Percept

A Percept is the result of perception without interpretation. Every person perceives the stimuli from reality in a filtered manner and thus forms subjective percepts of objective reality. In the case of illnesses such as paranoia, anorexia or depression, the personal filters result in a distortion of perception.

What is a percept?

A percept is the result of perception without interpretation. Every person perceives the stimuli from reality in a filtered manner and thus forms subjective percepts of objective reality.

Man perceives reality with his senses. He has different systems of perception: the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, the deep sensitivity, the sense of taste, the sense of smell, the vestibular sense and the sense of touch. Some of these senses are interoceptive senses that primarily pick up stimuli from your own body. The main task of the sensory systems, however, is an exteroceptive one. In this way, the senses give people a picture of situations and the environment in which they move appropriately thanks to perception.

Innumerable stimuli continuously flow into people. Not all of these stimuli reach his consciousness. The individual perception systems filter out incoming stimuli according to relevance from the perception. The result of a perception is called a percept by medicine and corresponds to the filtered stimulus product that overcomes the threshold to consciousness.

There are always differences between a perception and the actual situation in the sense of unfiltered perception. So what reaches human consciousness as a percept is never objective reality. Percepts differ from distal stimuli, which correspond to a physico-chemical object of perception. The proximal stimulus must also be distinguished from percepts, which correspond to an image of the object or its parts in the receptors.

Function & task

Perception corresponds to the sensory perception of an object or subject. The conscious grasping and the equally conscious identification does not include perception. Recognition and identification only follow on from perception. The percept thus corresponds to the stimuli that reach the brain and can, for example, correspond to a black spot on a white background. Only after the processes of perception processing, such as the combination and the summation, is the perception recognized and recognized, for example, as a coffee stain on a T-shirt.

In addition to the purely subjective perception, perception includes the neurophysiological processes of sensory perception on which this perception is based. In this context, perception can include, for example, the arrival of stimuli on the sensory cells of the perception apparatus, the conversion of these stimuli into bioelectrical excitation and the migration of the stimuli into the central nervous system.

Percepts are the result of filtering processes carried out by the perception apparatus to protect against overstimulation. Nobody perceives objective reality in this way. Every result of a perceptual process is subjective and is determined by filters such as personal experience, the world of emotions, the situational context and the socialization of the individual. Percepts are always relevant to the situation, that is, they have context-related importance.

The human perception filters are also shaped by people's attitudes, values, interests and experiences. For example, the perception of a certain situation is more likely to contain impressions that confirm a pre-established opinion than those that conflict with the pre-established opinion or expectation of a situation.

In the meantime, personal interests direct people's attention and thus influence their perceptions. Anyone who has just had a child sees more children on the street than before the birth of their own. This relationship shows how much one's own experiences are involved in the filtering processes of perception and thus shape the perceptions of the individual. Percepts are always specifically experienced, subjectively experienced and consciously perceived results from a filtering process of incoming perceptual stimuli. This means that two people must come out of the same situation with different percepts.

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Illnesses & ailments

Percepts are always subjective distortions of reality. Depending on what the individual has experienced in the past, their percepts can also assume absurd dimensions and become consciously recognizable as distortions for outsiders. This is the case, for example, with self-image disorders such as anorexia, in which those affected perceive themselves as overweight, although objectively they are already clearly undernourished.

People with paranoia also suffer from abnormally distorted perception. This disorder corresponds to a mental disorder with delusional tendencies, such as paranoia or paranoia. Patients with paranoia suffer from a distorted perception of their environment, which is viewed as hostile and, in extreme cases, even as malicious. The result of paranoia is an anxious to aggressively suspicious attitude. Often the patients believe in a conspiracy against themselves.

Paranoid reactions can be of a neurotic nature, but can also extend to severely psychotic forms. Neurotic paranoid personalities are overly sensitive to rejection. They are very ailing and are very suspicious of their environment.

People with depression also suffer from a distortion of perception with extremely negative effects. Often they assume that they cannot be liked by anyone or that they are failures. These beliefs are reflected in their perceptual filters, allowing them to form even more percepts that confirm their beliefs. Strongly negative thought patterns are described by doctors as dysfunctional and practically in every case lead to negative distortions of reality.