Practicing Perception

I’ve been reading through J. Kevin O’Regan’s book Why red doesn’t sound like a bell: Understanding the feel of consciousness. In the fall semester of this past year, I took a cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind class in the same semester and it was a really neat opportunity to see how thinking using vastly different methods on essentially the same topic can be insightful in different ways. In a sense, the philosophy of mind course was about consciousness—after all, who cares about the mind if you ignore consciousness—but still, I got the sense that in both philosophy and neuroscience, consciousness is such an intractable issue that we’re so ill-equipped to thinking about that facing it head-on tends to be only marginally fruitful. Nonetheless, those two classes left me in the search for theories of consciousness—the grand-unified theories of the mind that promise to finally explain our very experience as conscious things. I’ve read quite a bit about consciousness. As I’ve gon...

What is it like to see? Weirdly, exactly what it feels like to see can be elusive. The thing is that my understanding of my mind’s nature seems to be capable of changing drastically. This is what I want to write about today. When I started researching eye movements at the beginning of the summer, I was basically starting from ground zero. My supervisor had a major challenge: figuring out the best way to introduce eye movements to two undergraduate psychology students with relatively limited biological training. She made a somewhat interesting choice: a 2003 book titled Active Vision: The Psychology of Looking and Seeing dominated the reading list . This book would bring about the first true major shift in my understanding of my mind. Importantly, the book hasn’t just shown me I was wrong about how I thought about vision but planted the seeds for new intuitions that give me insight into my visual system. In a way, this book paved the way for a reduction of my subjective experience ...

Hello! Welcome to my first blog post. My name is Gavin Woodward and I’m an undergraduate student in psychology. I’m going into the final year of my undergraduate degree and am really passionate for most things perception, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science, and even a bit of philosophy (I’ve tried to shake it but the philosophy bug has too strong of a hold on me). My goal with creating this blog is simply to take some time to really think deeply about ideas that are interesting to me and to have a place to keep them. I’m not coming at it with the intent of amassing a sizable readership at all (in fact I might rather nobody at all stumbles across this) but just think it could be a fun opportunity to engage with some areas I haven’t seen before, practice my writing, and hopefully start setting a precedent for prioritizing the opportunity to engage with the public in addition to just being holed up in a basement lab somewhere subjecting innocent undergraduates to psychophysics expe...