Assignment 1: Sensory Perceptions "Memories establish the past; Senses percieve the present; Imaginations shape to future" said Toba Beta. Tatse, smell, sight, hearing, and touch, some of us can live without some of these senses others cannot. Whether it is some of your senses or all of your senses; have your senses ever mislead you? Have you ever thought about why they mislead you? I can go ahead and tell you one thing, your memory and imagination has a it to do with it. In the book American Gods Niel Gaiman stated "All we have to believe is our senses: the tools we use to percieve the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted.". Have you ever eaten something that made you sick and everytime you came across that food you would start to get that queasy feeling? I remember the first and last time I had chicken parmesean; after I ate it, I was throing up shortly after, I'm not sure whether it was due to food poisioning or if I didn't like chicken parmesean at all, but everytime I come across the smell of chicken parmesean I start to feel sick. My friend always tries to get me to try his mom's chicken parmesean, but the thought of me getting sick always pops up in my mind. Do you see part memory plays in a situation like this? Our memories influence our perceptions of things, in this situation it is with food. My memories influence on my perception of chicken parmesean could be considered a bad thing because it is hindering from trying something that may actually be good but I'm not allowing myself to give chicken parmesean a second chance because of my past experience with it. I have also thought that my imagination is also playing a part in this as well. if I could stop imagining how bad chicken parmesean would taste if I would probably be able to overcome this food hurdle. Have you ever walked into your house when all the lights were off and made it all the way to your room with ease? Now Have you ever been outside walking in the night time looking over you're shoulder like someone is watching you? Let me be more specific and say you are just getting home, you go and check the mail box and then you go inside. Now that whole time you are outside you are looking around like crazy. Sounds, different sounds make you react when you are in the dark. You precieve that something is coming to get you, your relying mostly on your hearing which makes your mind wonder even more. Rustles in the bushes seem like you are being crept up on, you steady telling your self that it is just the wind, but in the back of your mind you remeber the horror movie that you saw the other night and you feel like you are in the same scene. Hearing perceptions are commnly deceptive, if you do not have a visual to match the sound you usually suspect the worse. When you finally enter your house the noises that you were hearing outside become clear to you with the help of sight, you take a peak out of your window and see that the rustling that you heard was actually the local neighborhood stray cat. In Chapter three of our text books it talks about sharpening our senses; The sharpening of your senses can also be used as a type of calm down mechanism, it allows you to clear you mind and focus instead of having your mind wonder. Sensory Perception with people I think carries the most deception. You can look at some one and automatically precieve multiple thoughts of them with just one glance. People do it all the time, for example when some one you don't know smiles at you, you pretty much precieve them to be a nice person; when in reality that person may actually be a mean person. Its like your first impression of some one and first perception of them go hand and hand. When you start to know some one and learn more about them depending on the way they treat you, others and even how they treat themselves, the way they dress, talk, and even where they live you tend to build a clearer erception of them. It happens all of the time in everyday life. Sensory Perceptions take place every second of the day, its a really neat subject to talk about once you think about it. Whether it be taste, smell, touch, sight, and sound all of them are very much important and with their positive effects come their negative effects. Positive or negative, we can agree on the quote by Toba Beta "Memories establish the past; Senses percieve the present; Imaginations shape to future".