How Does the Sense of Touch Function in Reading with the Fingertips?
Final paper
How does the sense of touch function in reading with the fingertips?
Class: Perception
Professor: Erica St Germain
Student: Monica Beasley
Human perception is an amazing and complex phenomenon as it gives us true knowledge about our external world through our senses: smell, taste, touch, hearing and sight. Even though perception works the same for each individual, what each human being perceives can be very different. The human mind can only perceive phenomena that was already experienced from previous knowledge and it finds it hard to contemplate about new information. When that happens, the mind tries to understand that new perception with another phenomena that is recognizable to a similar event. Either way, each individual knowledge and previous experience triggers the way each one perceives what is real and true and vice-versa. What happens when one of the senses is missing: does the human body change the way everything is perceived? What if an individual in lacking the sense of sight: would he/she perceive the world around him/her the same as someone with all senses? Definitely not: a blind person’s sense of perception of the world around him is limited by the near vicinity of what he can touch while for a person who can see, they sky is the limit of their perceptions. This fact leads to the idea that a person who is deficient in one sense, must rely on the other senses to get a better perception of the world, becoming proficient on using the other senses. The energy saved by using only four senses instead of five, is being disbursed to the other senses that could eventually be performed very close to perfection. A perfect example is the ability of blind people to read: they have to rely on the other senses, especially on the sense of touch in order to perform the act of reading.
It is amazing how blind individuals have such a superior sense of touch and how they “see” sounds and “hear” colors. In a study done at
How does the sense of touch function in reading with the fingertips?
Class: Perception
Professor: Erica St Germain
Student: Monica Beasley
Human perception is an amazing and complex phenomenon as it gives us true knowledge about our external world through our senses: smell, taste, touch, hearing and sight. Even though perception works the same for each individual, what each human being perceives can be very different. The human mind can only perceive phenomena that was already experienced from previous knowledge and it finds it hard to contemplate about new information. When that happens, the mind tries to understand that new perception with another phenomena that is recognizable to a similar event. Either way, each individual knowledge and previous experience triggers the way each one perceives what is real and true and vice-versa. What happens when one of the senses is missing: does the human body change the way everything is perceived? What if an individual in lacking the sense of sight: would he/she perceive the world around him/her the same as someone with all senses? Definitely not: a blind person’s sense of perception of the world around him is limited by the near vicinity of what he can touch while for a person who can see, they sky is the limit of their perceptions. This fact leads to the idea that a person who is deficient in one sense, must rely on the other senses to get a better perception of the world, becoming proficient on using the other senses. The energy saved by using only four senses instead of five, is being disbursed to the other senses that could eventually be performed very close to perfection. A perfect example is the ability of blind people to read: they have to rely on the other senses, especially on the sense of touch in order to perform the act of reading.
It is amazing how blind individuals have such a superior sense of touch and how they “see” sounds and “hear” colors. In a study done at
References: 1. Blake, R., & Sekular, R. (2006). Perception (5th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill 2. Burton, H., Snyder, A.Z., Conturo, T.E., Akbudak, E., Ollinger, J.M., and Raichle, M.E., Adaptive changes in early and late blind: A fMRI study of Braille reading, Journal of Neurophysiology, 87:589-607, 2002. 3. Foulke E, Warm JS. Effects of complexity and redundancy on the tactual recognition on metric figures. Percept Mot Skills 1967; 25:177-87. 4. Grant, A. C., Thiagarajah, M. C., & Sathian, K. (2000). Tactile perception in blind Braille readers: A psychophysical study of acuity and hyperacuity using gratings and dot patterns. Perception & Psychophysics, 62, 301-312. 5. http://www.sfn.org/index.cfm?pagename=news_11102003b