Were you to stop by dorm room most any evening of the week after the textbooks have returned to the shelves and the toothbrushes are stowed back in the shower caddies, there is a good chance that my boyfriend will be standing in front of my flat panel tv trying his hand at being, if only for a few contrived moments, a rockstar of sorts. He isn’t alone, however, with most of the guys across campus, and the nation for that matter, being mesmermized by the opportunity the game Guitar Hero gives them to live out the Aerosmith/Guns N’ Roses rock n’ roll dreams. If you’ve managed to avoid the trend, the game basically works by having colored circles scroll towards the player on the screen, with the colors corresponding to a particular “note” or button on the controler. One of my more enlightened, and correspondingly disinterested in video games, friends recently described the process as similar to watching “dots on a treadmill”. As funny as the analogy might seem, it is rather accurate.

A few weeks past, on an evening exactly like the one I described above, my boyfriend stood in front of my dresser and tv fixating on the movement in front of his eyes. I, on the other hand, was casually lounging on my bed attempting to finish up some last minute reading. I say “attempting” because, despite the simple concept behind the game and my usual distaste with video games in general, the process becomes quite distracting. After struggling to concentrate on the textbook in front of me, I finally faced the inevitable and closed the cover to wait for my boyfriend to finish the song he was playing at the moment. When he had finished and turned to see the distracted and minorly annoyed look on my face, he put down his “guitar” and went about other business. In turn, I reopened my textbook and looked back down at the remaining few pages in front of me… only to see them moving away from me.

A little shocked, I looked up at the blank, institutional wall common to most of the Kissam dorm rooms and witnessed the same phenomena. I had never seen anything like it before, as the illusion was not effecting my vision entirely, but rather only when I fixated on a particular stationary object. For me, the illusion appeared almost like rapid ripples in a pond, moving the exact opposite direction as the musical notes on the screen had while my boyfried was playing Guitar Hero.

When I mentioned the phenomena to him, he glanced up, looking far less surprised than I was. As a much more avid follower of the game, he had obviously encountered this after effect previosly, but was quite amused at my immense surprise. Although I understood a lot of the visual pathways that would cause such an illusion, my understanding did not come full circle until our class discussion the other day and the demonstration with the image of Buddha. Although I’ve mentioned in nearly every post I’ve made, it never ceases to surprise me as to how much awareness this class lent to the daily instances of perception in my life. Is my life significantly changed, with me striving to perceive in a more complete and efficient manner– no. But, there is a distinct aire of comfort that comes with comprehension, with understanding why it is that we work the ways we do. Furthermore, while I state now that I am more interested than impacted by the material we cover, who knows– one day I could take up a position with the U.S. military, designing technology that will assist fighter pilots in recovering stationary vision more quickly after a flight. You never know what life will throw at you, but now at least we know how it is that we go about catching it

That being said, while my dedicated intentions may be honorable, from time to time, my body and ability to focus kick and scream, refusing to concentrate (metaphorically speaking that is… I mean, we’re not diagnosable schizophrenia here or anything, more just the woes of the late nights demanded by an elite education and the perils those nights result in). Anyway, more importantly, such an instance occurred just this past Thursday. For those of you who know me on a reasonably personal level, you know that I will be graduating with my Bachelor’s here in the next few weeks and have decided to take a little time off before returning to graduate school in order to earn my doctorate. While all that sounds good and well, the unfortunate truth that I will soon be an “adult” by every monetary, legal, professional, and laundry-doing interpretation is quickly descending upon me. Recently, I’ve been engaging in all those tenuous tasks: selecting an apartment, convincing them to rent to your newly independent being, finding furniture, purchasing said furniture, searching for jobs, interviewing for said jobs… oh right, and finishing up the last couple academic weeks of senior year– you know, the easy stuff.

