Recently, I’ve seen many articles related to body shaming, whether it be fat or skinny. It seems to be a trend in popular culture to voraciously consume magazines whose sole purpose is to keep track of which celebrity has gained or lost weight this week. Although we may like to think that we don’t judge people by their appearances, we do. Preconceived notions based upon a person’s appearance are useful tools in everyday life. We have developed certain heuristics, or “rules of thumb,” which aid us in making quick decisions regarding everyday scenarios. Related to these heuristics are correlations that we use to quickly relate information to preconceived notions we have about that information.

Fat shaming has been a popular past-time in pop culture for a long time. However, lately it seems that we’ve come into what I like to call a curve revolution. With the general acceptance of celebrities like Adele, Melissa McCarthy, and Christina Hendricks; a new form of shaming has come into fashion: skinny shaming. Stereotypes exist on both sides of this battle. Larger people are considered lazy, while super skinny people are sick or druggies. These stereotypes, and almost all stereotypes are consistently inaccurate.

Stereotypes are negative generalizations people make about others. Often, stereotypes are negative, nonconstructive and lead to people paying attention to particular behaviors that are often related to a stereotype, which creates an illusory correlation. Correlations are useful tools, but this particular type often leads to inaccurate snap-judgments of others.

Our brains are programmed to filter through an infinite amount of information in very little time. In order to process this information, and in order to do so quickly, we develop certain heuristics and correlations to help us quickly categorize information so we can make decisions based on information we’ve collected from our environment. Illusory correlations happen when two events seem to exist, when actually there’s no discernible correlation, or when the correlation is weaker than the initial assumption indicated.¹ Stereotypes are related to this correlation.

In the long run, stereotypes are not a great tool. They frequently lead snap-judgments and prejudice. Unfortunately, even the most educated and seemingly neutral people still tend to hold common stereotypes in mind. Its inescapable, but we can choose to read into peoples’ character, rather than their characteristics. Not all fat people are lazy, and sometimes skinny people are just skinny.

Citations

1. Goldstein, E. Bruce. “Reasoning and Decision Making.” Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. 3rd ed. Australia: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. Print.

Over two million people in the United States are affected by a little known language impairment known as aphasia. Aphasia (pronounced uh-fay-zhuh), is a reduction or loss of language as a result of brain damage, most commonly as a result of a stroke, or trauma to the brain. The most frustrating part of aphasia? Your intelligence remains intact, but language remains elusive. Few people knew about aphasia until, that is, U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords survived a gunshot wound to the head and is now appearing in public as she recovers from the tragedy. She has aphasia.

Last year, I had the privilege of seeing Ms. Giffords in person at the Richmond Forum. Prior to the forum, I knew little to nothing about aphasia. After a lengthy introduction by her husband, Mark, Gabby took the stage. Seeing her in the flesh brought tears to my eyes. Not because of the tragedy of her shooting, but because of her strength and perseverance. I couldn’t imagine the frustration she experienced on a daily basis. The ability to express your thoughts and feelings is a pivotal piece of the human experience. The inability to do so, after having been able to find words easily your whole life, has to be one of the most socially discouraging experiences a person can have.

A few months after attending the forum, my friend Jonathan experienced a debilitating stroke. He was 29 years old. After undergoing a left craniotomy to repair the damage, the stroke left Jonathan’s speech severely impaired. Seeing him struggle with words was heartbreaking. He is one of the most intelligent and eloquent people I know. He majored in English at UVA, for goodness sakes! Now his ability to form words was all but gone. Now, almost two years later, Jonathan is working his way towards his own version of normal. It has been a struggle for him and those around him.

Jonathan is one of the lucky ones. Through hard work and sheer determination, he has been able to regain much of his conversational speech and find most of his words. This isn’t always the case. Depending the area and extent of brain damage, a person can lose the ability to speak or use visual language such as reading, writing, and even sign language.

Language, both verbal and visual, is often taken for granted. We think nothing of saying “good morning” to our loved ones, or our ability to order lunch. Language is an essential part of the human experience. Aphasia is a heartbreaking condition affecting millions of people worldwide. People who are intelligent, thoughtful individuals who are unable to express their ideas and emotions to those around them. Aphasia is much more prevalent than I had ever imagined, and I’m in awe every day to see my friend working his way through it. Not everyone is as fortunate as he is to have the ability to work his way out of this disorder and regain his ability to communicate.

