Luke Ozdenvar

Group members: Luke, Malika, Steve

Badge leader: Luke

Feb 1st - Feb 7th

WOK Badge: Sense Perception

"How does sight impact our taste"

Journal 1 Feb 1st We plan to conduct an experiment where we try to manipulate the taste buds of a person by using there other sense to change the perception of their taste buds. So our key knowledge question would be "how does sight impact our senses?" We are planning to use bean boozeled. This is a pouch of jelly beans containing both good and bad flavors randomly mixed. We will ask them to eat the jelly bean without telling them what it is. After this we will record their reactions and create a final presentation. Overall the point of this experiment will be trying to manipulate taste by using sight. But, the idea of jelly beans are still up for change. If we can find a better and easier idea that would create a better experiment we will consider changing our plan.

Journal 2 Feb 1st Today we talked about how we plan to conduct our experiment without it looking suspicious. We are planning an experiment that will have 2 simple steps. The first step would be to get someone who is unaware of the situation to take a bite of the food that we will be testing. The second step will be to record their reaction. My hypothesis is that they will be confused and won't know what is going on, since they have a certain memory of the food that they are eating. We plan to do this during lunch so it won’t be a suspicious environment and no one will expect anything. We also plan to record their reactions using a phone. Since everyone has their phone out it would not be suspicious.

Journal 3 Feb 3rd After we finish our experiment we would create a video or presentation and show our results. We will show how people reacted and our predictions on how we thought they would react. We then came up with a better idea for our experiment. We will replace the water in the water bottle with a clear fizzy watermelon drink from the campus store. This will make it easier for us to both conduct our experiment and to better explain the affect of sense perception on our test subject. I think that our experiment will overall be successful and help us understand sense perception in a better way, especially how senses interact with each other. Today we should accomplish two primary objectives; Write down our prediction for the experiment and finalize the plans for our experiment.

Journal 4 Feb 3rd Today we finished a major part of our presentation, writing down our hypothesis, procedures, and experiment. We also had a few trial runs on our experiment and saw that it was quite easy to carryout. One thing that might be an issue is if the person does not allow us to use their recording. In case this were to happen, we plan to conduct the experiment on more than 2 people. I thought that we got a sufficient amount of work done today and we accomplished our set goal. We decided that we will conduct our experiment on Monday during lunch. Later that day, I will edit the video and place it onto our slideshow.

Journal 5 Feb 7th Today in our presentation we will show how our senses are impacted by other senses and how our memory of sense impacts our understanding of a certain sense. We will talk about why our subjects were surprised when they drank a substance out of the water bottle and it ended up being a different drink. A personal goal I have would be to understand why people are surprised to drink a familiar drink but instead of its normal bottle, it was placed in a different bottle causing them to have a surprised reaction to the substance.

Journal 6 Feb 7th I felt like this badge has thought me a lot about how senses interact with each other. Not only our presentation, but other groups also brought up different ideas that I would have never thought of. Seeing how different people interpreted sense perception and how it impacted their daily life was also an interesting point to take into consideration. If I were to do this experiment again maybe I might go with our original idea of an edible substance instead of a drink that why both the reaction and the senses in play would change giving us different results. But overall, we achieved our goal of understanding sense perception in a deeper meaning while staying original. One thing in this experiment that surprised me was although we switched out the water for another drink, the test subject could not determine what the drink was although they were exposed to it before. During this badge we have encountered 3 major question.

1. How can senses interact with each other?
2. How does your memory impact your senses?
3. How does sight impact our sense of taste

These were all developed as we were doing our research on sense perception. We knew we wanted to do something where we tried to understand how multiple senses interacted with each other for our research. As we were doing our experiment it came to my mind that since the test subjects have a certain memory of how the drink looks their taste buds would be expecting a certain flavor. But due to the fact that the drink had a different taste then what they were used to they were shocked and could not understand what was going on. Our last question was the basis of our experiment how sight can have an impact on our understanding of taste.

Elective Reading 1 For my elective reading I listened to “Why the Sky is Blue”. It talked about how a person perception off colors changed depending on how they were exposed to it. For example in the Odyssey we see the word black and white over 100 times each, but the word blue doesn’t appear once. After black and white red appears to be the most common word. We presume that words appear depending on how knowledgable the writer was about the colors and how apparent they were in his daily life. Since the color blue doesn’t appear once we presume that he hasn’t had an interaction with the color blue. But thinking about it the sky we look at everyday is blue. In the podcast it is discussed that unless one is to tell us that something is a certain color or we are exposed to it, it would be hard for us to differentiate between simple things such as colors. Since, colors such as red, white, and black are prevalent Homer used it in his writing but since he was not aware of the color blue he could not have used it. This show that we build our senses and create memories of them, for example, if we were not exposed to the smell of chicken all of our lives and all the sudden we smell chicken it would be hard for us to tell what it is since we wouldn't have a previous memory or interaction with that smell. It also shows us that senses are connected through memory. We create a memory of a certain smell, feel, taste, sight, and sound that stays with us and if we are exposed to them again we can recall what they are from our memory. This also shows us that all the ways of knowing can be linked with each other one way or the other.

Elective Reading 2 For my second elective reading I did "How Can Going Blind Give You Vision?" It talked about how our sight impact shapes our understanding of our reality and how it impacts our view of the world. Isaac Lidsky talked about the fact that ever since he got blind he had found his vision looking at the world with wide open eyes. He talks about how our fears help shape our reality not only our eyes but our feelings have an impact on what we see. He focused on overpowering his feeling and looking at the world from a pure perspective. This shows us that our senses aren't pure and are impacted by how we feel and perceive things. If we wanted to see the world for what it truly is we must overcome our inner critic and look at it from a different/pure point of view. Since sight is the most important sense for humans this also got me to think how dogs would act due to the fact that their smell is their most important sense. If a dog lost its ability to see it wouldn't be as important as losing his ability to smell since it is their most relied upon sense.

EXTENSION PROPOSAL

I think that this will be a great extension due to the fact that it is unique and shows how simply our senses could be fooled by just focusing our minds onto a certain thing. Although we rely on our sight more than anything this video shows us that how sight can get manipulated and distracted due to our narrow focus. This would be great edition elective reading list as it looks at the topic of sense perception in a different perspective than all the other readings where their is a direct relationship between the reading and sense of perception chapter. Watching this would help bring many question to the viewer about their senses and why they get manipulated. Another great thing the video helps us understand is how we have a narrow focus and disregarding our surroundings which can cause the manipulation of our senses.

RESULTS

DOCUMENTATION

Since our slides show our scientific plan and how we conducted our experiment we have chosen to use them as our documentation.