Homunculus - Crash Course Psychology #6 Video Lecture | Psychology Fundamentals: Learning Made Easy - Self Help Learning

Homunculus!
If you've heard that word, it probably wasn't
in the context of psychology.
A monster in Dungeons and Dragons, a song
by They Might Be Giants, the bad guys in Fullmetal
Alchemist, a novel by James Blaylock.
It's Latin for 'little man' and in psychology,
it refers to a kind of sensory map of the
human body, a depiction of what we'd look
like if each of our parts grew in proportion
to how much we sense with them.
Witness!
Look at this dude.
His ham hands could rip off a car door.
I mean, if he could lift them, which he couldn't.
Is this what we're supposed to look like on
the inside?
This freaky thing illustrates the weighted
significance of our sensory receptors.
His disproportional hands are monstrous, for
example, because we primarily touch the world
with our hands, not our elbows, so our hands
are extremely sensitive.
His mouth, meanwhile, is huge because we also
have a ton of sensory receptors in our tongues
and lips.
It's what we use for tasting food and for
sucking face.
As we continue our exploration of how we both
sense and perceive the world, the Homunculus,
while kind of freaky, is actually a pretty
attractive model for understanding how our
bodies interact with the environment.
How we smell it with our outsized nose, taste
it with our ridiculous Mick Jagger lips, and
touch it with our enormous Donkey Kong hands.
So join me, as we get to know the hideous
little creature within you.
[Intro]
Last week we talked about the difference between
sensation and perception: how sensation is
the process by which our senses and brain
receive information from the outer world,
while perception is how we organize and interpret
that information and give it meaning.
Like, right now, my sense of hearing is letting
me detect sounds, while my brain is processing
and interpreting them, allowing me to identify
and perceive the individual sounds and determine
if they're coming from the radio, or outside
or right behind me.
Sound moves in waves that vibrate through
a medium, like air.
And although they function differently that
waves of electromagnetic radiation, including
what we think of as light, sound waves also
can vary in shape.
Short waves have a high frequency and a high
pitch, like a plucky violin.
Long waves have a low frequency and pitch,
like a mournful cello.
Wave height, or amplitude, determine a sound's
loudness, which we typically measure in decibels.
And just as light waves become electrical
impulses that we register with our sight,
so too do our ears turn vibrating air into
signals that our brains can decipher.
While the human ear might not be as elegant
as the jackrabbit's, or as wild as the long-eared
bat's, it's actually a pretty incredible organ.
Or, organs, since we have two of them, which
helps give us directional stereophonic hearing.
That's the 3D type of hearing we couldn't
experience if we had just one big, freaky
ear in the middle of our foreheads.
Your outer ear, the part that you can see
and pierce and tug on, collects sound waves
and funnels through the ear canal and into
the middle ear, where they cause your eardrum
to vibrate.
From there, sound vibrations are amplified
by the so-called 'ossicle bones', which also
happen to be the most awesomely named bones
in your body: the stirrup, the hammer and
the anvil.
From here, those physical vibrations travel
to the inner ear, where they bump into the
snail-shaped cochlea, and its surrounding
fluids get jostled around, causing some of
your 16,000 tiny cochlear hair cells to bend.
This motion triggers neighbouring nerve cells
that convert that physical energy into electrical
impulses zipping up the auditory nerve into
the auditory cortex, where the brain is like
'Oh, songbirds!', or 'Elvis!', or 'Vengeance!',
or whatever.
And you know what goes great with a little
bit of rockabilly, or revenge?
A nice meal.
One of the greatest joys in life is enjoying
flavors; whether you prefer casserole or caviar,
we all get our tasting done in the same way,
starting with our taste buds.
Each of our thousands of taste buds contains
a sort of pocket-like pore that contains fifty
to a hundred hair-like taste receptor cells
that read food molecules and report back to
the brain.
"That chip is salty, that lemon is sour."
Now, everybody used to think that our tongues
just detected four distinct tastes: sweet,
salty, sour and bitter.
And you've probably seen the version of this
bogus taste map, which incorrectly assigns
certain tastes to certain parts of your tongue.
But we now recognize a fifth flavour: the
savoury, meaty, MSG-y taste, for which there
is no English word, it's known as 'umami'.
But taste is nothing without smell.
Plug your nose, and a bite of cold bacon is
just a mouthful of salt.
This is a prime example of sensory interaction;
the principle that one sense can influence
another.
I'll get back to smell in just a bit, but
I want to take a moment to talk about what
happens when those sensory interactions get
messy.
Let us take a little questionnaire, shall
we?
Do certain words trigger a strong, specific
taste in your mouth?
Like, does the word 'kitten' taste like candy
canes?
Has hearing a sound ever made you see a color?
Like does Prince's voice singing Purple Rain
actually cause the colour purple to flash
before your eyes?
Do you ever feel like you're being touched
when you smell something?
Like does the smell of lilies give you the
sensation of touching a cold, metal surface?
Most of you said no to all of those questions,
but at least one of you out there answered
yes.
And more likely than not, that person has
synesthesia, a rare and fascinating neurological
condition where two or more senses get wrapped
together.
