The perception of time is a brain construction.
Perception is a notion that derives from the Latin term perceptio and describes both the action and the consequence of perceiving (that is, having the ability to receive images, impressions or external sensations through the senses, or to understand and know something). .
Before defining this concept, it is important to indicate that to know the inner or outer world it is necessary to carry out a process of decoding the messages that are received throughout the body. Perception is defined as the cognitive process through which people are able to understand their environment and act accordingly to the impulses they receive; It is about understanding and organizing the stimuli generated by the environment and giving them meaning. Thus the next thing the individual does is send a response accordingly.
The idea of perception can also refer to certain knowledge , an idea or the inner sensation that arises as a result of a material impression derived from our senses.
Perception according to psychology
For psychology , perception consists of a function that enables the organism to receive, process and interpret the information that comes from the outside using the senses .
The term began to attract the attention of scholars during the 19th century . The first models that linked the magnitude of a physical stimulus with that of the perceived episode enabled the emergence of so-called psychophysics .
The first cognitive procedure
Specialists assure that perception is the first cognitive procedure , which allows the subject to capture information from the environment that surrounds them through the energy that reaches the sensory systems.
This procedure has an inferential and constructive character . In this context, the internal representation of what is happening outside emerges as a hypothesis . The data captured by the receptors is analyzed gradually, together with the information collected by the memory and that contributes to the processing and creation of said representation.
Through perception, the information is interpreted and the idea of a single object is established. This means that it is possible to experience various qualities of the same thing and merge them through perception, thus understanding that it is a single object .
Aromatherapy is based on the perception of aromas.
Differences between sensation and perception
It is important to declare that perception is not synonymous with sensation . Since both concepts are often used synonymously, it is necessary to be clear about their differences.
A sensation is an experience that is experienced from a stimulus ; It is the clear response to a fact after sensory processing.
A perception, for its part, is the interpretation of what is registered by sensory sensitivity. What is captured by the senses (taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing) acquires meaning and is classified in the brain. It is often said that sensation is what precedes perception.
To exemplify this difference we can say that the volume and tonality of a song played by a musician are captured by the listener as a sensation, while if we are able to recognize what song it is or to weave similarities between those sounds and an experience prior to listening, we are faced with a perception. The first is an intuitive and automatic process, while the second is more elaborate and rational .
Pain perception combines physical and physiological factors.
Gestalt theory
As defined by Gestalt theory, people perceive the world as a whole and not in a fragmented way; We can verify this if we think that when we wake up and open our eyes we can see the entire room where we are and not simply loose objects. Through our perception we are able to understand what that whole is made of and isolate what interests us most at each moment.
According to the studies carried out around this concept we can say that there are biological factors of perception, with which we are born, and others learned ; This means that the way we perceive our environment changes throughout our lives through experiences. For example, when we were children we admired our father, but after a certain age we may no longer do so, and we may even hate him, this means that according to the situations we have gone through we have reinterpreted that person and we have located him in different places over time.
extrasensory perception
It is important to indicate that we usually talk about another type of perception: extrasensory. This would be related to the way in which things can be perceived when the ordinary senses do not participate. According to those who believe in these abilities, these are energy transfer phenomena that cannot be understood through biological or physical concepts.
These phenomena include telepathy (ability to read the mind), precognition (prediction of an event that will take place in the future), clairvoyance (ability to see things that are not in space) and psychokinesis (ability to modify matter through the mind).
It is essential to keep in mind that for scientists, extrasensory perception does not exist . There is no rational argument or irrefutable proof that it is possible to discover what is in a person's mind or move an object through mental activity, for example.