From the psychological point of view, feeling is the direct response of our brain to an individual attribute that directly acts on our various sensory systems.

Vision, vision is the richest sense of human beings, and about 70% of the information in the world around us is accepted and understood through the visual system. It is precisely because of these visual systems that we will form a distinct impression on the world around us, including our color vision. It is because of color vision that the world around us has become so colorful.

Hearing is a wonderful response to the vibration of the world around us. The organ of hearing is mainly the ear, so the input information of hearing includes the analysis of the frequency, pitch and timbre of sound, as well as the physical properties of sound: frequency refers to the number of cycles of sound waves per unit time. Amplitude is the physical characteristic of sound wave intensity, that is, the height of sound wave from peak to trough. It is because of human hearing that we have such a wonderful experience of the vibration of the world around us. Classical music, symphony, rock music, jazz and folk music, all of which should be appreciated with the help of our auditory system.

Smell and taste, one depends on the olfactory bulb in our nose, and the other depends on the taste buds on our tongue to feel and understand the outside world. Taste and smell are actually closely related. Many times, our tongues may not feel the various flavors of things, and at this time we need our sense of smell to help. For example, when we have a cold, why can't we taste the food? It is because our sense of smell is blocked, which makes it difficult for us to appreciate the delicious taste of all kinds of food. Now we Neo-Confucianists already know that human taste should be divided into four categories: bitter, sour, salty and sweet. We are most sensitive to bitter taste, followed by sour taste and salty taste, and least sensitive to sweet taste, so many people don't know that they have eaten a lot of sweets, mainly because we are the worst and least sensitive to sweets.

Somatosensory sense is touch, that is, how we feel when we are touched. Human touch is very important in survival and evolution. In the 60 million years of evolution, humans and animals need to support and contact each other, and the sense of touch brings us a feeling of comfort, safety, happiness and joy. Including skin feeling, dynamic feeling and balance feeling.

What is the function of feeling? Feeling has two main functions. One is to help us understand the world around us. The existence of this world needs us to feel it ourselves. We might as well think about what kind of psychological experience and psychological reaction we will have if we don't feel it. With feelings, our life makes us live happier and more active.

What is perception?

Perception is the observation, feeling, integration, processing and interpretation of the whole stimulus object by our brain. What is the relationship between feeling and perception? Generally speaking, feeling is a direct reflection of the individual attributes of things, which is more objective; Perception is an indirect reflection of the overall attributes of things, which is relatively subjective.

There are two kinds of perceptual processing methods, one is bottom-up processing and the other is top-down processing.

1. Bottom-up processing: The analysis of stimuli begins with sensory receptors and then rises to the level of brain and thinking. This is a very widely used processing mode in our daily life.

2. Top-down processing: It is often based on our past experience and expectations, processing information from a higher level of psychological process, and then forming sensory understanding.

Perception has some unique properties relative to feeling:

The first is its integrity, called gestalt (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts). Gestalt psychology believes that we follow four principles when processing and organizing sensory information. One is called the law of proximity, that is, things that are close to each other, and we can easily form it into a whole. The second is called the law of similarity. It is easy for us to identify similar things as a whole. The third is called the law of continuity. As for continuous individuals, we tend to regard perception as a whole. There are related laws. There are some related things that we can easily perceive as a whole.

The second characteristic of perception is selectivity. We can't perceive all the stimuli around us. We can only choose the perceptual information, so the selected information is called the perceptual object, and the unselected information is called the perceptual background. Cocktail party effect. Generally speaking, the object of perception is distinct, concrete and memorable, while the background of perception is often ignored by us. Just like when a teacher lectures, what the teacher says may be the object of perception, and the background behind the teacher is the background of perception. You may remember what I said, but you may not remember some changes in these backgrounds around me. However, the perceived object and background are not completely unchanged. Under certain circumstances, the object and background we perceive are actually interchangeable. What we pay attention to becomes the object, and what we don't pay attention to becomes the background. For example, in the famous ambiguous picture, you can see two different things, and this phenomenon is formed because we change the object we pay attention to and the background we don't pay attention to from time to time.