This kind of sensory mix up is involuntary,
and it's experienced without forethought in
a durable and consistent way.
Like, the number seven is always going to
taste like coffee, and it's never going to
switch to tomato juice.
And we're still not sure what causes this
phenomenon.
One idea suggests that the rogue development
of new neural connections may override normal
boundaries that typically separate the senses.
Another theory suggests that all babies are
born with synesthesia and experience mixed
sense until the brain matures and creates
separate sense channels, unless they don't,
in which case you grow up to be a synesthete.
Yet another theory links the condition to
wonky neurochemistry, in which the neurotransmitters
associated with one function turn up way over
in a different part of the brain.
Just another example of how the mind is still
extremely mysterious.
So, back to the comparatively boring topic
of smells that only smell... unlike our wave
detecting senses of sight and hearing, out
taste and smell are chemical senses.
We differentiate the smells of spring lilacs,
grilled cheese, and gasoline when airborne
molecules travel up the nose and reach the
five to ten million receptor cells at the
top of each nasal cavity; and yes, that means
when you smell poop, there's poop particles
in your nose.
These receptors send information to the brain's
olfactory bulb, then zips it on to the primary
smell cortex and parts of the limbic system
responsible for emotion and memory.
Unlike our five different taste receptors
or two types of retinal receptors, we don't
have specifically differentiated smell receptors,
rather, odour receptors come together in different
combinations.
So, just like pressing different keys on your
keyboard can allow you to form tons of different
words, so too can these distinct combinations
of activated smell receptors communicate some
ten thousand unique smells.
But, how we feel about a smell, and our perception
of it, is often tangled up in our experiences
with that scent.
If our beloved grandma baked gingerbread every
time we visited, those memories may make you
partial to the smell of gingerbread.
Even if we can't immediately name the odor,
our brains are amazing at storing and recognizing
old scents by their associations.
Which is why you may suddenly feel happy when
you walk into a bakery, even before you realize
you're thinking of your grandma.
The emotional power of smell partly has to
with how our sense circuitry connects to the
brain's limbic system, right next to our emotional
registry, the amygdala, and our memory keeper,
the hippocampus.
That's why scents can be so intimately tied
with our feelings and memories.
And how a whiff of Nag Champa can immediately
transport to back to eating chips in your
freshman dorm room.
Smelling, hearing, tasting, seeing: all fantastic,
but if there's one thing that popular music
taught us, besides a bunch of really terrible
relationship advice, it's that when it comes
to our senses, we're all about touching.
We've got songs about magic touches and golden
touches, invisible and human touches.
Songs about touching ourselves, touching me,
touching you, and even what you can't touch.
Touch is extremely important, especially during
early development.
Baby monkeys that are allowed to see, hear
and smell, but not touch their mamas become
extremely distraught.
That's just a mean experiment.
Premature human babies gain weight faster
if they're held and massaged, and some studies
indicated that children that didn't receive
enough physical attention as infants are at
higher risk for emotional, behavioral, and
social problems as they grow.
Your sense of touch is actually a combination
of four distinct skin sensations: pressure,
warmth, cold, and pain.
If you touch various spots of your skin with
something soft like this anglerfish, you'll
feel that you sense different amounts of softness
on different parts of your body... just put
that up there...
The same goes for a warm mug, or an ice cube,
or a needle point.
You'll sense that some spots are more or less
sensitive to each of the four distinct sensations.
Other skin sensations, like tickles, itches,
and the experience of wetness, are just variations
on those four different sensations.
Ultimately, your sense of touch joins forces
with sensors in your bones, joints, and tendons
to provide your personal kinesthesis: the
way that body senses its own movement and
positioning.
You use your kinesthetic sense whenever you
walk, dance, swim, or hula hoop.
It's what the cops are testing drunk people
for when they ask them to touch their noses
with their eyes closed.
This sense allows you to detect changes in
the position of your body without relying
on other senses, which is why you can still
cha-cha, backstroke, and hula hoop with your
eyes closed and your ears plugged.
The partner sense to your kinesthesis is your
vestibular sense, which monitors your head's
position and your balance.
This sense of equilibrium is ruled by the
pretzel-shaped, semicircular canals and the
fluid-filled vestibular sacs that connect
those canals to the cochlea in your inner
ear.
So, if you spin around a bunch and suddenly
stop, it'll take a minute for that inner ear
fluid to return to normal, which is what makes
you feel dizzy.
That moving fluid is actually fooling your
brain into thinking your body is still spinning.
It's a good example of how even our normal
functioning senses can fool us.
Understanding exactly how we get fooled helps
us understand how our sensual perception system
works, which is exactly what we're going to
be talking about next time.
For now, hopefully you realized that your
homunculus is actually kinda beautiful, in
its own way, because you learned how your
sense of hearing, taste, smell, and touch
work.
And thanks for watching, especially to all
our Subbable Subscribers, who make this whole
channel possible.
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This episode was written by Kathleen Yale,
edited by Blake de Pastino and myself, and
our consultant in Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat.
Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins.
Michael Aranda is our sound designer, and
our graphics team is Thought Café.