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.