Group Stuff

This week in class we talked about how a person will usually "go with crowd" and do what everyone else is doing. This is called "group-polarization," and an example given was a random person agreeing with someone in a room of people giving wrong answers on purpose during a test. When they all gave their answers, that person agreed with them just so he wouldn't sound different and look stupid, even though he may have known the correct answer. I know I have done this before, actually in a similar experiment we did during class a while back. I didn't want to look like an idiot so I said what everyone else saying--no confidence. So now looking at this information, I realize that I need to be more independent in thinking, and rely on my own intuition, and not follow the crowd.

Blog About Hunger

This week we had a discussion about how the LH and VMH in your brain affects your hunger and how much or little a person eats. To understand these to subjects, we did an online experiment about stimulating and destroying both the LH and VMH in a rats brain, and then watching them to see how much they ate and then gained weight. When the LH is destroyed in the hypothalamus, you are going to eat less, and when it is stimulated you are going to eat more. When the VMH is destroyed you cannot stop eating, and when it is stimulated you are going to eat way less. It's amazing to me how these two parts in the hypothalamus work together and regulate someone's hunger. I found an article on this subject.....

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/Hunger-Motivation.topicArticleId-25438,articleId-25356.html

This article really hit on all the points we went over in class, and sums it all into about a page which I liked. A great study tool!

Article on a Mental Disorder

This is the article I found...

This is article was not so much interesting to me, but it showed me that people are starting to really care for the psychologically disabled more and more now a days. They are starting to put more of an effort into helping these people out with everyday tasks. It is a shame to read about how someone mentally disabled people were living on the streets alone and helpless in the 1990s, now the institutions that houes these people are not so degrading and conventional. These places have more of a "homey" feel to them, which provides more of a happy place for these patients.

Sleeping

In class today, we learned about sleeping and conditions associated with it like narcalepsy and insomnia. One of the subjects was sleep apnea, and when we were discussing it and the symptoms that go along with it, what people were saying described my dad almost exactly when he is sleeping. He would snore really loud for a while, and then he would almost choke and then stop snoring a little bit, but then start snoring really loud once again. He would do this all throughout the night, and you can here him all over the first floor in my house which is so annoying. I thought it was interesting though to learn abouty how this happens as well as learning more about our brain activity and the brain when we are sleeping. It's almost like I can predict what stage of sleep my dad will be in at night.

Week of March 28

On Friday we talked about our ID, Ego, and Superego. The ID is like what we do on an impulse or surprise. The more ID a person has, then obviously the more impulsive that person is going to be. Our Superego is very conservative on the straight and narrow. The more superego we have, the more anxiety and stress we put on ourselves for trying to do everything perfect. The ego basically balances these two things. I would consider myself to be more of the ego type, I not really like the other two at all because I'm not a very impulsive person around others, and I'm usually not someone who worries way too much about something. However, sometimes like before a test or talking to a girl I'll freak out and put a lot of anxiety on myself (superego) to do something like that. And other times when I'm with friends, and we're having a good time we may do something impuslive and out of the ordinary. But, usually I keep things in balance.

Memory

This week, on Monday, we had a lecture on memory. There were two different kinds of memory--short term and long term. We went over how people usually try and find the best way to remember things by chunking, spacing, etc. I usually never do spacing, which isn't good. It was interesting to do some of the memory tests displayed for us. An example would be how many sets of letters a person could remember in four seconds, or remember a set of numbers only read to you once, and remember certain words from a bunch after only looking at it for thirty seconds. For this one, it felt like I could remember a lot of them when I was looking at the words, but when it came time to writing them down from memory I drew blanks on over half of them. My short term memory probably isn't the best. Also, we learned about a lady who can basically remember everyday of her life. That was just amazing to me. However, I wouldn't want to have that "power." And lastly, the thing I found most amazing was the man with the thirty second memory. That was just unbelievable to me. His wife would walk in and say something to him, and he would forget it in seconds. To me that would just suck! So far I gotta say that AP Psychology is one of the more fascinating classes I've ever taken.

The Four Activities

The first station my group was in, we had to read a story about brain plasticity, and how it can heal itself. They gave some examples of people who experienced this as well. We also had to try and figure out, on a worksheet, out of five universities, five people, five rewards, and five cars, who drove which car, where did they go to school, and how much was their reward. It was extremely difficult, and my group and I didn't finish. Some may have taken it home and worked on it for fun, but I didn't. I had no perseverance in this station, although some of my other group members did and almost got through it.

The second station was dealing with three people on each side trying to get across sides by not skipping, turning around, and they had to be facing the opposite way from when they started. I did something like this is my chemistry class, as well as the others, so we already knew how to do it. You could classify all of us as having insight before doing this because we obviously already knew the answer, and just had to recall it.

The third station was trying to balance ten nails on top of one nailhead. At first we had a heuristic way of thinking. We wanted to think in a more speedier way so we could beat the record time of four minutes that was set by the previous group. After the four minutes had passed, we realized that we couldn't beat it, but instead went for more balancing nails. We were able to end up balancing 26 nails. I'm pretty sure we had the best in the class.

The fourth station was trying to get a record to play using only like tape, a pencil, some candy, a needle, a record, and a piece of paper--I think. At first we had the right idea because we had a certain mental set already developed. We knew how to do it, but we had to get it to work. We ended up sticking the pencil through the hole in the record, and making the paper look like a funnel used as a speaker. Then we just stabbed the needle through the end of the small side of the paper to go on the record. As Joonho spun the pencil, the record spun around and around as the needle stayed in one spot, in contact with it. The paper acted like a speaker, which amplified the sound coming off of the record to the rest of the class. Apparently we had the best success with this activity.