Dr. Gillan's Presentation

What were your impressions of the lecture and Test from Dr. Gillian? In your opinion, what should the average person know about how our brain perceives the world? What are the larger implications of this?

I thought Dr. Gilligan's Lecture was pretty interesting. I wish she had passed out some notes along with lecture, she talked very fast and i did not have enough time to type out the notes that she was presenting to us. The fact that i was always rushing to get the notes down so i wouldnt miss them before she moved on to the next slide took away from my learning experience. I felt that the information that was shared was really helpful to understanding how perception effects knowledge, but I felt as though there was so much presented in not enough time that I was unable to grasp all of it. I thought the test was interesting; it helped to prove the information that was presented to us. For example, when the sentence 'dog is a man's best fiend' flashed on the screen I wrote down that I saw 'dog is man's best friend'. This helped to show that the brain does fix things for us. I thought it would have been more effective to do the test first, instead of the notes. I feel like if the test was first I would not have been equipped with the knowledge I just learned, and not have been as aware of the tricks that the brain can play on my mind. It would have been more interesting to then compare our results to the knowledge learned in class, and it would have helped with the understanding of the knowledge. I feel like the average person should be aware of how your brain tires to fix things for you, and how that affects how you see the world. I also think it would be important for the average person to know that focus can make it so you may not be able to see what is directly in front of you. For example, in the ball toss video that we watched, I did not notice the gorilla the first time. I feel like if the average person were to watch that video it would give them a better understanding of how they are only aware of a fraction of what actually happens around them, and how their brain can block out what is not being focused on. An example of this is my own life is at the barn that I used to ride my horse at there was a shooting range and hunting in the woods near by, which is probably not the safest thing to have near a horse barn. At first I found the constant noise of gunshots in the background eerie. Overtime though I didn’t notice them until someone who had not been to the barn pointed them out. As I learned from this presentation, your brain tends to block out stuff you see or hear on a daily basis. Which is why I didn’t hear the gunshots in the background anymore, even though they were still there. This function of the brain can be highly dangerous though. In the case of gunshots at the barn, we would often take our horses out on trails in the woods. Being so used to the gunshots we didn’t hear them. If a hunter or were to come near us (which wouldn’t have happened, hunting was prohibited) we may have not heard the danger near.