KEEPING IT ROLLING

 “I have perfect vision,” explains my colleague, Heather Sellers, an acclaimed writer and writing teacher. Her vision may be fine, but there is a problem with her perception. She cannot recognize faces.

 Sellers wrote her memoir, Face First about her face blindness also called prosopagnosia. Her words: “In college on a date at the Spaghetti Station, I returned from the bathroom and plunked myself down in the wrong booth, facing the wrong man. I remained unaware he was not my date even as my date (a stranger to me) accosted Wrong Booth Guy and then stormed out of the station.

 I can’t distinguish actors in movies and on television. I do not recognize myself in photos or video. I can’t recognize my step- sons in the soccer pick-up line; I failed to determine which husband was mine at a party, in the mall, at the market.

 People would perceive her as snobby when she would ask something to the effect of “do I know you?”  Kind of the way people who are hearing impaired fake their way through a conversation.

 Sellers’ sensation is normal when she is viewing someone she knows. Her sensory receptors work the same way most everyone else’s and in many ways her perception is good as well. She may recognize people from their hair, their gait, their voice, or their physique.  Her experience is like trying to pick out a penguin in a group of waddling penguins.

 Bottom-Up Processing: Analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain’s integration of sensory information  Top-Down Processing: Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations.

 Nature’s sensory gifts suit each recipient’s needs. They enable each organism to obtain essential information. Consider: -A frog, which feeds on flying insects has eyes with receptor cells that fire only in response to small, dark moving objects. A frog could starve to death knee-deep in motionless flies. But let one zoom by and the frog’s “bug detector” cells snap awake.

-A male silkworm moth has receptors so sensitive to the female sex-attractant odor that a single female need release only a billionth of an ounce per second to attract every male silkworm moth within a mile. That is why there continue to be silkworms.

-We are similarly equipped to detect the important features of our environment. Our ears are most sensitive to sound frequencies that include human voice consonants and a baby’s cry.

We begin the exploration of our sensory gifts with some basic questions that cut across all of our sensory systems: 1) Where is the border between our conscious and unconscious? 2) What stimuli cross the threshold?

Read this sentence: “Buster Bunny lives in Acme Acres.”

Did you make a conscious note about your shoes pressing against your feet or notice your nose in your line of vision?

 Selective Attention: The focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus When you talk on your phone and drive you are shifting your selective attention from one thing to the other. The Cocktail Party Effect: Your ability to attend to only one voice above many

People with ADHD seem to lack the ability to be selectively attentive. Instead of filtering out unimportant stimuli in order to focus on important ones, they attend to all stimuli in the environment, making it difficult, if not impossible to process information correctly.

 Share with us an experience you had when you were either so caught up in an activity that you missed something obvious in the environment; or when the environment was so distracting that you couldn’t concentrate. If you have attention difficulties youmay be reassured to know that others are frequently unable to concentrate or that they, too have times where their own intense concentration makes them miss things.

 Flow is a term coined by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (Cheek-sent- me-hi) It involves being skilled at a challenging task that takes away our sense of self-consciousness and awareness of time and the presence of others around us.

Inattentional Blindness: failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere Change Blindness: Failiing to Notice changes in the environment Cell Phone users (even with hands free devices) are 4 times more at risk for accidents.

 Relating Choice Blindness to Implicit Associations: