Month: September 2019

I am going to be discussing a time in my life in which I experienced the psychological concept of illusory correlation. Illusory correlation can be explained to mean, the perception that there is a relationship between two separate variables, when in reality no connection exists between the two at all. Throughout my childhood I played many sports. I was most committed however, to playing hockey. I did so for 14 years and through this time I developed many superstitions that I believed effected the outcome of my performance. My superstitions ranged widely and included things such as eating a specific meal before games, working through a specific pregame workout, putting my gear on in a specific order, my locker room routine, and most outrageous being lucky underwear. I had convinced myself that if all of these variables were taken care of that I would undoubtedly be at the top of my game. On the contrary, if I missed completing one of these tasks I would overthink and i believed that I would play poorly. While some of these variables such as the warmup up routine may have had a small impact on my performance, the majority of these variables had no actual effect on my performance. These superstitions most likely came into reality though coincidence. The most logical explanation is that I played a good game either the first time I did one of the previously mentioned tasks or I just so happened to remember doing after I played well. I then continued to do these tasks and only took notice to the times that I did play well rather than the times that I didn’t. This then formed the illusory correlation that by performing the same routine I was increasing my chances of playing a better game. I perceived that there was a connection between my routine and my performance but in reality there was not.

What is Nature?

Nature is the idea that our thoughts, ideas, and characteristics are in born. We learn about ourselves by examining ones’ thoughts and feelings. We are born already knowing what type of person we will be. Nothing we experience in life will change our beliefs and how we act or how we will turn out.

What is Nurture?

Nurture is gained through experience(senses). We believe what we believe based on what we have been through in our lives. Our experiences it what shapes us as human beings.

I believe that we all have tendencies of both nature and nurture in our lives. For example, ever since I can remember I have believed that God is real. Nothing that anyone can say or do can make me believe that God is not real. That is just something that I have always found to be true. There’s no experience I could go through that would make me believe otherwise. Nature has stubborn tendencies to its beliefs. Those beliefs are implanted in people’s minds. Nurture however, is just a little bit different.

For example, when I was very young my neighbor had a dog. Every time I would be near the dog it would chase me. Through that experience I was afraid of dogs because I assumed all dogs were like that. As I got older I started having joyful experiences with dogs and I started to look forward to my interactions with this animal. The more kind dogs I was around the more I changed the way I treated them. I now am in my second semester of college and own a dog where I live. Going back to the definition of nurture it is knowledge gained through experiences. Through my experiences with dogs I gained knowledge that well trained dogs are not bad.

The lecture on sensory adaptation Tuesday September 17^threally stuck with me. Specifically, in this lecture attention. Attention is the process of concentrating on specific stimuli while blocking out other stimuli. For example, our eyes see around us but can only focus and process information in pieces about the size of our thumbs. There’s more information that we can fully process in the world all at once. Part of attention is due to mental effort on each of our parts, but also attention can seem effortless. When you are busy doing something else, you can fail to observe even very significant things.

After learning about attention in class and seeing examples, I wanted to try one out on my roommate. My roommate loves to play video games. When he plays video games, I almost become nonexistent in the room due to his attention being solely focused on his game. I wanted to test his attention to see how he reacted to the changing in his environment while he was focusing on something else. While he was playing video games for the span of two hours, I completely changed my appearance. I did this by leaving the room and changing something. I made sure he looked up from his game to see what I looked like before I started changing everything by asking if he liked my shirt and if I should wear it to dinner. Over the span of two hours I left the room three times and changed my pants, my shirt, and shaved my beard. Each time I’d come in and ask him a question, so he’d look up from his game for a second and see my appearance. I thought there was a chance he wouldn’t say anything just because he didn’t care about my shirt or pants, but surely if he were to have noticed I shaved my beard he would have noticed something. I say this because he had been telling me to shave it for some time. Each time I would come back into the room and he would look up, he didn’t notice and didn’t say anything. It wasn’t until after he was done playing his game, laying in bed, did he notice my shaved face and my changed outfit.

This little experiment showed how there’s more information going on in the present around us that we can fully process. Also, that, part of attention is due to mental effort on each of our parts, while also attention can seem effortless. When you are busy doing something else, you can fail to observe other things around you. Another example of our lack of attention to our surroundings while focusing in on something that we went over in class that stood out to me was the amount of car accidents due to distractions.

This study shows how while being distracted while driving can increase the chance of a driver getting into a crash. Human’s when reacting to stimuli have a hard time reacting and focusing to other stimuli. Further proving how hard it is to be fully attentive to the world around us as we are focusing on something.

We as human beings all have this wonderful thing inside of our heads; it is called the vertebrate cerebrum. In other words, it is our brain. The human brain is formed by two cerebral hemispheres that are separated by a groove, the longitudinal fissure. The brain can be described as being divided into left and right cerebral hemispheres. 

In a normal functioning brain, the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for controlling the right side of the body. It also performs tasks that have to do with logic, language and analytical classification. On the other hand, the right hemisphere coordinates the left side of the body, and performs tasks that have to do with creativity, art, music and recognition of faces and shapes. For the very few people in this world, split brain patients function very differently. 

Split-brain or callosal syndrome is a type of disconnection syndrome when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is severed to some degree. It is an association of symptoms produced by disruption of or interference with the connection between the hemispheres of the brain.

In the image above, it shows split-brain patients can only respond to stimuli in the right visual field, but in their left visual field receiving stimuli they are able to see it and draw it, but not recite what they saw. Split brain patients are absolutely fascinating. Although they struggle with day to day normal tasks that regular brain patients do, they can function in a way that no one else can.

In an article that I read, there is a split brain patient named Vicki that struggled with daily tasks that people with normal brain patterns do not have difficulty doing. She would often be grocery shopping and see something in her left field of vision and went to grab it with her left hand, but her right hand often got in the way as she went to make her choices at the grocery store. Vicki described it as: “I’d reach with my right for the thing I wanted, but the left would come in and they’d kind of fight,” she says. “Almost like repelling magnets.” This describes her split brain activity during daily tasks. The article also described that she was put through tests and studies for her brain activity, she was tested how I described the brain pattern above, just like the picture depiction. She was unable to say the things that she saw in her right visual field, and she was not able to say the things she saw in her left visual field, but was able to draw them.

The disorder that Vicki had is an accurate representation of what a split brain patient is like. This article falls into the category of different split brain patterns and studies as I described above. Although it may seem incredible that the human brain is able to act that way, it is extremely serious that can alter a person’s entire life.

We all know the feeling you get when you find yourself in a sticky situation. Our hearts beat faster, our hands get sweaty, and you feel like you are ready to make a run for it. Whether this particular experience actually presents danger to us or not, our body has ways of preparing itself to fight or flee from anything harmful. This feeling is thanks to our nervous system. The nervous system in the human body is split into two parts, the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system is our spinal cord and brain, while the peripheral nervous system is split into the autonomic and somatic nervous system. The somatic nervous system deals with things we can control, such as voluntary movements of skeletal muscles. What we know as the fight or flight response is thanks to the autonomic nervous system, which controls the self-regulated actions done by our body. More specifically, the autonomic nervous system can be split into the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. These two are opposites in a way, as the parasympathetic nervous system is for calming, while the sympathetic nervous system is for arousing. The sympathetic nervous system is what wakes our body up and prepares us in a time of potential danger. In a situation that might be potentially harmful, our body makes us very alert so we have the best chance at survival. Our pupils dilate, our heart rate increases, we stop digesting food, and our adrenal glands secrete epinephrine and norepinephrine. All of these effects serve as a way to prepare us for any dangerous situation. 

Experiencing the fight or flight response is very common and happens to everyone from time to time, even if no real danger is present. For example, when I was much younger, I had to stay at home alone while my parents went away for a weekend. This was fine, as I was comfortable with being alone, but being a bit younger and less used to an empty house, I was easily startled by the occasional noise I would hear. At one point I was in the living room watching tv when I heard the front door begin to open. I knew this should not have been happening, as my parents were out of town. I remember running to the bathroom and locking the door to hide from whoever had entered my house. At this point, my heart was beating so fast and my hands were sweaty. My body was preparing me to either fight the unknown person or run for my life. A bit of time passed, and I went back out into the kitchen to investigate. There was a loaf of Easter bread on the counter that our family friend had stopped by to drop off, and everything was totally fine. Obviously this was not a dangerous situation for me, but I didn’t know it wasn’t a threat, and neither did my body. Though, in a time of not knowing, my sympathetic nervous system was making sure I was prepared in case it was a truly dangerous situation. As far as our bodies are concerned, you’re probably better off safe than sorry.