While doing some routine textbook reading and enjoying my post-dinner bottle of Sunset Wheat, I was intrigued by the discussion of sensations, game shows, and the pushing of our ‘sensational boundaries’. A significant reason why this caught my attention on this particular evening was that today, while I sat silently taking notes in Reid Hall, my roommate conquered America’s most epic obstacle course on the ABC reality show Wipeout.
(If you haven’t seen Wipeout before, I recommend you watch this clip in order to get up to speed.)
It is interesting to compare the way in which my roommate will surpass swinging pendulums, rotating beams and bouncing red balls to the way in which I choose what brand of cheese to buy. It is all a matter of taking notice of some stimuli and blocking out other stimuli. We utilize a variety of cognitive tools, such as schemas, heuristics, and information processing in order to determine what information to take in and what stimuli is left as background noise. My roommate has a much larger incentive (50 grand can buy a lot of cheese!) to ignore the shouting of audience members and various undulating mechanisms than I have to tune out the marketing schemes of Kraft or Velveeta. This illustrates how we can utilize automatic and controlled processing depending on our level of investment in a given decision or situation. Panda is, for several reasons (fame and fortune, to name a couple) highly invested in her performance on Wipeout, while I am much less discerning when it comes to the sensations and stimuli present in my hypothetical dairy-shopping environment.
So let us all crack another Sunset Wheat and wish Panda the best of luck in avoiding that bombardment of stimuli—for she has a lot more on the line than the 2 dollars I may or may not choose to spend next time I’m at the grocery store.
