Seven Sins of Memory from psych blog

When we look back, experiences and events are never the same as when we experienced them. When we look back we may remember different people being there and forget things that happen. According to the article the seven sins are transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, mis attribution, suggestibility, bias and persistence. Without out memory we would be lost people not knowing who we are, what we do, or who we know. There are other articles attached that are related if you would like to know more about them. Relating to this article there are many times which I review a memory one day and then the next remembering it happening a different way. If you talk to someone about the memory or they tell you their view of the same memory yours will be altered to fit both yours and their memory. Sometimes people keep telling themselves that something happened that didn't and eventually they remember it as their altered version of the memory.

Chapter 6

I thought that this chapter did a good job explaining the senses and perceptions. I enjoyed the perception part the most. The images shown were confusing and sometimes made your head hurt. The way we automatically group shapes is so automatic we don't notice it. We create shapes and objects when they aren't there. How we recognise things for what they are when we see something else is amazing. The image i really liked was of the dog house on page 265. How we adapt to see different things and see different images when suggested shows how much we are influenced by people around us.

Chapter 6 Illusions

I went to Roget's 'Palisade' Illusion, Flash-Lag Effect, "Stepping feet" Motion Illusion, Motion Induced Blindness, "Breathing Square" Illusion, Scintillating Grid, Pyramid Illusion.
From these tutorials I learned that you see things that don't really happen. These illusions show how our brain and eyes trick us into thinking we are seeing moving objects or the disappearing of objects. What surprised me was the flash-lag effect and the breathing square. I thought that the objects were really disappearing and getting smaller and bigger. Yet again my trust in my sight has been reduced. IT makes me want to take a closer look at things we see in every day life.

Fun in the school hall

After class one day this week i randomly decided to walk on the left side of the hall. One of my classmates joined me in this experience but failed to get the full effect. Instead of walking beside me this person decided to walk behind me and let me take all of the hits. This was a very scary experience in my life. In the end it was looked at as humorous and a stupid thing to do. The kids going the opposite was just kept on walking strait expecting me to move out of the way. A few kids did say i was going the wrong way and told me to move. Going against the norm can be very dangerous if you aren't careful. I think i ended up hugging the wall halfway to the lockers. There was a look of terror on my face and a few others as we were about to collide but at the last movement one person moves out of the way.

What day is the worst?

So i found an article that tells which day is the worst of the week. I think that most of us teenagers can agree that it would be Monday right? The day we all come back to school. Maybe it would be Friday the beginning of the weekend. Well both of those guesses are wrong according to researchers. Three hundred fifty one people were questioned every day of the week as to how their day went over a period of time. The graph above is of the research taken and it shows that the worst moods were on Wednesday and the best moods were on Sunday. Our actual mood doesn't change nearly as much as what we think it is. So really when someone asks you about your mood you could honestly say about the same as usual.

Chapter 5 Blog

I really enjoyed most of this chapter. The old age part of the chapter didn't really enthuse me. The developmental pictures on page 174 and the description of the different stages were really interesting. I enjoyed learning about the different stages of development throughout a humans life. If puts in perspective the stages of which everyone has so go through. The developing child video was interesting to watch. It amazed me that children at age two can't do simple calculations such as finding snoopy and one age three can. How much a the knowledge that a person has grows in such a short time if unbelievable. I actually remember doing some type of test like Piaget's test of conservation on page 183 when I was younger. The study of different cultures on page 190 and 191 were really interesting. I never expected to read something along the line of the male staying home and being close to the children. Something that I'm not exactly looking forward to is what comes with old age. The chapter talks about the loss of physical abilities. I like my physical health and want to keep it. The loss of memory is another thing i don't want to have happen to me. I hope that i will me one of the lucky people who can remember most of their life.

Psyblog Time!!! on Conceptual Consumption

So i found a blog called "Why Do People Watch Scary Movies, Stay in Ice Hotels or Eat Bacon-Flavoured Ice-Cream?" and to be honest i didn't really know why people do such things. According to the article it claims the reason we do crazy things like that is to be able to 'possess the experience' and 'look like interesting people.' This I find a little bit weird of an explanation but yet it just might be true.It is also said that people by thing that they never use just to show the object off and rub in other people's faces. Of course there is the giving things and money to charity which makes you feel good and others think you're a nice person. If you think about it people always buy and do things for a certain reason. People usually do things for one of three main reasons. They do it for the experience, the positive feeling they get afterwords, or for negative experiences.

Food Cravings?!

Okay, so I'm going off of something that I experience like every day. I know we will probably get to this part of the book eventually but I figured I'd just do this anyways. So every day a person needs to eat food in order to survive. Junk food is naturally the humans' favorite type of food to pig out on. What I want to know is, why is it that when we are done eating and aren't hungry any more, do we still want to eat food. It's like I know I'm not hungry because I just ate but then you think of something like a fruit roll up and you're like that sounds so good right now. So why does our brain tell us that we need to eat it even though we know we don't. It's like we are addicted to food and just can never stop eating it. I'm sure that we learned about the part of the brain which causes this but i can't remember at the moment. Then there's the thing with women and loving to eat chocolate, but i guess that can be for another time.

Chapter 4 Blog

I found the whole twin studies very interesting, mostly because my two best friends are twins. I never knew that even though a person could be an identical twin and have different genes. I often Wonder what will happen when they have to start their own lives as in going to different colleges and getting married. They have always been there for each other and rarely separated.
The gender differences in general was interesting to read. It mostly confirmed what I already thought as true. I really liked the cartoon on page 148 with the woman saying, "I had a nice time Steve. Would you like to come in, settle down, and raise a family?" I found it funny because as far as i know women don't say things like that. Usually in my mind it's the male asking a woman inside. Something else i found interesting was how true it is that we categorize boys and girls. People say that girl are the ones that are suppose to play with dolls, when I know for sure that boys play with them also because my brother use to play dolls with me. Like wise girls aren't suppose to want to play rough or play with cars and trucks. I don't see why people should categorize in that manor. If a child was not influenced by the environment to play with certain toys they would most likely play with any toy they were given.

