Chapter 16 Not My Type

Attribution:
The process of attribution is where we simple attribute one's behavior to internal dispostion or external situations. We may try to link someones behavior or why they do the things they do because of something in their personality or because of something that is taking place in their life. For example, we may think that our best friend is being crabby not because she is like that all the time, but because something is or has happened in her personal life to cause her to be this way. She may have had a fight with someone close, had a bad day, car wreck, a death in the family, or any of the above to cause her to be that way. The fundamental attribution error is the overestimation of the influence of personality, and understanding their influence on situations.

Stereotyping:
Steroetypes are when we generalize a belief or action about a certain group of people. For example, blondes are dumb, rednecks like snowmobiling, southerners like nascar, or all which a group is assciated. Illusory correlations are when people tend to overestimate a link between two variables and the correlation is small or none existant. Examples of this are the team won the game because they prayed beforehand, wearing his lucky shoes made him jump faster, all things where there is an associated link between an event. This is how stereotypes are made.

Chapter 13

I found it interesting in the fact that babies always suck on their thumbs. The kids that grow up know that it is not in the style to do so, so they smoke instead because it still gives that oral response that smoking gives. that was extremely interesting.
Inkblots were also very interesting to me. when showing people the same image of an inkblot, their personality will decide what they will see in an inkblot. For example, If the person is a serial killer they may see a victim, weapon, or something to of that nature. Also how people describe images or pictures projects their inner feelings. They may not notice, but people all have a different way of showing their personality.
We all go through the who are we stage. Some people will not admit this. Whether it is sports or what will you study in school. All these things are choices that our personality could have an effect on. When you ask yourself, "Who am I" a lot of things come to mind. When we did the 20 who am i questions, it reminded me of a good example of showing ourselves who we think we are. I really liked this chapter because it helped us understand how one finds oneself

Think Yourself Healthy by Appreciating the Exercise You Already Do

So, this psyblog dealt with how a person could lose weight by thinking they were doing sufficient amounts of excercise already. In an experiment hotel attendants were told that the excercise they did for their jobs was sufficient for a large amount of their daily excercise. Without the people doing any extra workouts or eating more, the people were monitored for four weeks. At the end of this period, the people, on average, lost two pounds. The experiment then said it dealt a lot with mind over matter.

I totally believe that this is true. I am a firm believer in mind over matter. If you think something is true, or believe something will happen, it will generally happen. This experiment proved that point. Your mind has more control over people's bodies than everybody thinks, and it is amazing what your mind can do to your body by just believing something.

Current event chapter 9

I was thinking very intently today about why a act the way i do. Most people say i am a very nice, amiable person who loves life. My explanation is that it is because of the environment i was raised in. My family is a very happy family, even my extened relations. I grew up with little conflict, and therefore appreciate the little things in life, and treat people well. The book says many things about how people's personalities are formed, but i think what i said above is the correct answer?

Tom Nichols Chapter 9 blog

I found it extremely interesting how they showed how animals can be trained to develope vocabularies, whether audible or signed. Its really interesting to think that dolphins and chimps can understand what you say sometimes.
I thought when the book talked about framing, it stated it very nicely. When you get complimented or rewarded when doing something, it is more likeable, and the person is likely to do it again. It was an iteresting topic and i thought immediately about how you get stickers on your helmet in football for doing something phenominal.
Insight and instinct were very interesting to learn about as well. It really made sense of why some people are just smarter than others. Smart people have better instinct and can remember/store information better to be brougt up instantly easier. They also seem to have more flashes of insight, or inspirational thinking moments

Memory is very important to who we are as human beings. Who would we be if we were like Clive Waring, we couldn't remember anything 20 secs in the past? We would practically be non-existent because we wouldnt remember how to do anyting at all. Everything from reproducing to eating would eventually fail to be remembered, and we would cease to exist as people. It would be a humanless world if we were all like Clive

I see my memories differently, but not too much differently. it surprisede me to read how much our memories fabricate memories to fill in gaps in stories. I realized before this that our minds did it, but not to such an extent as this. I still truse my memories, but now its just a matter of do i tell them to people or not. I dont tell stories to people if i know that something if not right very often, and that will just reinforce my thinking.