It is because of all these newly-found responsibilities and the sleep-depriving effect they have been wreaking on my nerves, that I found myself sitting in my Thursday 8 a.m. lecture discussing the mitotic flaws which lead to cancer with a little less umph than I would have appreciated. As the lecture progressed, our forever-dedicated and newly appointed (which equates with perpetually-enthusiastic) professor, began diagramming one of the many processes on a white board in order to better convey the depths of his knowledge. Don’t get me wrong– his tireless efforts are one of the primary reasons why the class has had such a profound effect on me and I’ve done so well in it. At the same time, his choice of marker color was… a little less than informed in this particular instance.

After he’d been diagramming, editting, and re-diagramming for about 10 minutes, the fact that he kept mentioning “two colors” began to seem very odd to me. When I look at the board, which seemingly depicted two homolgous chromsomes undergoing an identical process, I saw everything in dark blue… despite the shadow that covered half of the board. “Poor fellow,” I thought, “He’s gotten confused on the color he has been diagramming in again,” which unfortunately has been an error that has plagued his lectures on more than one occasion. It was at this point that he stepped to the side, ceasing to block the light source behind him, and bringing the full board into illumination. In this moment I saw, undoubtedly and indisputably that he was in fact diagramming in both black and dark blue, with the black only being represented on the half of the board that had been in a large shadow.

In truth, I actually had to laugh out loud at the situation… feeling as though I had just witnesses another clever illusion-slide from one of our perception lectures. Additionally, and probably not in the interest of better understanding the genetics lecture at hand, I began to go over the processes that would have resulted in the phenomena I had just witnessed. Based on the information that we have covered in class, it is safe to say that when my brain perceived that half of the diagram was not being illuminated a significantly as the other half, it reasoned that writing must have been lighter than it was being perceived. Additionally, with the surround of the dark blue as a cue in the nearby area, it seems natural that it compensated, lightening my perception of the black to that of a dark blue. When, however, the two images were brought into the same lighting conditions, the ratios of their color compensation were brought back into a more realistic comparison, making it far easier for my visual cones and visual cortex to distinguish the difference between the two hues.

As I’ve said before, one of the most interesting aspects of this class has been that I’ve realized just how fragmented perception is in our daily lives, in addition to how many times the illusions we’ve reviewed in class occur in our daily lives without us being aware of them. In this particular instance, I realized just how valid these opinions were. Here I was, weeks away from graduation at a top institution, sitting in one of the most trying classes I’ve ever been a part of and succeeding relatively well at both… and still falling prey to the misconceptions and misactions of my mind– my mind was, very literally, playing tricks on me. With just a week and a half of Perception left, it was, what I can only hope to be, one of a few more examples of the validity of the concepts we have been addressing in class. In addition, it imparted an ever more tangible sense that we are slaves to our perception, falling prey to it, being enabled by it, being misled by it, living our lives by it, and everyday, without our even being aware, further fine-tuning the foundations upon which and the mechanisms by which we perceive.

Perception: It is a complex and involved process, leading to one of the many beauties of life and, in truth, when you appreciate that which goes into it, you can see the brillance of both its triumphs and its flawed attempts.

For this particular instance, it is undeniable that, realistically speaking, these young women were seeing or encountering the exact same visual stimuli they would were they not innebriated. That being said, I think that it is equally undeniable that, while the stimuli in and of itself remains unchanged, their perception of that stimuli was unrecognizably altered. For me, the connection to academics comes in that, similar to Mary’s lecture, although the visual structures themselves remained functioning and intact, the visual system is vast and complex, a fact that, although it dictates the beautiful breadth and depth of human vision, also leaves the system open to attack and manipulation on a variety of avenues.

I must confess that, as I make this connection, I haven’t put a significant amount of research into the actual mechanisms through which alcohol alters human visual perception. In addition, I realize that vision is so intimately interconnected with other perceptions, such as the balance mechanisms located in the inner ear, an anatomical truth which dictates other systems playing a role in the curiosites of drunkeness. At the same time, it was an interetsing concept to mull over the distinct visual alterations most college students know all too well as the result of a few too many and the reality that these alterations are the result of alcohol affecting the lateral geniculate nucleus, superior colliculus and visual cortex.