If you’re like me, your memory for everyday things is shoddy at best. I will spend five or ten minutes searching the house for my car keys, only to figure out I had already put them in my purse that morning (so I wouldn’t lose them). Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind, other times I chalk it up to being the mom of a two year old, working full time, and going to school part time. As we’ve delved deeper into the workings of memory and long term versus short term memory, I’m coming to realize that my problem is not necessarily that I’m losing my mind, but maybe that I’m simply not taking the time and energy to properly commit things to memory.

According to our text, short term memory (STM) is a “mechanism that can hold a limited amount of information for a brief period of time.” This is because STM refers to information that we’ve processed at a shallow level. Shallow processing is the concept that we don’t place meaning on the information given to us. We don’t put it into any context that makes it relevant to ourselves. For example, if I were to ask a person to memorize a series of letters such as SHL TMI ATV NKD, they would more than likely not be able to commit those letters to long-term memory.

According to a study conducted by Peterson and Peterson (1959), memory for things with no relatable context such as letters deteriorates over a matter of seconds, especially when rehearsal is prevented. According to this study, participants had an 80% retention rate after three seconds, but after 18 seconds, retention was down to less than 10%. That’s an incredible drop.

Long term memory (LTM) refers to the processing of information at a deeper level. This means, that the information processed is related to an event or put into a context in which the information is made relatable. For example, the series of letters I presented previously ( SHL TMI ATV NKD) might be more easily committed to memory if we put them into some kind of context. Suppose I form a sentence using the series of letters. ShirLey shared TMI (too much information) when she told me about a time she rode an ATV NaKeD. Now that we’ve put these letters into an amusing context, we’ve used Semantic Coding to commit them to memory. Semantic Coding is simply the act of putting something to memory that has meaning behind it, as opposed to Visual Coding (what something looks like). Now, if you could also relate those letters to something personal that happened to you, that would include Episodic Coding, and that would make the memory and retrieval of those letters even more accessible.

Ultimately, my problem lies in that I don’t take the time to fully process information before bouncing to something else. This may also be due to having ADHD, but we’ll save that for another blog post. If I were to put context to remembering things during my daily life, such as peoples’ names (Babbling Brooke, Flora in the floral shirt), I’d spend much less time agonizing over what I’ve forgotten.

A human’s perception of our environment is essentially a complex puzzle constructed not only of individual pieces of information we’ve gathered from our environment, but many layers of sorted information. The sorting of this information involves not only visual similarities, but also a collection of knowledge and experiences we’ve gained from previous encounters with our environment.

Take a forest, for example. Without previous knowledge of what a tree is, you might see a collection of shapes in colors of green and brown. But when knowledge and experience are introduced, not only will you distinguish that those collections of shapes are trees, but you may then be able to discern trees according to category. Some are evergreens, some are deciduous. You can then further narrow your categorizations based on the genus of each tree. I could go on, but the general idea here is that our perception of the environment around us is similar to seeing the individual trees within the forest.

According to Psychologist Richard Gregory, our perceptions are based on assumptions of general information provided to us. His theory of human perception is based on that of Hermann Helmhotz, which states that “visual perceptions [are] unconscious inferences from sensory data and knowledge derived from the past, perceptions are regarded as similar to predictive hypotheses of science, but are psychologically projected into external space and accepted as our most immediate reality.(Gregory, 1997)”

For example, in the next sentence you’ll find that comprehension is not necessarily dependent on the spelling of a word, but mostly on our previous knowledge of the English language. Entesslliay, yuor biarn can irentpert wrods sloely besad on the cntoents so lnog as the frsit and lsat ltetres rimean the smae. It’s not a perfect concept, you probably automatically went back and filled in any previously unintelligible items with subsequent linguistic context based on your initial reading of that mess. By the way, I think my spell check just went into fits. But our ability to read and understand that sentence shows how previous knowledge (the letters that make up these words) can assist in our interpretation of these disorganized letters, rearranging them in our minds in order to make sense of them.

The building blocks of perception include a definition of the objects we see. This definition results from a collection of various pieces of information: edges, colors, shapes, textures, movements, and the like. Cognitive processes are dependent on perceptual information, but at he same time, information gained from cognition influences perceptual processes. The information obtained from the environment is processed through a series of systems, these systems then alter the information systematically, allowing for our brains to place all of the pieces of the puzzle into a logical order, thus creating a cohesive impression of our environment.