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How would we know that they
existed? How might humans develop devices, such as binoculars, night-vision scopes, and
hearing aids, which allow us to experience these senses?
2. How similar are sensory experiences between people? Do all individuals experience the
color “blue” the same? How would we know if we did not, and would it matter?
3. Have the class think of real-life examples of dichotic listening. Is this a phenomenon with
which they are familiar and of which they have a basic understanding?
4. Discuss attention from the perspectives of its being goal-directed or stimulus-driven
perception. Generally speaking, do more students seem to be goal-directed attendees or
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stimulus-driven perceivers? What might contribute to this phenomenon?
5. Discuss the premises of Gestalt psychology with the class. Point out that Kurt Lewin’s
Field Theory was a result of the Gestalt movement. What other theoretical constructions
might have a relationship to the Gestalt movement?
6. Discuss the wide variance that exists among people in their sensitivity to pain. The
sensation of pain is a complex process involving multiple nerve pathways. But to some
degree, responses to pain might be learned. In the 19th century, writers often noted that
Native Americans were remarkably stoic in the face of what Whites considered
overwhelming pain. Other researchers have also noted cultural differences in pain
threshold. While individual differences can easily be chalked up to differences in biological
makeup, cultural differences are more difficult to pass off as exclusively biological in
origin.
7. Could it be that to some degree we learn how to respond to pain messages based on factors
such as how much attention we receive for crying in response to pain when we are infants?
Many parents of young children have remarked about incidents where their child has
fallen, and then looked up at the parents as if asking “How should I react?” If the parents
start to make a big fuss over the fall, the child immediately starts to cry. If the parents smile
and stay calm, the child ignores the fall and returns to playing. If a parent constantly
overreacts to small falls, and lavishes attention on a child every time he or she cries, could
they be reinforcing a tendency to react negatively to any pain and use overblown reactions
to pain as a means of getting attention? Could this influence those children to be more
sensitive to any painful stimuli in that they learn to attend more to pain messages and
subsequently notice them more? Ask students these questions to see what they think.
8. Many people believe the myth that when people lose one of their physical senses, their
other senses become more sensitive to compensate for the missing sense. The idea that
blind people have hearing that is more acute than others has been around for ages. Ask
students if they have heard this and if they believe it. This myth is technically wrong in that
there is no actual increase in physical ability to detect sound when someone goes blind. But
blind people may learn to pay more attention to subtle differences in sound than do sighted
people, therefore making it seem as if their hearing has increased in its sensitivity.
Similarly, losing one’s hearing does not increase one’s visual acuity, but deaf people often
pay more attention to certain visual cues than do those who can hear, allowing them to
learn more from those cues.
9. Usually these myths focus around hearing and sight. If the myths were true, what sense
might become more acute if the sense of taste is lost?