This connection in mind, I’m sure that a quick check of the ever-helpful Wikipedia would shed some light on the means through which alcohol plays tricks on our visual perception, but, with the information we have reviewed in this class alone, it was quite interesting to warrant a few guesses: perhaps, considering the blurriness of many a drunken panorama, alcohol affects cone efficiency with low light levels not being minimized or amplified by intermediary cells or it could dictate far more convergence, blurring the detail of a normal image. While considering these thoughts on a walk back home might seem nerdy at best, and although I make this next statement at the risk of coming off like an after-school special, it is interesting, when looking at perception and alcohol’s effects in these terms, to consider the very neurological impact one is having when deciding to throw a few more back. For many, a weekend with drinking equates to nothing more than a few giggles and out-of-character actions, but when we step back and look at the very mechanisms through which we are affecting our bodies, realizing that we are disrupting the very neurological processes that functioned to bring us to this academic establishment in the first place, hopefully we can assess our choices with slightly different criteria.

Alright, that’s it– I’ve stepped down from the soap box, I’ve made the circumscribed speech, shared my moment of insight into the cortical woes of drinking and passed on a small slice of the knowledge I’ve gained from years of being a resident advisor. Whether the ultimate message is one to take to heart, you can’t negate to find interest in the fact that the very complexity that gives us the capacity for greatness can concurrently be our greatest weakness and largest vulnerability.

Considering the experiment we assessed in class where the facial expression of a monkey was recognized and evaluateed, I started wondering exactly what components of an individual’s face lend us recognition. While we’ve discussed geons and their possible place in the world, the intricacies of a human face seem beyond the reach of this simplistic theory and, rather, it seems more likely that we recognize patterns of placement– two eyebrows set above two eys, the general shape of a nose, ears protruding from the sides of the head, etc. When considering that facial recognition occurs in this manner, it seems that it is in fact likely that people experience the illusion that many memebers of another race look “the same”.

Breaking down the logic of that last statment, one can consider that the visual cues we normally use in facial discrimination are altered for various races, from caucasian to asian, with the placement of various facial components and their proportions varying. In the same vein, it seems reasonable that these major differences are also accompanied by the minor differences that give each member of a race individuality. That being said, we discussed how, in truth, the human visual system takes in very limited information about the world it is perceiving, generating a fuzzy understanding of the situation at hand and then filling in the rest. When discussing an individual with whom you are not familiar, if the basic cues for facial recognition are altered, it seems logical that your brain and visual cortex would be fixating on these major differences, rather than the minor ones, which a majority of the members of a particular race will share in common. With only this visual information at hand, it could very easily result that an individual would come away with the hazy perception that all members of another race look “the same” because, based on their limited impression, a multitude of faces belonging to a particular race match similar cues.

Of course, when an individual has more exposure and experience with members of a different race, the individualities and intricacies characterized by their lineage become familiar and useful. This being said, however, thinking through our friend’s comment in this manner, I came to see the comment not so much as characterized by cultural ignorance, but, more likely, scientifically based. It brought me back to a forensics class I took a couple years back where, in one exercise, we identified the age and race of various skeletons based on various skeletal cues. While all humans have the basics in common, their are a multitude of phenotypic differences that betray our heritage down to our very skeletal components. It seems that, many times, we take for granted our ability to fill in missing information in the visual worl and, in these instances make wide-reaching innacuruate judgements (suchas an entire race looking “the same”). As this seems like one of the more obvious cues one would pick up on throughout their day, it begs the question of “what else are we missing?”

Obviously between that evening and our early return the airport the following morning, we were beyond exhausted. All that being said, when we finally found another flight and sat happily in our seats, my eyelids had dropped closed and the world was beginning to melt around me. Although my boyfriend made the habit of looking up every few moments throughout the flight to comment on something fascinating from his technology magazine, I had all but tuned him out, offering up only the obligatory nod and smile.

