Bio Perception Questions

Why we get much of our brain information through vision ? I mean is there any specific selection pressure ? Might be the same for other animals . Why not other senses like smelling ,…

I understand that humans perceive colors through opposing pairs of colors, with the pairs being black-white, blue-yellow, and red-green, with each color being mutually exclusive to its opposite. A color perception other than black, white, blue, yellow, red, or green come from a combination of on...

Are there any current tests that can check whether the colours we see are consistent with someone else? For example: Person A and Person B are born at the same time, and both have normal vision Person A sees yellow as "normal" yellow, while Person B perceives yellow like A's Red Both A and B gro...

Based on the Wikipedia explanation of Haidinger's brush I would expect it to remain oriented to the light polarization, no matter which way I rotate my head. However that is not what I observe. When I rotate my head, the pattern tilts by about 20 degrees to the opposite direction. This is compare...

Human sense receptors quickly become insensitive to constant stimulation and even the human brain can effectively filter out and ignore constant stimuli. For example, people living by a busy road soon ignore the noise of traffic and even sirens are hardly noticed. I used to live close to a highwa...

Waking up to distracting sounds is one of the many very useful features evolution has equipped humans with, as it allows humans to react to potential threads, for example, posed by nocturnal predators, that may occur during sleep. However, the human consciousness is a complex system, and thus sur...

I've read that buoyancy due to the cerebro-spinal fluid reduces the "effective weight" of the brain. Because of this, we do not feel the weight of the brain. I do not understand the statement because even if the brain floats in CSF, we have to carry the entire weight. We can't just put a heavy we...

A "gravity hill" is one where a downhill slope appears to be uphill, such that an object such as a car will appear to roll uphill when in fact it is moving downhill. This is described in a wikipedia article as a feature of the lie of the surrounding land. What relevant feature of the land would c...

I've recently watched veritasium video about time perception. And what i got out of that is that the more are brain is being used up the slower time goes and the less we use the faster it goes. Is this the right way to think of the way we perceive time?

I notice that certain (wild) flowers have the same colour, although they are not closely related. For example, the yellows of the dandelion (Taraxacum) and the buttercup (Ranunculus) are, at least to my eyes, identical (my observations are in the Netherlands). I know that the colour is intended ...

All drugs I remember tasting (with the notable exception of Aspirin) have bitter taste. Is the taste due to the active substance, or is a bittering agent added to them, perhaps to prevent overdose? Take Paracetamol for instance: adult pills taste bitter, while the syrup for babies is sweet withou...

I think I can find out if the food is salted by smell. Is it possible scientifically or just my psychological impression?

I have a question regarding tunnel vision during the fight or flight response. I believe that during fight or flight high levels of adrenaline are released which causes the pupils to dilate allowing more light to enter which allows us to be more aware of our surroundings. Why is it that sometimes...

I have a question regarding the reason behind the 2 bipolar cells. So, from my understanding we have both on and off bipolar cells and from the numerous diagrams I have seen, I find that most show a single cone attached to both an off and a on bipolar cell. The on bipolar cell reacts in an inhibi...

In what way does exposure to a certain smell for some time causes them to loose sensitivity and have a lesser electrical response

What is the trait or examples needed for a virus to travel by rain-cloud that could be harmful? Why can't the Corona virus travel by night rain?

I’m interested in learning about the biological and chemical basis of human sensation and perception (on both a microscopic and macroscopic level). This includes The mechanisms underlying our “five senses,” i.e. the eye, inner ear, tongue, nose, and nervous system, and how (chemically/physicall...

"It feels like it's 30° today" I'm fascinated by how human perception compares to electromechanical sensors in terms of accuracy. "It feels like 23 minutes have passed since I put the cake in the oven" or "This note sounds like an F#, though it's slightly flat". This question concerns temperatu...

There are people who completely blind or deaf. Are there people who are completely blind to touch in a particular area or in the entirety of their body? If not, are there people in whom the temperature modality of touch or the pressure modality of touch is completely absent? It seems that this mi...

In terms of the perception of flickering by CRT monitors, This answer suggests that peripheral vision has faster response and is thus more sensitive to flicker due to being provided by rod cells. But in another answer it's said that rods are saturated at daylight and even at twilight. These two...

It might be a dumb question to ask, but I find it confusing. Is the perception of taste additive? Or to be more precise, can two tasty food items combine to give a more delicious product? For me, this sounds logical. I believe that the sense of taste is due to some chemical reactions in our mou...

OK, this may be a stupid question…but here goes. Does the human eye “white balance” itself? I assume that each human perceives colour slightly differently according to the peculiarities of their own eye, but within parameters (notwithstanding colour-blindness). But does our eye (or brain) whi...

Scientifically & philosophically, is it fair to say that our faces & bodies do not represent our real selves, considering that they are made of flesh, skin, muscle, bones, etc., rather than neurons, arguably the real essence of us? Might seem quite obvious, but much more often than not, faces &...

I'm looking for research studying: How small and compressed together do particles of a surface need to be to be perceived as solid surface to human touch? E.g. sand still feels grainy. Has there been research on how much it varies between different areas of the body? Same question, but for wher...

