Chapter 6: Sensation and Perception

This chapter interested and confused me. The parts of the text that explained how our individual senses work got lengthy and reminded me of anatomy class, while the parts about ESP and sensual adaptions were really grabbing.
The three main things I learned/found interesting were the basic four skin sensation variations, association of smells, and how perceptual set influences what we hear.
I found it interesting how certain motions create tickles, itching, wetness, dryness, and heat when pressure is put on the right spot. Stroking adjacent pressure spots creates a tickle, repeated gentle stroking of a painful spot creates itching, touching adjacent cold pressure spots triggers a sens of wetness (this can be experienced my touching dry cold metal as well!), and stimulating nearby cold and warm spots produces hot sensations. The variation about touching cold dry metal and thinking you are touching water rings a bell for me. I can remember times when i have even thought my clothing was wet because it was so cold (outside at football games, etc.).
The example used about the smell of wintergreen stimulating thought of candy or gum for Americans and medicine for British was a great perspective. The text explained how our attractedness to smeel depends on what we have rpeviously associated that smell with. I found it interesting that babies are not born with a preference to their mother's smell, but that the preference builds. I ahd previously assumed that, after 9 months in mommy's tummy, a baby would recognize and favor their mother's odor. The text also explained how smells evoke memories, whether pleasant or unpleasant. I remember a time when, after being out of the hospital for 2 months, I smelled someone's hand sanitizer. This hand sanitizer happened to smeel just like the sanitizer the hospital staff used, and I immediately disliked it.
Finally, the chapter talked about perceptual sets. I liked the example given about the pilot who raised the wheels of a plane too early after thinking he had heard his co-pilot say "gear up." really, the pilot had said "cheer up" but the pilot operating the plane was anticipating gear-up and therefore "heard" the phrase. This seems to be extremely common in my life! I feel like I often do something totally opposite of what I'm told to do, just because the words may sound the similar. I'm sure everyone has had some type of similar incident, becuase we all form perceptual sets.
I hope we talk about color constancy, proximity, continuity, similarity, and connectedness in class because I don't feel that I completely understood them. Did everyone else?