How Meditation Improves Attention

This article is interesting to read if you are into mediation. According to studies people who meditate have larger attention spans. Other studies have shown that meditation can benefit motivation, cognition, emotional intelligence and awareness to maybe control our dreams. I think that by meditating we will have better psychological and physical benefits. Maybe if we know how to concentrate more there will be fewer people falling asleep while in classes, this might even improve some of our grades. There are some neat tips on how to become a mediator if anyone wants to check it out it's on the psyblog.

How to make people believe in telepathy

I think that telepathy is a joke. You can't send messages from your own brain or mind to someone else. A brain can only transfer information to other parts of the body. In the article it doesn't say if telepathy is possible but it says people are more confident that they can telepathic if the two people involved can meet, talk first, and do a few practice runs. Telepathy used to be considered possible when someone guessed what a card showed when a person was thinking of it. I would call that a lucky guess not telepathy.

Consciousness and the two track mind

I learned that we know more than we know we know. A good example from the book is the hollow face illusion. Our eyes are telling the mind that the face is protruding but our brain is telling us that the face is hollow. So really our mind is believing one thing while the brain another. With this study I would trust my brain more than my mind. Another interesting thing I learned about was the different stages of sleep and the brain waves. I thought that you dream toward the end of your sleep, but when it really occurs many times throughout the night.
What I found the most surprising was what we dream and what goes on in the REM sleep. I thought that men had sexual dreams, more often than what was recorded, as a young adult and that we had more sweet dreams than negative ones. I won't mention what I learned and found interesting about REM sleep, instead if you want to know look on page 96 in the first paragraph (it may not be totally appropriate).
Also I disagree with Freud's wish-fulfillment theory. When I dream it's not about things I want to happen in the future. For example, once I dreamed that i killed someone and trust me I really didn't and don't want to kill that person. But I do think that actuation-syntheses is more likely to explain dreams. You might really be creating a story from books, movies, and real life events that you know or have heard of. I know i read and watch some weird books and movies and i do have some occasional weird dreams involving the same plot or characters.

Late Night Blogging!!!! YAY!!!!!!!!

So I finally found an article that caught my eye, it's called Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive. I was wondering why things we don't want to think about randomly come into our head at the worst of times. Is it because we are thinking of something along the same line and it creates a like to the old memories? It's like every time you try not to think about something you think about it more. I found out a little bit about why we can't keep things out of our minds while reading this, some people say that the reason why we can't block out some thoughts as well as others is because we had less practice blocking them out. Another thought is that if you just clear your mind and don't not try to think of it you will stop thinking of it. I myself think that the second way of not not trying to think of it works better, what do you think?

Blogging again...

So.. I read an interesting article called "Are You a Liar?" I found this one interesting compared to some others that i have read like the sitting up straight one. In the article there was an experiment of how much you lie to a person when you just meet them. After reading this i kind of want to meet someone new and tape the conversation. According to the article the average number of lies being told in a conversation with a stranger is 3 times in every 10 minutes. By the graphs shown it looks like people lie most about how they feel. That makes a lot of since considering when ever someone asks me how I'm doing I usually say I'm doing fine or good, mostly because that is the normal reply you give to people you don't know. It's not like you want to bother people with your personal problems when you have no idea who they are.

The Brain and Behavior

The first activity that I did was the Ambiguous figures. It confused my mind so much seeing too many things in one picture, especially the one where there is a box and it has different objects going through is. That one gave me a major headache from looking at it so long. I learned you really have to study the pictures in parts to see the whole.
The second activity that I did was the voyage to serendip. It was hard to find serendip and i figured the easiest ways to find things sometimes is to randomly choose a path or not search directly for things, but to look for the unobvious ways.
The third activity was Contrast/Color "Illusions" this one really made me realize how much our brain can sometimes trick you. By the play of light i thought that the different squares were different colors. They look different under different way of lighting such as shadows, but when you move the square out from under the shadow and put it next to the other square it is the same color. It's a really confusing concept when you write it but if you try it you'd understand what I'm trying to get to.
The forth activity was map your own blind spot. I've known for some time that my eyes have blind spots, but it makes me wonder if the opposite eye can fill in that blind spot. Seeing how big the blind spot really is makes me wonder how much we are really missing. Sometimes while driving there is a car that appears when just a minute ago there was no vehicle, thinking about it now i wonder if the car was in the blind spot in my eye or the one in my car.
All of these activities make me wonder what is really going on I'm my head that i don't know about. I think now I'll be more careful choosing color objects in the store, I don't want to end up with mismatched clothes. The blind spot activity makes me want to figure out if it's really the car's blind spot my eye's. This defiantly makes me think about how we look at things and how we actually view them.
When first starting this chapter I never really thought about how our brains are made up of neurons. Even though I knew my brain was made up of cells I didn't realize how complicated the brain really was. It amazes me how much the neurons communicate and how fast they can move. I would go to sleep to give the cells a chance to rest but they work even then.
I found it interesting that not just one part of a brain does one thing, but multiple parts of a brain work together to create one final result. That more than one part helps you actually smell, see, and move.
Before i never really understood before how drugs triggered or blocked your natural chemical releases or functions. The figure 2.6 helped me to see how drugs fooled our brain. With how complex our brain is you'd think it would have a better defense system against drugs inserted into the body. If it actually did I think it would be a bad thing because all of the drugs and chemicles the doctors give humans to get better wouldn't work.