The conceptof memory repression was interesting. i knew about how people in traumatizing events sometimes repress the memory and don't remember it, but i never realized that it actually isn't lost. Most of the time the memory is always there, the person just chooses not to remember it. Sometimes even, trying to forget something leads to creating persistant and vivid replays of it, such as veterans. God Bless Them.

Tom Nichols Chapter 7

I found the part about sexual arousal very interesting. It honestly stunned me to read some of these things. The part about being aroused by onion breath was very interesting, the man sounded very unintelligent to me. Besides that fact, it was cool to see how much this relates to my life. Something that you haven't eaten or whatever for a long time can be instantly remembered by the scent of something similar to it.

An example of conditioning that has happened to me is operant conditioning, i think. I am pretty good at sports, and with constant repetion i get the feeling sometime i can "do things with my eyes closed." Like with golf, i have golfed so many times, i can tee off without looking at the ball once. It just becomes ingrained in my mind, almost second nature.

Current event for chapter 7

So this week i learned about observational learning. It sounds very easy to comprehend, and it is. This week i taught a sunday school class, and we talked about TV's influence on them. It was pretty shocking to see how much TV had influenced them. When i read this chapter, i was surprised to see observational learning and its refernce to TV with anti social behavior. It made me think how bad TV actually is, and why so many older people don't like it because they see how it has change America.

Chapter 6 blog---Tom Nichols

This chapter was really long, and it took alot of will power to stay focused and pay attention. At times i found it pretty interesting, but at other times, it was insanely boring.

One thing that captivated me was how our sense of touch is actually several senses in one, those being pressure, warmth, cold, and pain. These combine in various combinations to form a feeling, such as hot, cold, or pain. Also, kinesthesis, the system for sensing the position and movement of individual body part, was fasinating to find that sensors in all over your body allow you to control your body, and knowing at what point your arm is at.
Another thing that was interesting was how we hear things. I never before realized that the soundwaves that reflect off of our ear drums to form sound are actually air waves. The air waves are actually bands of compressed and expanded air. When these travel at different frequencies, different speeds basically, they form a sound that form impulses that are brain turns into audible noises. It was just fasinating to learn how this actually comes about.
Yet another fact that intersested me was sensory interaction, the ability of one sense to influence the other. Before i read this, i never made the connection that other senses can influence how another sense works. For instance, everyone has smelled dead fish, its a horrible smell. The funny thing is that when i ate a jelly bean flavored dead fish it "tastes like it smelled." Through our sense of smell, we can partially understand how things taste by their strong odors. Another example is that the air above the blacktop on a hot summer day "rippling," shows us that it must be hot outside.

Illusion--Tom Nichols

For this activity i picked 8 activities. I picked stepping feet, motion induced blindness, stereokinetic phenomena, rotating snake, pinna-brelstaff, motion after effect, percieve your eye moments, and the flash-lag effect.

I learned that from these tutorials, there is more to an image of picture than meets the eyes. It showed me that my mind only shows me what i want to see, rather than what is really there. I also learned that sometimes some of the illusions are to complicated for the eye to notice, and that we want to focus on moving things.

What really surprised me about these illusions was how much your eye doesn't catch. For instance, i tried doing a few of these without looking at the explanation, and i was hardly able to figure them out. You first must know what you are looking for, otherwise your eye won't percieve them in complex illusions. It also surprised me how easily my eyes or brain can be tricked by these illusions.

Honestly, these illusions didn't change me in how i view or percieve the world. The thing that they did do, was reaffirm the belief of mine that there is more to someithing that meets the eyes. Whether that be a picture, movie, or person is for you to discover. You need to look at things expecting something odd, or look at someone from all perspectives, so as to not miss any small detail.

