During the first ten minutes of class, write a summary of your reading from John Medina’s Brain Rules: “Sensory Integration.” Also, discuss how you think sensory integration relates to creating and reading multimodal compositions (combining words, sounds, moving images, graphics, body language, etc).
During lab, we will peer review the writing that you brought into class for Project Two. Your task, however, is to peer review with fellow students who you have not peer reviewed with before.
Remember: On Wednesday, we are meeting just outside the library in the Atrium on the 4th floor. Your reading assignment to prepare for our library tour and in-library assignment is to skim the sections linked from the Purdue OWL’s Conducting Research site (i.e., read that page and skim the pages linked from there beginning with “Research Overview” and ending with “Internet References.”
Touch, smell, sight, taste, and hear are the five senses responsible for us to receive information. Without these senses there is absolutely no way someone to obtain information. John Medina Brain Rules talked about how using more than one sense at the same time, a person would be able to receive info on a deeper level than just using one sense. With me, if someone is talking to me while I’m looking at the phone, I would believe that I’m listening to the person, but the information is actually going into one ear and coming out the other. If someone is talking it is better to use your ears to hear and face the person so that the information is clearer. John Medina stressed my situation and called as situation like this multimodal reinforcement. He said, “They could literally get a 30 percent in the visual system by introducing touch. Another statement I encountered in the sensory integration chapter was on page 173 abut smell. It is a fact that smell can help memories to memories such as the smell of fresh bake bread bring back memories to me when my grandma used to cook for me in St. Lucia. Smell and memory go even deeper than that scenario. Brain Rules calls the smell evocation on memory the Proust effect. Smell so close to memory because according to John Medina smell have a direct access to the amygdala which controls your memory. Knowing this by smelling the same sent when studying, while doing a test on the same subject, I’ll have a better chance on remembering what I studied while doing the test. Trying touching a fire while seeing the stove color. There are two types of information being processed. The first is the burn you got by the fire and the second is the color of the stove you have seen with your eyes. In the future if you walk in a kitchen with the same color stove that burned you, you would most likely keep away. This is very important on how people are different. John Medina Brain Rules explained how senses help how we view the real world. By having a bad memory and specific sent that was in the memory or sense. When the person visit the same situation their view would be different because of the senses that caused them to see that situation as bad.
In this chapter John Medina explain sensory integration. He starts off by telling us a story about Tim. Tim has a condition called synesthesia. The condition happen to every 1 in 2000 people. In Tim case it is trigger by different letters, like for example when he see the letter E everything turn red and the letter O makes the world blue for him. He then went into more detail and explain how the brain deconstruct and reconstruct information. First the brain takes in all the sensory information and transfer it into electrical signal. These signals are then send to different parts of the brain to process and then finally reconstruct as memories. He then mention how important smell is to us. Smell is not like the other senses, that’s because it doesn’t need permission for a higher level of the brain. Smell bypass the thalamus and goes right up to it higher destination. Because of this smell is able to boosts out memory all by itself. Smell is able to trigger long lost memories because of its ability to bypass certain part of the brain, this is called the Proust effect.
When you combine more than one sense into an event you seem to remember it better, that’s because how the brain works. The more input the brain have on a specific memory the more likely you will remember it in the most accurate way possible. This is true because this happen to me. My mom was baking fruit cake during the holiday and the smell of the cake baking brought back a warm and happy memory of when I was younger.
In the sensory integration chapter by Medina, it is very interesting how our senses can help us remember different things from being a small kid by smelling something that can trigger a memory or a song that you would always listen to at the time and every memory is just starting to flood back to you. Sensory is a great way to help remember things that we have seen, emotional charged events, sound, etc. A way our brains can retain memories is by the brains integrations. When our brains process a memory, the event that just took place goes through our brain and starts to get broken up into different categories such as smell, hearing, vision, etc. After, all the broken pieces are now reformed into something called a memory. The best way to complete a task is to go back and think about the thing you had to do, get a scent of something like a perfume bottle smell it and try to link ur stuff together. It is said that things are better remembered because of the perfume or colon sprayed. It is amazing what our brains are capable of doing. In the beginning John Medina started off by talking about how Tim has a condition called synesthesia. About 1 in 2000 people have this condition. Tim’s condition triggers by having to look at different letters. An example of this would be when he see different letters. Whenever he sees the letter “E” everything turns red and the letter “O” everything turns blue. When I see a person that I got into a situation with, my mind automatically goes back to thinking about the conflict I had with that person. Another thing that happens to me is when the holidays come. When the holidays come and my house smells of food and baking it brings me back to when I was a little girl. Especially during my favorite holidays which are Christmas and New Years.
