Fatma Loves to Draw!

East Coast - David Leonard

American , b. 1962 -

Perception is the cognitive process by which the brain gathers, organizes, and interprets sensory information to make sense of the world. It allows us to understand our surroundings by giving meaning to what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. [1, 2, 3]

Key Components of Perception

Sensation: The physical detection of environmental stimuli (e.g., light waves entering the eye or sound waves vibrating the eardrum). Sensation provides the raw data. [1]

Bottom-Up Processing: Using direct, raw sensory information from the environment to build understanding. It is the "what am I looking at?" phase. [1, 2]

Top-Down Processing: Using prior knowledge, memory, expectations, and context to interpret sensory data. It explains how we can read poorly written handwriting or recognize a familiar scent based on context. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.