Sensing and perceiving as experience

Introduction

The feeling and knowing of being conscious seems to be the experience of life. Life is a sensory experience. When we are awake, it is the sensory inputs that give us the sense of being conscious.

Humans may not be the most sensitive species in a purely sensory context, but their unique combination of emotional, cognitive, and sensory sensitivity arguably makes them one of the most sensitive in terms of overall experience and perception.

The human body operates much like any other living organism on our planet, functioning through five cognitive senses that allow us to perceive our surroundings:

Vision

Smell

Hearing

Taste

Touch

Sensing refers to the raw detection of stimuli through our sensory organs. Sensing involves capturing the initial input without interpretation. Sensory receptors detect various forms of stimuli, such as sound waves, light, or texture, and convert them into electrical signals sent to the brain. Hearing a sound is part of sensing. It’s the immediate experience of detecting that there is a sound, but without knowing its source or meaning.

Perception involves interpreting and making sense of the sensory inputs based on our knowledge from previous experience. The sensory information is relayed through a repository of memories for interpretation.

If we had to imagine hearing the sound of a barking dog for the first time. Initially, the sound might be just an unfamiliar noise (sensing), and only after processing and interpreting it through y knowledge and experience does it become identified as a dog's bark (perception). As time goes by we get familiar with the sound and it recedes to background of our awareness as just a recognition.

Consider another example of touching a hot cup placed on a table. As you touch it, the sensation of its heat exceeding your tolerance generates a perception. The experience of sensing the cup’s heat, coupled with the memory of your heat tolerance, enables you to perceive the cup is “hot.”

Every moment is experienced through the sensory receptors as a stimulus. And this stimulus is perceived as an experience through the superimposition of our memory which is based on past experience and knowledge.

Sensing is about holding raw sensory data briefly (lasting only a millisecond), which is an unconscious process while  perception are both conscious and unconscious processes of organizing and interpreting this data.

Now, we can start talking about how the past experiences that are stored as memory help with the function of sensing and perception.