In John Medina “Brian Rules” sensory integration chapter, he goes into detail about how your five senses, sight, taste, touch, sound and smell have an influence over what you learn and what you remember. When we come across a new experience or familiar event, we absorb that information through our senses that eventually gets turned into electrical signals. Those signals are then broken up and separated into different parts of the brain, and then later reconstructs what happens and eventually perceives the whole event. John Medina also states that our senses evolved to work together and when combined, they help us learn even better than they would separately. However even though the process is the same for every, there are people who could have a completely different experience even when exposed to the same event. For example, two people can go to the same seafood restaurant and order the exact same meal; one person could take a bite and absolutely enjoy the dish, but the other guy could that ab bite and have the taste or smell of it just turns him off. And speaking of smells, your sense of smell is your most powerful sense of all. According to the book, it has the ability to bring back memories and can also influence emotions this is because smell signals can bypass the thalamus and head straight to its destination. For example during a math class a student who usually chewed a pack of gum 2-4 times a week or who wore certain a perfume later takes a test or exam. If the same student ate that pack of gum or used that same perfume during that test, she could recall any information that she learn from days prior.
Media talks about how sensory information, or the data from your five senses, are stored in the brain. He also discusses how these vary from person to person due to past experiences. Sensory info is stored into the brain and is linked to the way you remember an event, whether experienced recently, or a good time ago. Each of your five senses are different than everybody elses, due to the wiring of each persons brain. One key piece of information is that the more senses e use during an experience, the better we will remember it, as there are more pieces of info the brain can use to store it. Also, your sense of smell makes you remember something better if there was a certain smell that was unique to the event you went through. This is good for class and test taking, since e can use a certain cologne, or eat a certain gum flavor in order to link it to what we learn. Your senses go through a lot in your brain before it gets officially stored. The info breaks down, then it becomes electrical circuits i our brain, and then they reform again. Multi-modal info is better than plain old singe sense info, since there are several ways we can remember the info given to us.
Sensor make part of our daily life, and we’re using them every second of our lives. As it’s been introduce in the book “Brain rules” by John Medina, above the chapter Sensory Integration, this system is in charge of dis-symbolize and re-symbolize . We can describe this process just in this two terms, The process sensor go through when they are usually sending the signals to the different part of the body. (smell, tactile, visual) and according to what it come up to be the result, the sensor are combined all together and their is when the picture or the visual comes up. There are also memories that may change that pattern. All depends on the person, if they have bad memories with food or and action, they will reject everything that has to deal with , On the other hand if the person had any good memories with the object food or action will have a different reaction than the other person, happier.
The bigger sense that works particularly independent from all the others is SMELL. This sense has the power to make us do or remember that we lived while the smell was present in the past. Moreover this sense can change the way how other senses work. Using as an example we have vision influencing the sense of hearing, In the book it’s being illustrated that if a person can’t ear anything but they are able to see their sense of hearing it still on and it stimulates as if this person were hearing everything they are seen.
This had happened to me while i was playing with my sister, i can’t hear her but i could read her lips so i literally hear what she was doing or singing.
