While we are asleep, our sensory organs provide our brains with a huge amount of data about the outside world. However, instead of just feeling these sensations, our brains convert them into images, sounds, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. These mental representations allow us to interact with the world around us. To understand how we experience reality, let’s take a closer look at our cognitive processes known as perception. Perception allows us to recognize patterns and relationships in the world around us. By perceiving something as meaningful, we learn about ourselves and others. We also learn about things we’ve seen before.
Perception is our ability for distinguishing between foreground and background, to recognize what things are and where they are located. We do this mostly without being aware of it; most of the time. Some psychologists – especially Gestalt psychologists – believe that the ability to perceive is somehow wired into our brains, that our brains are ‘hard-coded’ to make sense of the world around us. Other people think that perception is learned through experience.
