
9/22/2017 10:27:26 pm
After reading the article I wonder if our sense perception is what allows us to specific what we as individuals believe what is real and what isn't. Therefore does that mean we shouldn't always believe things the way we see them since our sense perception could just simply be tricking us to think otherwise? It really opened my perspective on things after reading this article. Portrays that we as humans have limitations because of our brains. Although our brain can help us in many ways it always differs our senses as a cause of bias. However, there are limitations to our sense perceptions without them during lessons or when we gather knowledge from subjects we need these sense perceptions because without it we'd be impaired.
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David
9/28/2017 10:18:56 am
After reading the article, I was able to find everyone has different interpretations on colour and that we are using our previous memories in brain to determine what colour is. Colour is not just a visual sensation but it is immediately followed by perception deciding and identifying what has been sensed. I once read the interesting article about people looking the same clothes with different colours (blue gold, white black something like that). This article you given and I read inform how our sense perception can change what we know about at the moment and should doubt whether we should be too reliable on sense perception or not.
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