Towards the end of the flight, however, irony seemed to step in when one of the comments he had made earlier on suddenly had incredible relevance. As I tried to rouse myself during my descent and prepared for the onslaught in pursuit of a cab back to campus I sat with my eyes open focusing on a point straight ahead of me. At one point, I glanced to the side and out the window only to be shocked that we were turned and approaching Nashville at a drastic angle. What was interesting to me was that, when I looked out the window and witnessed the obvious motion, I felt that motion and movement through every part of my body, becoming completely aware of every turn and adjustment the pilot made during our flight; however, when I looked ahead and was not taking in the trajectory information from outside, there were absolutely no clues as to whether we were moving at all.

 Although I at first offered this experience up to a product of my immense exhaustion, my boyfriend reminded me that it had been one of the phenomena he’d described in an earlier, obviously tuned-out, comment. He went on to recap the illusion explaining that, were all the windows in the plane to be closed, the pilot could complete a barrel roll with the passengers being none the wiser. While I have yet to surmise enough information from our lecture to determine the cause of such an illusion, it was reminiscent of an experiment we completed in class on the McGurk Effect.

In the experiment, when we watched the clip with no sound, we perceived the individual to be forming one particular sound, when we listened to the recording only we perceived another sound and finally, when we put audio and visual stimuli together, we heard a third sound that was basically a compromise between the two we had heard previously. As the captions for movies on this effect tend to describe, in this illusion, as individual begins to “hear with their eyes”, meaning that the discrepancy between the stimuli information being received being negotiated and resolved in the brain and altering perception. In my flight illusion, it seems to me that, as the plane and its passengers are moving at the same speed, we lack stimuli to signal this movement; however, when the eyes perceive movement, it sends a conflicting message to the brain, resulting in a compensation and alteration in perception.

Although I doubt that this illusion is the product of the eye’s numerous cell types or neural pathway, but rather a result of stimulatory interaction, I still felt that held a certain degree of relevance with regard to our recent discussions. For me, this minor illusion clarified that, although any one of us could compensate and function with the loss of one, possibly two senses, the sensations of life are a constant product of collaboration between our various perceptory systems, with a system only acting rarely without the influence of another. Really, when one considers this logically, it is not surprising, considering such collaboration constitutes the foundation of organic life– each of our systems surviving and functioning as the result of another. This being said, however, it still begs the question of whether we perceive is in fact accurate or merely the product of the manner in which mankind’s perceptory systems mold and manipulate stimulation?

 While Florida offered us spring-breakers upper 80′s weather and plenty of sunshine, there were a handful of thunderstorms and more than our share of violent wind to deal with as well. Unfortunately, while these minor inconveniences can be easily compensated for while on the ground, when one is flying they obviously result in a lot of turbulence and a rather uncomfortable flight.

For me, everything went off without a hitch, arriving at the airport in plenty of time and enjoying the better part of the hour and a half flight down south. When we started descending above Tampa’s beautiful international airport however, the minor turbulence turned fairly violent. In the next few moments I was cupping my hands over my ears and tearing at the acute pain all that turbulence was bringing about. Remembering our class discussions, I popped a stick of Juicy Fruit into my mouth and started chewing, hoping that the opening and closing of my mouth would assist my Eustachian tube in equalizing the immense pressure being exerted on my sensitive eardrum. Of course, things are never that simple and, while the chewing action would give me relief for a few moments, the pain was bound to resume its torment a few seconds later. In a last ditch effort, the flight attendants handed me a bottle of water and told me to gulp it down throughout the landing, claiming that the swallowing action would allow my ears to equalize even more effectively.