Another very important feature of perception is comprehension, that is, our understanding of surrounding stimuli is understanding, analysis and judgment, and sometimes we have to add our own subjective experience, subjective experience and subjective expectation. Japanese and China tend to pay attention to the background of fish tanks, while Americans tend to pay attention to the visual objects of fish tanks. He pays attention to the first three big fish, and Asians pay more attention to the background behind the big fish. This cultural difference in perception is actually reflected in our understanding and expression of the world around us, and art embodies our understanding and expression of the world around us. Psychological research has found that our human artistic expression is influenced by our differences in perceptual knowledge.

Characteristics of perception:

Differences, many of our artistic expressions in the East are actually to fully tap human appreciation and understanding of the background. Our long scroll technique, our Suzhou garden's moving scenery to borrow scenery, our bird's-eye technique, bird's-eye technique, and the perceptual way of observing the world from top to bottom are all manifestations of our oriental concern for the background. Western art, on the other hand, pays more attention to the object of things, so they have invented many means of expression that emphasize appearances. For example, in many western art paintings, the objects are huge and bright, and the background is often very dim or even no background at all. Westerners' perception mode is more fixed, while our oriental perception mode is more dynamic, which is that aesthetic art actually reflects the cultural differences of our psychological perception.

Let orientals and westerners scan their brains with MRI while appreciating their expressions, and we will find that orientals and westerners use less cognitive resources in their familiar expressions, and this difference in perception can even be shown on the neurological level. Recent studies have found that westerners need less cognitive resources for absolute expression and more cognitive resources for relative judgment. On the contrary, we orientals need less cognitive resources when making relative judgments, but more cognitive resources when making absolute judgments, which is the cultural difference of perceptual knowledge.

Another feature of perception is constancy. Although the stimulus our senses feel is constantly changing, our perception thinks it is constant, unchanging and stable. There are many manifestations of this constancy. One is called size constancy. Size constancy means that within a certain range, an individual's perception of the size of an object does not completely change with the distance, nor does it change with the size of the visual image on the retina, but its perceived image is still perceived according to the actual size. The other is called shape constancy. Shape constancy refers to the perceptual feature that when an individual observes a familiar object, when the observation angle changes, his original shape perception remains relatively unchanged, which leads to changes in the retina. There is also a color constancy. Color constancy refers to the perceptual characteristics of individuals who are familiar with objects. When their colors change due to changes in illumination and other conditions, color perception will not tend to remain relatively unchanged due to changes in color light.

Why is our perception constant? It is mainly because our eyes are only a two-dimensional world, receiving external stimuli in the form of retinal plane, while our brain understands a three-dimensional world, so the two-dimensional information we feel must be converted into a three-dimensional information, and many unexpected phenomena will occur. How to create the impression of the three-dimensional world in a two-dimensional information processing, we psychologists found that we often use some clues, mainly two kinds of clues, one is called binocular clue, which is to perceive the three-dimensional world with the visual difference of our two eyes, and the other is monocular clue.

Binocular cue: it is a cue that both eyes jointly provide spatial depth perception, emphasizing the role of feedback information generated in binocular coordination activities. Monocular cue: it is a cue that can perceive depth with only one eye, including the relative size and occlusion of visual objects. (Visual cliff experiment-the development of human depth perception and fear)

The French philosopher Descartes once beautifully expressed the meaning of eyes to us. He said that eyes are a beautiful gift from God. In fact, God has given us not only eyes, but also all our sensory systems and even our brains, which can be said to be beautiful gifts, because it makes our lives colorful. Colorful, let us live a positive and happy life, which is the beauty of feeling and perception.

(Professor Tsinghua University from Peng Kaiping)