Chapter 9 - Thinking and Learning

For starters this chapter was short, which was awesome!! But other then that I liked this chapter because it had to do with how we communicate. With communication being such a big thing, I found it interesting that certain animals can communicate just as well as we can. And they all can transmit cultural patterns between their peers.

Another thing that I found interesting was the language development. How at four months babies babble many speech sounds, at ten months their babbling resembles household language, then at twelve months they are in the one-word stage, twenty-four months they are at the two-word stage and telegraphic speech, then from there language develops int complete sentences.

Current Event # 4

With this whole chapter being about learning it got me thinking about something. How come it is that I have learned how to stand up in front of a judge for forensics and not be the least bit scared. But when I have to get up in front of my church and read the lessons I become extremely nervous.

I had to read in church today, and the whole time I was up there I was shaking, messing up my words and read though both lessons very quickly. But I can stand up in front of a room full of people I don't know and a judge on top of it and not have any nerves ever. Once I stopped and thought about it a little more, I'm pretty sure it has something to with the fact that the people in church are kind of like a forensics judge, but they are judging me on much more then just the set things that a forensics judge would be. And I'm pretty sure that not knowing quite what people are judging me on is what makes me so scared.

Chapter 7 - Learning

This chapter was interesting to me because of all the different types of learning that it talked about. I knew that some people are visual learners, some learn better by doing things and others learn by hearing it first. But what I didn't know was that there was even more ways then that. The learning assignment was also very helpful in fully understanding everything.

I'm pretty sure that I've used conditioning it a lot of my life. But the example that I can think of right now would have to be with my dad. My dad works for County Materials as a cement truck driver during the summer. And its become a habit of mine during the summer to always look at the number on the trucks. Any time that I see a red cement trunk I instinctively look at the number on it to see if its my dad. I've always done this ever since I can remember, and I'm pretty sure I'll keep doing it as long as he works there.

Current Event #3

Part of this chapter was dealing with optical illusions. It made me think of how many of them are out there, I mean the library has tons of books on optical illusions. And it seems like on a daily basis they are coming out with more of them. And people love them, I'm not saying that I don't, I use to love going to the library or on the computer and looking at them. But as I got older and learned what was really happening. That they really aren't moving, that our eyes are playing tricks on us. It kind of made looking at them not so much fun. And another thing that plays into that is it seems that whenever I start looking at the ones that move, I start to get a headache. And I can only look at them for so long. So some of the ones we had to look at for our blog, kind of gave me a headache. The illusions that don't move, don't bother me. In fact I still love finding those and looking at them. Some of them are really funny.

Chapter 6 - Sensation and Perception

This whole chapter was on a persons sensations and perceptions. The things that I found interesting in this chapter were the absolute threshold, pain, and a persons depth perception.

Absolute threshold, is the minimum stimulation necessary to detect a particular light, sound pressure, taste or odor 50% of the time. This means that whenever we detect a sound, taste or odor we are usually about 50% right. As a person grows older their absolute threshold varies. Their sensitivity to high-pitched sounds declines, leaving them in need of louder sound.

Occasional pain is a good thing, it is telling us that something is wrong with our body. If we didn't feel pain, it would mean that something bigger is wrong. If you would sprain your ankle, the pain you feel is telling your brain that you need to not put so much pressure on that ankle. But a person with chronic pain, meaning they always feel pain. The pain they feel never really goes away, they might always have persistent or recurring back pain, arthritis or headaches.

The final thing that I found interesting was a person depth perception. Depth perception is seeing the world in three dimensions. This allows us estimate distance from us. Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk discovered that depth perception is innate. They did this by running a study with crawling infants and newborn animals.

Illusion Blog

The eight illusions I went though were Stepping Feet, Motion Induced Blindness, Stereokinetic Phenomenon, Rotating Snake, Snake ad lib, Pinna-Brelstaff Illusion, Motion Aftereffect, Spiral Aftereffect. I learn that if you stare at something for to long and then look away, whatever your now looking at is doing the same thing whatever you were staring at was doing. I also learned that you can get a headache very fast from looking at something for to long.

Something that surprised me was the motion induced blindness. I didn't know that the motion could induce blind spots. I actually found that really cool, as you looked at it longer the more the dots seemed to disappear. I think what I experienced changed my view on sensation and perception because I learned that the objects themselves weren't really moving. It was our eyes playing tricks on us. These experiences may affect me on a daily basis because now that I know my eyes can play big tricks on me like this. I think I'll have to maybe think a little more about whats happening around me.

Are You a Liar?

This article is from Psyblog and it talked about how people lie within just minutes of meeting a person. It talks about a study that was performed, it had 121 people that were going to talk to someone new for 10 minutes. They separated the people into three groups, the first group had to try to present themselves so the other person thinks your competent. The second group had to present themselves as likeable to the other people, and the third group was the control they had no specific goal. All the groups were secretly video taped, and at the end they were asked to point out their own lies. After that they got to watch the tape, and write down any time they were lying. 40% of people claimed to have told no lies at all. That probably isn't far from the truth, they had no motivation to lie to the others. While the other 60% of people reported some lies, with the average being just under 3 lies in the 10 minutes they talked.

Lies are broke down into five areas, feelings, achievements, plans, expectations, and facts. The study was broken down into these five areas, with the three groups. The competent group of women told more lies about their feelings, while the likeable group of men told more lies about feelings.

Overall this article was interesting, i found it kind of funny that men told more lies about there feelings so they would be liked. Another thing was that lying is broken up into two types, good lies are pro-social, while bad lies are used to swindle people. But in the end most lies come back to hurt us in someway.