 Luckily for me, and my eardrum, they were right. When I stopped and thought about the advice that the attendants had given me, it followed the basic anatomical premises we established in our class lectures, with the swallowing allowing my Eustachian tube to open and assist in equalizing the pressure. Comically enough, I took the attendants advice a little too literally and ended up going to through 4 bottles of water before the finally landing on the ground… which, I’m sure comes as no surprise, led to yet another uncomfortable dilemma (this one however, was far more manageable). In the end, the moral of the story becomes: who knew that class lecture could help start spring break off right? =)

 One such humorous mishap occurred this past Tuesday while eating lunch with some of my friends. After stopping by one of my frequent vegetarian haunts, Nectar, I decided to get a bit adventurous with the plethora of options Vanderbilt affords us on the meal plan (at this point, try to ignore the immense sarcasm in my voice). For those of you familiar with the establishment, only a small handful of drinks count as a beverage, all of which seem to blend together in blandness rather quickly. Because of this lack of variety, when I stopped a new variety of one popular tea, a cherry limeade to be specific, I jumped at the opportunity.

Well, past this point, everything proceeded quite well, with the attendant not deploying her wrath on me and deciding to, freakishly, not deny one of my selections as eligible for meal plan. The lunch was surprisingly edible, which is always a gamble with these microwave creations, and the conversation was equally engaging. At this point, I thought that the world was on my side and that things would continue along this blessed path… then I tried the “cherry limeade”. Let me define tried: I opened the bottle, brought it close to my mouth, unintentionally inhaled, gagged and aborted the attempt. You may ask yourself what on earth could have caused this strange reaction and I respond that the drink smelled… like playdough. Not a little bit, not remini”scent” of, none of this nonsense- it smelled exactly like playdough.

 Obviously, I’m not the only person in this class to have had a childhood filled with playdough. I’m even going to go as far as to say, on some occasions throughout my early years, I sampled said playdough in hopes of gathering some sort of sensory information regarding the perpetually engaging substance. I’m willing to bet that it was these gourmet endeavors that led to my reaction of disgust in fact. When I handed the bottle to one of my best friends and asked her what the fragrance reminded her of, she immediately screamed “Oh my god, playdough!”. Interestingly enough, when passed to the last of our trio, the substance was deemed completely suitable… and nothing like playdough. I later found out that my corroborating amiga had in fact also engaged in her share of kindergarten sampling, while the other friend had not. I can’t go so far as to say whether this difference was the deciding factor in our dividing opinions, but I willing to bet that it played a significant role.

What struck me as funny was how accurate our discussion of the olfactory sensation had been. For one thing, I could never bring myself to sample the drink, yet I tasted playdough when I smelled it. Secondly, although the taste was not, when I stopped and thought rationally, that offensive, the reaction it conjured up in my stomach was nothing to be trifled with or second guessed. I can only assume that perhaps one or two of my childhood samples ended poorly and this was my body’s way of forebidding a repeat occurrence. Obviously, the aroma of both playdough and this drink was volatile and fat soluble because they both produced a pungent and clear sense. At the same time, it is incredibly humorous that my receptors would identify compounds, that simply must be quite different, as incredibly similar and sent a message to my brain that would be such an unshakable perception of the presence of playdough that I simply couldn’t bring myself to drink the liquid in front of me. Although we are constantly astonished by the magnitude of the brain and corresponding receptor’s specificity, it is obvious that occasionally, it leads us off course. For these instances, what emerges as truly incredible is that, although the brain communicates so flawlessly and works in tandem with its various parts continuously, it still has the acuity to occasionally separate logic from sense and doubt the very messages it is encoding and conveying in another part of itself.

Friday evening, after a quick jog around the Vandy loop, I jumped in the shower to rinse off before grabbing dinner with a few friends. When either my shower ran over or my significant other arrived early, I began to feel the pressure to wrap up my primping, leading me to rush my usual routine just a bit too much. While attempting to multi-task, I accomplished the inevitable and tripped as I swiped a q-tip in my ear. In the next few moments, the absolutely searing pain was nearly crippling, in fact it was really indescribable… while unsettling, simultaneously astonishing that such a circumscribed location could inflict such a sensation.