If anything, i think that these experiences would help me read people's body language better. There are many signs we can get from people by just reading their body language. Our mind chooses to focus on the person talking most of the time, so we miss out on body language a large percent of the time.

Why You Can’t Help Believing Everything You Read

In this article i read, they tested 71 people. to see if they paid attention to facts. They gave different senarios, and then asked to readers to give the person in the story a jail time. The senarios that were true were in green type, and the false ones in red. The funny things is, is that many people who were interrupted in their reading believed what they read despite the color of the text. they consequently gave the person a longer jail sentence. Whereas the people who were uninterrupted and had time to reflect, paid attention to the type, and gave the person in the story a shorter jail time

This article was very odd, and so far none of the psychblog articles have pervoked my thinking. Most of them have been something that seems very interesting at first, but turns out to be somewhat obvious when you sit down and think about it. This article was odd, but it proved that given no interruptions, you can pay more attentions to small facts, and that is why librarys are better places to study.

Chapter 5 blog--Tom Nichols

I enjoyed this chapter, i learned about many things i never knew about. Besides the sleep chapter, this was by far my favorite one. I am so jacked that heritability is finally over with!!!

One thing i learned is that the interconnections in our brains, as children, multipy rapidly at birth, and that is why it is so easy for children to learn. Also involved with that is that our motor skills-sitting, standing, walking, moving arms- develop in a sequence that depends on our culture and environment. Whith the maturing part, i thought it was interesting how the book said we don't remember anything before 3 1/2 years of age because our brains are not fully developed.
A second thing i found interesting is that there are two differnt levels of maturation in boys and girls. I found it interesting how the early maturation benefitted boys better, and how late maturation was better for girls. I think agree with the fact that the book said it was due to the developement of the frontal lobes because that area of the brain deals with things that older people deal with-like judgment, impulse control, and long-term planning.
Habituation was also something that fascinated me. habituation is the decreased responsivness to repeated stimulations. I never realized that when you continually do something and you get bored with it, that you are actually still subconciously learning about it. Its such a fascinating concept. It makes a lot of sense now how we learn and retain information, even after infancy.
Jonathon Haidt's theory of social intuitionist is something i don't agree with. I don't agree that it depend on your mental and moral maturity if you would save 1 or kill 5. Meaning, if i could save 5 people by killing one of my friends, it is based on my moral maturity what i will do or not. I dont think it has anything to do with morals, if this were to happen in real life i wouldn't kill my bestfriend or wife, i would instead do my best to save both of them.

current event #3

Okay, so in the chapter they talked about how after age 3and a half, a person loses their conscious memories of experiences from before that age. They say this in mainly due to the fact that the major areas of our brain weren't developed at the time. I think that either the age estimate is wrong, or i am just a unique individual. I say this because i can remember a lot of things from when i was little. I can remember my mom changing my diaper, and i can even kinda remember my mom rocking me in a chair. I somewhat remember sleeping in my crib sometimes and seeing the toys dangle above me from that thing. I didn't know what they were at the time, but it didn't scare me at least. I don't know what my deal is however that i can remember that, but i was wondering if anyone else has memories before the age of 3 and a half?

How to Make People Believe in Telepathy

In this experiment they talked about how likely and easily people are to be convinced of telepathy. They did the experiment by putting two people in different sound-proof rooms, and asking one of them to "send" and image of a card they were looking at. One group, the control, was not allowed to see their partner before the experiment, and the variable was allowed to. The variable group was far more confident going into the room as a result, and felt they were more likely to succeed in the telepathy test. The results showed however that telepathy is nonexistant, and is no more successful as chance.