During the sensory chapter of John Medina’s “Brain Rules”, the chapter describes what sensory information is, as well as how it assist our brains. When it comes to sensory information, this kind of information is collected through our 5 senses. It is then sent to the thalamus in our brain. Once this happens, the sensory information is then split into different parts of the brain. During this transaction within the brain, the brain then proceeds to disassemble and reassemble the information that has been collected from our senses. Once this happens, our brain then proceeds to create our own individual perception of what is happening around us. Yet perception is a whole other phenomenon when it comes to different individuals. The perception of every individual tends to vary quite a bit. The reason for this is because we all may see things differently based on our memories. According to this chapter, memory greatly influences our perception. This has to due with personal experiences having the ability to mold our minds into seeing things differently. An example of this is when an individual may associate a particular aroma with a past memory. On the other hand, you may have another individual who may not have any sort of recollection and will have there own perception of what that aroma may be to them. The chapter also explains to us how we can better utilize this sensory information to our advantage. This can be done through the use of multimodel sensory information. This kind of information is utilizing multiple senses at once in order to better influence our understanding of information we see on the outside.
Sensory integration, as talked about in John Medina’s Brain Rules, is how our five senses help us with our memory and how the brain functions. Through the thalamus, our brain processes our senses in the order of sensing, routing, and perceiving. The processes are split into two: the bottom up (visual aspect) and top-down (reaction aspect). The sense that has the greatest standalone impact on memory is smell, due to its direct stimulation with the amygdala, which supervises the formation of emotional experiences. The example the correlates well with this idea is the Vietnam veteran that has to resign from medical school due to the fact that the smell of blood during surgery sparked the memory of smelling blood during combat. Sensory integration relates to creating multimodal compositions. An example would be the automatic reaction of most to tap their feet when first hearing the sounds of music. Also when I smell certain scents, the memory of my girlfriend will pop up.
In the “Sensory Integration” chapter in John Medina’s Brain Rule, he talks about how we sense things and how its stored. We are told that the information we receive from our senses are sent as electrical waves into our brain and put into different parts of our brains, where they reform. We are also told that even though two people can witness the same event, the perception of the two people will be completely different, because people sense things differently. Two people can be watching a hotdog eating contest and one of the two people can remember the smell of the delicious hotdog, whereas the other person might feel nauseous from having a bad memory with the hotdog. Two people will always have different perceptions of the same event. We are also informed that the sense of smell can help us remember things by 40-50%. Its amazing how the sense of smell can just trigger our brain and help us remember things that the other senses might not be able to do. For example, if you’re walking down the street and you smell a cologne or perfume from someone walking by, you might remember that smell from somewhere else in your past. You might relate it to something or someone you may know by just smelling that scent. I’ve experienced this many times and one being reminiscing about eating popcorn with my friends and family as a kid at the theatre by just smelling the scent of popcorn. Its really amazing what the scent of smell can do and help one bring back to life the events we once lived through.
In John Medina’s Brain Rule, the sensory integration chapter describes how the five senses affect our memory and how our brain interacts with the information the senses are sending towards the brain. The brain converts the sensory information to electrical energy to the thalamus. Then the information is reformatted in the brain by being disassemble and reassemble. Also our past memory influences what we experience. Therefore two people who are currently experiencing a similar event together are viewing it differently through due to their senses, but mainly because of their past experience. I think sensory integration is similar to reading multimodal compositions since there are five senses in total. In multimodel compositions you use the senses hear, see and maybe touch to comprehend the information from the various format of data from the compositions.
John Medina’s chapter is based on four general rules. These rules are what scientist have discovered over the years about how the brain processes sensory information. The first of these rules states that when collecting information, our brain first breaks it down the information and sends it to the parts of the brain that govern the different aspects. For example, one part would decipher the color of the memory, one part would focus on sound and other parts would break it down even further. After the brain breaks all the information down, it then reassembles the entire situation at the back of the brain where it fully understands it. The next rule states that the brain relies on past experiences to decipher a situation. The example Medina uses is that two people can be apart of the same exact situation at the same exact time and still remember it differently. The brain pulls on our past to fully understand our present. Thirdly, he states that all our senses evolved together as opposed to being developed one at a time. This means that while humans were developing to work with each other so to were our sense in order for us to fully be able to function in any environment. This also helps with memory, because our senses developed together, we remember things that encompass more senses than those that just are focused on one sense. Finally Medina states that our sense of smell is one that holds an unusual power. All other senses must be broken down and evaluated before reaching the intended destination. Smell however, does not pass through these same steps as the others, it bypasses all others as the most important and makes the largest impact in the brain in terms of senses.
