It’s common sense! I think of myself as a pretty smart individual yet I tend to over-analyze things every day from math problems in my stats class to how my co-worker hasn’t talked to me as much as usual. “She must be upset at me!”  In our lesson commentary for the chapter on problem solving, our professor gives us the nine dot problem to try and solve. I racked my brain to do so and after much frustration I gave up and continued to read on the lesson and of course, I over analyzed and over thought the situation and didn’t realize the obvious, “Go outside the “box.” If I would have been told to, I would have easily figured out the problem.  Ironically, not thinking outside of the box is what is usually my problem in my everyday life and honestly, causes me to stress myself out when I really do not need to. This was my huge problem in statistics. I started my class believing it was going to be Einstein complicated therefore, something as simple as the Sum of Squares became unsolvable to me. Aren’t EX2 and E(X2) and (EX)2 the same thing!? After tutor help, it became so obvious and simple that I laughed at myself for making something so complicated when it was so simple. The Nine Dot problem showed me that I still haven’t learned my lesson and need to take a step back, breathe in, breathe out, and evaluate everything in the most simple terms. I hope to be able to master this soon because I do not want to be more stressed out than I need to be! Problem solving doesn’t have to be so complicated!

            I can barely remember anything from when I was a little girl. The only time I can retrieve memories is by verbal cues from others that explain a situation and the details and then suddenly everything comes back. This occurs with visual cues as well, for instance, a movie from way back when. I had never had retrieved a memory through a smelling cue so when I did and all the memories flowed through the memory flood gates, I was caught a bit off guard. After reading chapter seven in our textbook, I am now able to understand how a smell triggered a submerged memory through a cue and a matching condition of encoding and retrieval (Goldstein, 2011).

As I walked down the perfume aisle of the department store I scanned the displays to see if anything was of interest to me. A woman a couple feet away from me sprayed a perfume to sample smell it and after deciding it wasn’t for her, I’m assuming, began to walk past me. As she passed, I caught a whiff of the perfume she had sprayed and recognized it instantly. Before I even had the chance to exhale, memories flowed through my mind and I remembered my great-grandmother, her little wood run down house, her skin, her face, the room I was in when I said my goodbyes to her while she laid on the bland hospital bed, in her dusty room covered in Virgin Mary shrines and photos of Jesus Christ,  the outhouse I had to use because she lived on a ranch, how smelly that was, the goats and chickens outside, the unforgiving smell there too, her white hair with a patch of blondish looking hair near her forehead, the casket with a glass cover that she was laid in after she passed, the sweat droplets on her body while she was in it, and even remembered thinking to myself, “How is she sweating when she is dead?” I even stared at her chest until my eyes hurt to see if I could see her chest move, making sure she wasn’t breathing. All those memories that I hadn’t thought of in over ten years came back and as vivid if it had all occurred the day before. My great-grandmother seemed to bathe herself in that perfume, which was often overbearing to me, a then maybe 6 year old girl. It’s no wonder that I associated that smell with her, the house, and other memories. Even though the smell in the department store was modest in comparison to what I had been used to, it was enough to bring back many memories. But why? How?

            According to our book, “retrieval can be increased by matching the condition at retrieval to the conditions that existed at the time of encoding.” (Goldstein, 2011) Of course the department store wasn’t a wooden run-down house, and the lady looked nothing like my great grandmother who had beautiful green eyes, however the powerful smell of the perfume that was encoded into my senses and the sudden rapid firing neurons in response to that smell was enough to retrieve any remote memories I had. The clarity and details of how much I recalled was largely due to the depth of processing. My great-grandmother on her deathbed and her death were important and an emotional time for me being that she was the first person that I had ever had to let go of because of death. I replayed the moments over and over in my mind for a couple weeks after she had passed trying to make sense of everything so in a way, my deep processing was aided by the elaborative rehearsal I had unknowingly done in my mind. Understanding this made me realize how my mind remembered so much after so long.

            This incident happened over maybe two years ago and at the time I remember thinking to myself, “How crazy is it that I remembered all this just by smelling a scent that I hadn’t smelled in years!?” Chapter seven answered my questions and clarified much of the “how in the heck?” questions I had. It’s appalling how small our brain is in comparison to everything else in the world, how it can go through so much, and still it remembers things when we think we have “forgotten”.

Goldstein, E B. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Australia: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. Print.

As I walked from the hallway into the living room to get my charger I saw, in my peripheral vision, a person sitting on the couch. Normally this wouldn’t frighten me since I do have a family of 4 but I was supposed to be home alone! I stopped in my tracks and when I turned to  my left to get a good look at this intruder, I realized it was a Nike workout bag that I had placed on the armrest of the couch earlier that had stayed “standing” up vertically. Needless to say, I was relieved! After I relaxed and my heart stopped pounding out of my chest and having read the chapter on perception from our book already, I thought to myself, “What happened in my mind that made me think it was a person even though I knew I was the only one home?”

One thing that affected my thought process for sure was my brains recognition of my environment and the regularities often seen within it. My brain and I are used to seeing people sit on couches in my home, its the norm. Because I had done something irregular (placed the bag on the arm chair instead of the closet), my brain automatically assumed it was a human form due to top-down processing. My previous knowledge of my environment affected my brains reasoning and result.

The size and distance of the bag also played an important role. It was not a large bag nor an extremely small one such as a clutch or wallet, so being that it was of average size and the bag was near me and on top of the arm of the couch rather than on the seat cushion, I perceived the bag as being similar to the human’s torso and head size.

Once my fear forced me to turn and confront the “intruder” and see who it was, my bottom-up processing came into play. Instead of my brain getting the information from the “blob” seen in my peripheral vision, I now focused clearly on the object and my brain was able to process that it was not a human but indeed a bag. Certain neurons were “fired” when the rods and cones in my eyes were able to distinguish the bag’s parts and categorize the “geons” (Goldstein) into the area of my mind that said “It’s a bag!”

Of course I felt silly after my brain helped me realize that I was scared of what turned out to be a bag but, if  not for the chapters I have read already, I do not think I would have taken into account all the different processes and steps that it takes to do, what I believe, is the simple task of seeing and interpreting. Everything our mind can do at one time is astonishing and I learned I take my mind and body for granted very much. Just waking up and getting dressed is an amazing feat in itself and it is amazing what our mind can do every second of every day of our lives.

Goldstein, E B. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Australia: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. Print.