I thought this experiment was totally ridiculous. I do experience odd occurences where i'll be thinking of a person and they call me, but i believe that to be just chance and nothing more. Other people suggest that between lovers, if they think about eachother enough and strong enough the other person will be able to feel there feelings. I think that this too is a shaky theory. I believe the researchers gave a valiant effort, but were saddened to discovery that they wasted their time.

chapter 4 tom nichols

This chapter had a lot of information present, and i found that it was quite complex. I didn't really agree with some things that the book stated, but thats most likely due to my beliefs as a person.
I learned in this chapter that heritability accounts for more than just genetics. Whenever i had heard that term before i had thought it meant about inherited traits from genetics such as brown hair and parts of intelligence. Before the book said that the enviroment the individual grows up in accounts for the development of that intelligence trait, ability to speak well, shyness, outspokeness etc., i thought that the person was given most of those things to begin with. Truly i was wrong. If you were to put a child in a room for 12 years and test his intteligince with his identical twin who has the same traits as him but has been in the real world for those years, the child in the room would not be as intelligent as the other. This is true because of the different enviroment the other child who was not in the room. He was able to learn whereas the other child was not.
Though i know the scientists and psychologists are smart, I disagree with darwins theory of evolution. I learned that many scientists believe that the world came from a "big bang", and that we developed from the most superior cell at the time, hence "survival of the fittest." This is a completely ridiculous theory to think that all the complex life around us developed from cells that appeared out of nothing. It simply isn't pheasable. I am an adamant christian, and i do believe certain creature have evolved, to an extent. It makes sense that bacteria evolve to bypass new medicines. Penicillin, which at one time killed many forms of bacteria, isn't as effective as it once was due to the fact bacteria evolved to bypass it.
Lastly, i learned that people who i thought to be arrogant, blockheaded, or narcacistic may be individualists. the book then asked if we thought we were an individualist who went after their own personal goals, or a collectivist who pursues the goals of a group. I believe i am a collectivist, but to some extent an individualist. Everyone has some things that they wish to accomplish, though being a selfless person sounds nobel, and it indeed is, i don't think anyone besides Jesus is/was a true selfless person.
What really perked my intrest was talking about social mores or norms. This is what society expects you do to. Americas norms are far different from other countries, and i learned that it would be very interesting do go against some of these.

Current event #2

So in this chapter we talked about heritability. Heritability is who your are based on your genes you inherit and the enviroment you grow up in. So my brother has a trait where he asks the same question over and over but with different wording everytime. He doesn't do it to annoy me or anyone else, he just does it. What is odd, is that my grandma is the same way. So i thought that maybe it was connected in a way to how he acts (my mother does it minorly too). I thought this was very interesting in the fact that we are talking about it today in class most likely. I don't know if its true or if its just something a psychologist thought he discovered, but i don't think its a genetic thing unless its a disease or something close to it.

Chapter 3---Tom nichols

One thing that i learned was of dual processing of our minds. Dual processing is the principle that infromation is often simultaneously processed on separate conscious and unconscious tracks. Meaning, we actually know more than we know. Most of our usual thinking, feeling, and acting happen ourside of our conscious awareness. The bookd gave us an example of a woman who was blinded and was still able to place an encelope in a narrow mail-space without seeing it. This shows that our minds can see things our eyes cannot. Its effects me because i never thought how much our mind keeps track of. It knows when a curn is coming even when we are busy talking on the phone, and makes sure we wont run into anything most of the time.

The pare on hypnosis really is a part that i found really surprising, I never knew that hypnosis could alleviat pain, has therapeutic benefits, and can force people to do just about anything, depending on how hyponotized they are. Last year, my school hired a hypnotist, a rather good one, to come to our school . It was really funny to see my friends up there basically looking half asleep or whatever. I learned from that there were different degrees of hypnosis, and that it varies on the person and the command of the hypnotist how hypnotized an individual is.

It also surprised me to learn of how importan sleep actually was. I never know that there were four different stages of sleep, and that if you are interrupted to much, or cant sleep deep enough you will developed sleep disorders such as sleep apnea. It made me change my views on how much sleep i should get, and i am excited to see what our sleep/dream activity will hold.