In the Sensory Integration chapter john medina talks about how our sense and how they help us remember events and information from our daily life. He mentions that the sense of smell is the strongest sense we have and it’s the best way to recall our memories. He also talks about a man named Tim. Tim has a mental issue with his senses. If he sees a letter he will start to recall to memories related to that letter. When he sees the color of the strawberry and when he eats it the taste of the strawberry changes. I can still remember back to when i first moved here, but i can recall back to it better in winter because when i first got he in the winter it smelled a lot different than when it is hot, or warm and now every winter when it starts getting cold the air start smelling that same as when i first came to America.
The most important way a human brain can receive signals it by using our senses. Our senses can greatly influence the brain to act and react a certain way. This is what makes an individual who they are, such in a case when two people experience the same thing. They would perceive it very differently. A person can feel disgusted by just looking at a hot dog and another person can feel the taste of it, because of how they first experience a hot dog. If your able to use multiple sensory together at the same time, can greatly impacted the way we remember and learn new thing. The most unusual way to remember something really good is by our smells. The smells signal bypass the thalamus and head straight to their location, which is located by the supervisor emotion or otherwise known as amygdala. Our sensor is so amazing that even hearing a certain word like an apple, can give us the taste of it, feeling of the skin or the appearance of it in our sense to recall it.
The sensory integration chapter of John Medina’s “Brain Rules” focuses on how each of senses are used to create memories and extract information. As we intake information through our senses, it moves to our thalamus where it then converted into electrical signals and asks permission to connect to higher levels of our brain. Our thalamus shows these signals which part of the brain to go to depending on which sense the information was absorbed from. After it is stored in various regions of the brain, the information then reforms itself and creates memories. Smell, however, is an exception in that it does not have to pass through the thalamus. Smell also directly affects emotions since it directly stimulates the amygdala which is responsible for the formation of emotional experiences and memories. Medina gives us an example of how smell can bring back memories through the Proust Effect. The example was of a medical student who was a veteran from Vietnam. As he performed his first surgery in medical school, the smell of burning flesh from the cauterizer brought back a memory which he had suppressed during his time in Vietnam. The harsh reality of this memory caused him to resign from the program within the next week. Your senses are very valuable tools that the brain uses to gather information and could also be used to later retrieve that information more easily. The more senses you stimulate, the better you can remember something.
In John Medina’s “brain Rules”, he talks about brain rules number eight “ sensory integration”. Medina speak on the importance of the six senses and how their input of information to brain is an important contribution to the memories we make. I am honestly fascinated by this phenomenon. The way our brain gathers information in our environment and from Complex sensory to minor electrical charges stored as one memory. when I once visit the countryside of the Dominican Republic, I always took the deep breath. This is because the air in the countryside is less polluted compared to the cityside. in addition, there are more trees, less factories and less cars. This way can remember sitting on the back of pickup truck while traveling on road somewhere and surprisingly every time I go out New York to go camping I remember that memory.
In John Medina’s “brain Rules”, he talks about brain rules number eight “ sensory integration”. Medina speak on the importance of the six senses and how their input of information to brain is an important contribution to the memories we make. I am honestly fascinated by this phenomenon. The way our brain gathers information in our environment and from Complex sensory to minor electrical charges stored as one memory. when I once visit the countryside of the Dominican Republic, I always took the deep breath. This is because the air in the countryside is less polluted compared to the cityside. in addition, there are more trees, less factories and less cars. This way can remember sitting on the back of pickup truck while traveling on road somewhere and surprisingly every time I go out New York to go camping I remember that memory.
In the “Sensory integration ” chapter in John Medina’s Brain Rules, he talks about how all of our senses come into play when we try to remember stuff. Our sense of smell plays a huge roll when we remember. A good smell would usually lead to a good memory and vice versa. With this in mind, companies have been manipulating this to work in their favor. An example would be a local Starbucks where the employees are not allowed to wear perfume or cologne because it can mess with the smell of their coffee.