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A Confederacy of Senses Joseph McAbee 4 November 2013 Dr. Joelle Elicker Introduction to Psychology Fall 2013

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Many people think of the five senses as a union of strong, independent perception devices that can be used to sense and perceive the outside world. While this may be how it seems, the senses are actually more like a confederacy a loose connection of weak, interdependent states. Much like the thirteen original United States, the senses interact with each other on a rather frequent basis, although they are not entirely combined. For example, one may see a gourmet food, and as a result, they begin to taste and smell it too, even though theyre not close enough to actually be experiencing these senses. In the same way, it is possible to smell something without seeing it, and our ability to identify what these scents and aromas are ties into our schemas and other various mental cues. When the brain is faced with multiple sensory inputs, it has various decisions to make regarding correlation among the inputs. Once the brain subconsciously decides whether the stimuli are related or not, it is then faced with a new problem: to integrate or segregate? Usually, things like food are integrated with their smells and tastes, while smelling a skunk on the side of the road can be segregated from perceiving the road while driving, because you dont always smell skunk while driving its just a once-in-a-while thing. While multisensory perception does these processes and many more, it should not be confused with sensory interaction, which is the way two senses influence each other. Taste and smell, for example, play a huge role in the impact of each other on the brain. When you taste something, you also smell it. Just as the senses help each other to function properly, they can also confuse each other. The McGurk Effect is defined as the phenomenon of having an inability to speak properly when faced with multiple sensory inputs. More often than not, the sensory stimuli that affect speech are sight and hearing. When someone hears one thing while seeing someone say something else, they become tongue-tied, and cannot say what theyd like. Instead, their speech is slurred, and

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becomes unintelligible. Our perception of speech is influenced by the McGurk Effect simply by combining simultaneous sensory inputs. When you hear something different than what you see being said, youre likely to become confused and ultimately slur your own speech as a result. The areas of the brain that process sound is known as the Temporal Lobes. They can be found just inside the skull near the temples of the head. The visual cortex, or that which is in charge of perception of sight, is located in the very rear of the brain, towards the cerebellum. It extends forward just enough to be contiguous with the temporal lobes, which may explain why the confusion experienced in the McGurk Effect takes place. Touch, taste, and smell are all controlled by the Parietal Lobe. With the brain being divided into so many different lobes, each assigned to certain senses and processes, one might think that the brain works like a Swiss Army Knife, having set partitions for one thing and one thing only. This is certainly not the case, as Myers (2011) says that the brain has a sort of plasticity to it, in which if a sense is suddenly removed, that new space becomes available to allot space to the other senses. This, therefore, proves that when a sense is removed, the other senses are significantly strengthened because of an undeniable plasticity the brain has evolved to have. When it comes time to perceive a certain sense, the other senses cant really be suppressed. Theyre representative of a closed-circuit television set, in which a security camera is always on and transmitting live footage to a television. Although our senses cannot be suppressed or turned off, the brain can choose which senses were more influenced by based on what were trying to accomplish. Typically, audition captures more articulatory detail than the other senses, especially while were listening for something specific more intensely than we are looking for it (Rosenblum, 2013). Even so, vision is our predominant sense. We use it for

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everything driving, guidance in writing and hand movement, and even in the process of applied perception of sound. Clearly speaking, sight is used to better perceive sound, and sound is used to better perceive sight.

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References Myers, D. G. (2011). Exploring Psychology: Eighth edition in modules. New York, NY: Worth Publisher. Rosenblum, L. D. (2013). A confederacy of senses. Scientific American, 308(1), 72-75.