I agree with the books view on addictive substances. This can be supported because I have an uncle who likes the drink too much. As time went on, he neede more alcohol to feed his addiction to get to the happy place. When he finally decided to quit, I watched him go through the hard difficult phases of withdrawal. Everything form headaches to being angry for no reason. Thankfully, he never was violent because I like him very much. Something I disagree about is how the book thinks some addictions are influenced by biological traits or hereditary. I strongly disagree with that because I don't think there is a gene that makes you an alcoholic or a drug addicit. It is mostly about bad experiences the person has had that they want to forget about, and what encironment they frew up in that makes them more likely to be and addict. Peer pressure is also a way choldren become addicts early on.

Its important for children to have proper environments to grow up in. It is also direly important that they are all well informed of the consequences in engaging in these said activities. Its really sad to see how many people do drugs, and why people love alcohol so much.

Are you a liar psychblog

I did this psyblog article because it interested me alot, and i wanted to read the story too because i commented on somebody's and the article was interesting. In this article, they tested the statistic that people lie three times withing the first ten minutes of meeting someone. They took 121 people and tested them by seeing how many times they would lie within a ten minutes conversation with a new person. The shocking thing is that 60% of the people claimed to have lied, and 40% claimed they hadn't. Proving that the statistic was correct indeed.

I didn't fully agree with it, but at the same time i did. People lie all the time, whether it can be helped or not. Its human nature to lie, its called sin. No matter how hard we try, you will eventually tell a lie. Even if it is a little lie like saying im great when you really aren't feeling great. It may be for the right intentions and it may not be, but nonetheless the statistic was proven to be feasible.

Personal blog for week 3

So psychology, the most important thing that is going on in my life is the rather strange dreams i have been having. It fits in with our new chapter pretty well I would say. One dream i had me and my brother were forced to join a gang fight in front of Best Buy. We then ran away and made a last stand at my friend andy borchardt's house, which we won. Another, i was floating in the clouds with a friend and we were angels to people. Yea, i know its wierd, but its what im dreaming. I also had a dream where i was playing god and made my own planet. I had a dream also that i was batmann and superman and wearing football pads at the same time, it was pretty sweet i thought. The point is, is that i don't think about theses things when i go to bed at all. Nothing previously happened that would have caused me to dream those things, and i want to know what my classmates think. (you can call me crazy if you want)

Serendip Activities

I thought that the Serendip activities were sweet!!! The four I chose were Time to think, Find Serendip, Blind Spots, and Ant Colonies.

I learned in blind spots that in fact we do have blind spots, and that our brain is far more sophisticated then i thought. I was surprised to figure out that we actually have them, i didn't believe my classmates until i tried it myself. I never new that the brain discerns that it should put white where the black dot actually was!! After i figured out that we do have a blind spot, i admit it, i went around doing it to various things. Everything from the tv to icons on the computer. It was fasinating!!

I don't really know how blind spots would coinside with everyday life so i thought that a good one was And Colonies. I didn't get part of the activity, but i understood the information it gave me and it was knowledable. I learned that geese and fish have leaders in their groups, and the same thing goes for people i guess when i though about it. However, every ant is independant. There is no leader, and society is maintained through positive interactions. It would be nice if this were true for the human world, but we are too riddled with sin for such a thing to happen. Ants are simple creates of God, and most of them aren't intelligent enough to think to to evil, its all instinct. So i guess it really hasn't changed my perspective. I'm not cinical by any means, this is just how i view the world.

I learned many things in this week's chapter. The chapter was not really a mind opener, it just gave me more facts about the brain. I learned that certain ailments such as seizures can be stopped by separating the brain's hemispheres along the corpus colossum. I also learned that, through split brain research, like in "The Man with Two Brains", scientists discovered the left hemisphere is more verbal , while the right deals in perception and the recognition of emotion. Finally, I found it very thought provoking that almost all right-handers process speech in the left hemisphere, and more than half left-handers do too. It interested me because i thought left-handers would be more involved with the right hemispher. The activities made all this really very fun, and i enjoyed every one of them, even though i didn't learn much from the other two.