Psychology (senses) - Essay Example

Psychology by number] Psychology Question As defined in the online website Wikipedia, the definition of senses, the five major senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste) as "a system that consists of a sensory cell type (or group of cell types) that respond to a specific kind of physical energy, and that correspond to a defined region (or group of regions) within the brain where the signals are received and interpreted." (Wikipedia) Based upon this definition, it would most likely be hardest to lose the sense of touch as the other major senses can usually be compensated in some form or another.

For instance, if you lose the sense of sight, you can easily compensate for this sense by the use of your other senses as well as commercial products, such as a cane for the blind, which will allow you to "hear" for your eyes. When you lose the sense of touch it is very difficult to compensate for this as your other somatic senses cannot be easily conditioned for taking over this loss of touch. To better understand this loss, put yourself in the situation that you cannot feel if you have touched something excessively hot (called thermoception), such as a hot stove, and continually receive burns to a large part of your body through the inability to continually feel the heat every time you touch the stove.

Think of this exact situation whereby you are a child of toddler age, where you continually touch a hot stove without the ability to feel that it is hot and need to be rushed to the hospital in critical condition with third degree burns and having your mother explain why this happened and no one believing her.By losing this feeling of touch it is hard to understand how hot or cold things are, for instance in the above example, heat was used, now by losing the sense of pressure (tactition) whereby you cannot feel various forms of pressure would be difficult as the skin covers all your major body parts.

By not being able to feel pressure on the skin, you may not be receptive to any injuries, be they major or minor, which can lead to larger problems.Question 2:When a person jumps to the wrong conclusion about an incident it usually is a result of misinformation designed to either elicit a positive or negative response from the offender. This generally occurs in the workplace due to colleagues who are either vindictive or merciful in conveying a story/situation to you. For instance, in one position a colleague was looking out for my best interests in conveying a conversation they overheard with respect to a potential project being assigned to a team which would bring great recognition in the industry.

The colleague heard that due to a personal problem that was discovered in the human resources file, it would be impossible to give the project to our team as there could be an ethical problem. Instead of approaching the person who was assigning the project and discussing the problem, if there was one, a campaign of subtle personal attacks that would make the person look unsuitable to assign any project was launched. As a result of this provocation, it was decided that the project would go to someone else's team and a reprimand was put in my personnel file.

If, in fact I had approached the person who was assigning the project in the first place, I would have found out that the story that was being told was in fact not about anyone on my team at all was being discussed regarding any ethical problems. The persons they were talking about regarding ethical problems were in fact a new story they heard about in the human resources presentation and that any ethical situation was purely hypothetical.Works CitedWikipedia. "Sense". 14 Jan. 2006. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 28 Jan. 2006 .