Surely you have experienced firsthand the uncomfortable sensation described in the following fragment of “L’Encyclopédie du savoir relatif et absolu” by Bernard Werber:
“Between what I think, what I want to say, what I think I say, what I say, what you want to hear, what you hear, what you think you understand and what you understand, there are nine possibilities of not understanding each other.”
Communication problems are a common event when ideas are not assertively expressed and when listening does not involve an attentive and conscious exercise of respect and consideration for the other’s position.
Many people, those most related to the subject, always try to distinguish between the act of hearing and the act of listening, while the first is seen as the mere action of the sense of hearing by inertia, while the second supposes being really willing to pay our attention to a conversation and, especially, to listen to understand and not to respond from prejudice.
The processes of sensation and perception in the individual are clearly different and involve both elements at the physiological and cognitive levels.
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Sensation involves optimal functioning of sensory organs and the nervous system, and under normal conditions, results in us being able to see red when it is red and green when it is green.
However, perception is a much more complex phenomenon in which factors such as culture, experiences, values and personal expectations intervene, a totalitarian sum that could well support the well-known phrase from The Babylonian Talmud: “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
Sensation: the raw material
The processThis sensory response occurs through the sense organs following a chain of events that begin with an external stimulus, which must be strong enough to be captured by the receptor cells found in each sensory organ.
These cellsThe receptors specialize in converting a particular type of energy into a nervous signal that reaches the brain through a specific channel, depending on the sensory organ that has registered the stimulus; This is why the light spectrums captureed through the sense of sight are decoded (under normal conditions) in the format of images and not sounds, for example.
The term threshold plays a determining role in the process, and is subdivided into perception threshold and differential threshold, either barely noticeable difference.
ANDl perception threshold It is the degree of sensitivity that determines the minimum level of energy that the sensitive systems are capable of registering. At this point, it is interesting how this threshold can vary depending on two factors:
- The type of sense (vision, smell, touch…)
- The individual
Hearing, for example, is much more sensitive than the rest of the senses and, therefore, has a lower perception threshold.
He differential threshold either barely noticeable difference is the degree of alteration in the energy disposition registered by an orsensory organ whose magnitude is sufficient for the individual to notice the change, like a handbag that originally contained two books and now contains ten.
In the case of differential thresholdwe see that a considerable increase in the eenergy of the stimulus so that the change does not go unnoticed, which is explained in terms of the ability of the nervous system to adapt the individual to the conditions of a regular stimulus, an adaptation that occurs regardless of the sensor systemial in question.