Our Five Senses: How Do We Acquire Knowledge?

I now know why people always say cramming the night before a test will do you more harm than good. Everything we do is done with our five major senses: Sight, Hear, Taste, Smell, and Touch. Up until now I used to believe that the mind was a recorder and our senses were independent of any other influence besides purely what we come in contact with. I used to think our five senses were objective and allowed us to interpret the world in new ways every time. I was wrong. It is true that we use our senses to interpret life and all the things we come in contact with, however, each time we encounter something our mind does not act as a recorder rather, it attaches meaning to the things based on preconceived notions, one 's culture, expectations, past experiences etc. After …show more content…
But then again, if our sense perceptions acquires knowledge through familiarity and already known concepts how do we retain new knowledge, when would we accept truth in a new discovery? Many poems depict the eyes as the windows to the world such as that given to us in our TOk class called 'It 's not enough ', and as windows we would expect them to show us exactly what is there but according to the chapter, that is not the case. Especially since the poem had a theme that aligns with the 'the allegory of the cave ' which states that knowledge entirely based off perception is an opinion that needs to be backed by philosophical thinking as well.. The eyes can easily be tricked and vision is subjective to multiple things such as emotion, culture, experience, memory, and expectation. By this, I simply mean that the way something makes us feel shapes, whether or not we see it in a positive or negative light. If we remember something for example pie while looking at something else such as a circle our mind corrects the thing to make them similar which is what we 'expect ' it to be and we