Blog #6

Today in psychology we did two demonstrations with the ears. The first one we did was dealing with the vestibular sense that senses your bodies position and movement, including the sense of balance. Your vestibular sense is in your inner ear and uses a sense of equilibrium to determine where your body is: upside down, high in the air, or on the ground. In class we demonstrated this by placing a person on a board blindfolded. Two people lifted the board about two inches and the teacher would say raise the board up, but really he would just move down. We did the experiment three times, but it only worked once. Danielle was the only one who thought she was going up in the air, while the another two knew that the teacher was just moving and they weren't. I found that to be very interesting and weird at the same time. I thought that they would all think they were moving, but I guess not.

Another hearing lab that we did was placing desk about a chair and placing someone in the middle, while the people in their desk would tap a pen. The person in the middle had to guess where they were hearing the sound from. It is much easier to hear if a sound is coming from the left of right, but extremely hard to tell if it is coming from in front of you or behind you. That is because when a sound comes from the front or back they reach your ears at the same time, but when it comes from the left or right they reach your ears at the same time. I find this experiment to be interesting, because it is really hard to tell where a sound is coming from and can be quite difficult.