Page 20 - Changes and Challenges
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Dementia
Changes and Challenges
Figure 8: What We Might See with a Distorted Sensory Perception
The result in this example might be that it takes us longer to interpret the
image of the Meerkat in the image, or to consider briefly that the Meerkat
may be in the sea, rather than the Kalahari Desert.
Coming to Our Senses.
What is a sense? It is a physiological capacity we have, to provide data about
the world, for our perception. They enable us to both make “sense” of the
world and function as an organism.
Commonly we can think of our senses as a series of specialised tissues that
react to the environment, encoding data that is transmitted via nerves to our
brains, as illustrated above (Figure 6). Some of our senses may be far more
complex than this simple model and be dispersed throughout our bodies, or
even use chemicals to transmit information.
How many senses do we have? Compared to how much sense we have? Is an
interesting set of questions. I’ll ignore the second but make you wonder about
the first. As children we are often taught that we have five senses; sight,
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