Sense Perception

Do we believe the senses we perceive or do we perceive senses the way we believe? Many would say the former, but there definitely are some cases whereby our bodies tend to distort senses and deliver fabricated information to the brain, usually to support whatever the brain thinks beforehand.

As aforementioned in the 'intuition' post, intuitive people tend to gain information from internal world whereas sensible people gain information from the external world. Therefore, sensible people are usually more likely to be relatively objective, as the information they would perceive would not so much be affected by their own subjective opinions. They would see, smell, hear, taste and touch things the way they actually are. Their kind of sense perception would be fairly direct, straightforward and unfiltered. On the other hand, intuitive people would not really care about or learn much from the outside world. They would believe in their own hypotheses, and their senses may deceive themselves.

There is one famous anecdote about Saint Wonhyo. While he was travelling to Tang to practice asceticism, he stayed the night in a cave. Among the dark there was water in a bowl, which Wonhyo drank it and it was so fresh and cool. The next morning, Wonhyo then finds out that the water he drank was the water stagnating in a skull, not a bowl.

Intuition

I, personally, have a very strong sense of intuition. It occurs in every part of my daily life, such as when I pick an answer for a multiple-choice question or choose what menu I would go for this evening. I don’t think or consider thoroughly about the conditions of each choice I could make, like each of their benefits and drawbacks. All people have times when they can make a decision without any hesitation because they have a feeling that it’d be right. Though it may not always be a right and rational decision, people would probably not change their minds if their inner voice says, “Go for it”. We call this ‘intuition’.

The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, also known as MBTI personality test, examines whether the person is extraverted (E) or introverted (I), sensing (S) or intuitive (N), thinking (T) or feeling (F), and judging (J) or perceiving (P). Hence the result can come out 16 different combinations. For me, I was told I was an ENFP person: extraverted, intuitive, feeling and perceiving. To focus on sensing (S) and intuitive (N) factor, it represents the method by which someone perceives information. Sensing means that a person mainly believes information he or she receives directly from the external world. Intuition means that a person believes mainly information he or she receives from the internal or imaginative world. Hence, people who got N would be more likely to go for their own decisions and care not so much about what others say, as the information from their own outweighs that from outer world.