It was in these searing moments that my boyfriend noticed that something was not quite right and asked me what was wrong. Unfortunately, also in these moments, I found that I couldn’t really hear him. After a quick trip to the ER, I was told that I hadn’t actually punctured my eardrum, but had bruised it and wouldn’t be able to hear extremely well until the swelling went down. It struck me as incredibly ironic that such an almost humorously unfortunate event would happen right as we are studying the human ear. Because we had just reviewed the properties of the outer, middle and inner ear, I understood that the swelling from my carelessness would reduce the elasticity of my eardrum making it more difficult for it to transmit the air disturbances that are, in essence, the constituents of sound.

Before I was sure that my hearing would eventually return, the possibility that struck me more was the absolute truth of Helen Keller’s quote. As devastating as never seeing the faces of my family would be, not seeing the events of my upcoming graduation or my future children, such a loss would effect more the depth of my connection, rather than very elemental ability to connect in the first place. As calming as the faces of my loved ones are, its their words that have molded me into the adult I am today. As beautiful as the steps of a skilled dancer may be, they are an expression of the emotions of the music they are set to. Well, two days later, my hearing has returned and, along with it, my ability to actively engage with the world rather than simply witness it passing by me. As ironic as it was, the timing of this short-lived injury gave me a rather poignant opportunity to engage in what would have otherwise been a rather contrived exploration into the loss of hearing.

(p.s. the time stamp somehow got messed up for last week and this week, so I’m editing this one to denote that it was submitted on time.)

After discovering our mutual gourmet choices a few moths past, my best friend and I began a small tradition every Friday afternoon in an effort to keep life interesting and continue expanding our horizons despite the lifestyle choice we shared that many others believed to be limiting. Since that day, come every Friday, we venture out into the metropolis of Nashville in search of a new food that we’ve never tried before. In truth, it’s become one of my most cherished traditions in life, with each week holding the promise of discovering something new and having a bonding experience in the process, whether our bounty for the day be good or bad.

This past Friday our tradition led us to the doors of a local Indian restaurant that we’d heard numerous great things about. After gorging on a few curry dishes, it’s not hard to believe that our mouths were on fire, which led us to take the advice of our waiter and order Lassi, a smoothie like drink made from yogurt that cuts the heat with flavors like mango and strawberry. While I proved to be the lesser of our group and drank my new found savior on the spot, my companion chose to take hers along with her after our meal. From there we browsed a couple boutiques, picked up a few groceries for the evening and made our way back to the dorm.

The next morning, a small group of us had formed a conversation in the hallway, plopping down with blankets and pillows in front of our doors, when my best friend came strolling from her room Lassi in hand. At first, I thought she must have really taken to the drink and managed to locate some more that morning… then, when I noticed the same insignia on the foam cup, thought she must just be headed to throw out the remains from the day before. A few moments later she took up a spot on the carpet next to me and popped a Dayquil in her mouth. As soon as she pulled the clear, plastic lid off the cup I could smell that distinguished sour scent that seems to robustly fill the back cavity of your throat as soon as you encounter it. When she proceeded to tilt the cup back and move to take a swig, I couldn’t help but intervene and scream, “What are you doing!?!” Come to find out, while the cup had been sitting under the draft of warmth from her heater all night and had been sniffed in the morning to verify its sanctity, the cold, for which she was popping a few decongestants that morning, had prevented her from detecting just how entirely off course the drink had managed to go over night.

After we had cleared things up, and thrown away the offending remainders, there was little more that I could do than laugh at the irony of the situation. Having just reviewed the mechanisms going into a near miss such as this, I took the opportunity to be sufficiently nerdy and explain the logistics of what had just happened, much to the joy of my hall-mates I’m sure It seemed that we had just witnessed a real life manifestation of the experiments we mimicked in class Wednesday, but unlike missing the beautiful intricacies of a red skittle’s flavor, I’ll never think of the role of scent in quite the same way again.