When I see a sunflower in the bright sunshine, I am reminded of the colour yellow. But, is it the same yellow that my friend sees? It is very much possible that my friend is actually seeing the yellow colour as pink, but still says that the sunflower is yellow because he has since his childhood b...

I know about the hair cells in our Cochlea and it is the movement of the fluid that makes them vibrate. And it is this that activates the transmission of electrical signals to the brain that become sound. But I've heard that hair cells are each built to detect specific pitches of sound. And if t...

This is a subject that is very disturbing to me and one that I've been obsessing over for years. I warn you now that this is probably not the sort of thing you get asked on this website and I'm not even sure if I'm explaining it very well but please bear with me. I have, or at least used to hav...

When I was in high school (30 years ago), I took a biology class, and the instructor showed us an Ishihara color test for color-blindness. (This is the "hidden numbers" test.) What I thought I saw once or twice was two different numbers that had been embedded in the same slide. Were there slide...

So, color difference measures how differently two colors are perceptually. I was wondering if there was a similar metric for sound. Sound will probably be a little more complicated since it is not just three dimensional. Basically, the inputs would have to be spectrograms instead of RGB triples.

There are many more that three visible wavelength in the visible EM spectrum, and yet we can model any color using only three primary RGB wavelength. Perception of an arbitrary color is equivalent of perception of a linear combination of only three fixed wavelengths that correspond to Red, Green,...

Frequency/pitch is a stimuli. Isn't it? So what is the weber constant for it? I cannot find it anywhere. Nor i can conduct that experiment.

If someone is hallucinating, that isn't caused by illness, brain damage or anything like that, but normal absence of information. Could using a device to enhance light entering the eye for example, to make sure I get enough information of my surrounding be enough to stop hallucinations? And the s...

Yesterday I had a BBQ with some friends. The sun had already set and the only light source left (besides some ambient light from the world around) was a low energy lightbulb. After a while I started to see lighting changes in the faces of my friends and the number plates of their cars. It felt l...

One could say: senses are a piece by which the theater is born. Eyes are related to visual images, without them there is no roses, no sky, and so on. Then there are subjective notions in which culture plays an important role. But it seems here is an intermediate one which is why I'm posting. Th...

How exactly do our eyes see an inverted image of what we are looking at? Does it have something to do with the shape of our lens (i.e. convex)?

From what I understand (which is very little), the neural mechanism behind tinnitus is that after some degree of cochlear damage, the relevant frequency-specific signals from the ear decrease. Then, downstream neurons that used to get stimulated by those frequencies get 'bored' and seek out stimu...

As dogs have limited colour perception, what colour would appear with most contrast against a green background for a dog? I understand that red and green are very close in dog's colour perception, would blue offer better contrast?

So I was wondering if consciousness is continous and I found out it might not be the case. But in that case it begs a question, what if in every frame of consciousness my old me dies and new is reborn or rather there is nothing as consciousness but its just a reaction? What I mean is if I clone ...

I was wondering if there is difference in brain activity when someone is hallucinating an object, say a giraffe compared to when someone is genuinely observing a real giraffe?

To get the context of this question clear, I would like you to walk through some parts of my house. We'll start with one of my rooms as it appears normally - As evident, this part of my house has a creamish tinge to it, also the balcony door is open which further gives this room a yellow tint....

Just like we have the persistence of vision that is helping us watch movies, what are the possible consequences if humans had persistence of sound. Will there be any difference in how we hear/perceive things then?

I have a ""which came first: the chicken or the egg?"-kind of question regarding the processing and understanding of speech / non-speech sounds in the human brain. I'm wondering whether speech and generic non-speech sound processing in the human brain are somehow related and whether one of the t...

I read that some species of crocodilians can take care of their young for as long as a year. How do parents differentiate their offsprings from other young crocodiles? Smell, appearance, sound?

I read that most reptiles don't even care about their offsprings and let them fend for themselves. But other reptiles, like crocodiles, do tend their hatchlings for a brief period. My question is: would a croc recognize his young from others? If so, how? (smell, appearance, etc.)

Are arachnophobics more subceptible to toxical effects coming from spider toxins?

That is, were the various wavelengths of light that we and other animals can perceive assigned random color values by the brain at various points during our evolution? Edit: By "color value", I'm referring to the specific color/hue that a wavelength of light is perceived as by the eyes/brain. Ce...

Surfing youtube I found a video where a cat shows a protective behaviour towards a pregnant woman soon to enter labour. In the miriad of average (dumb) comments I found another person stating that her cat felt precisely (via olfactory means I guess) that her (the woman's - not the cat's) day had...

If I understand it correctly, humans can discriminate shades and colours based on their inherent contrast, as in we can see colors because there are different colors. Same for shades and for acoustic phenomens, because to differentiate two sounds they have to differ in some quality of sound: pitc...

I am currently trying to understand how speech is being perceived and understood. I am currently aware of the inner ears working of the basilar membrane and its frequency filtering, but how an acoustic signal goes from that, to something meaning full as perceiving speech is still very unclear. I ...

How can I maximize my ejaculation? Is there like an organic milkshake, protein shake or food that I can eat to prepare? Or maybe a workout, such as yoga? Anything based on science?