Today, a series premiere of a new show called, “Black Box” aired on ABC.  The show is about a world famous neurologist who, while helping others deal with their own mental disabilities, hides the fact that she herself has bipolar/ manic depression disorder. During the show the writers depict the disorder, for example when Dr. Black goes off of her medication and goes into a manic episode. During the episode, she dances on edges of windows and balconies and thinks that she is invincible, almost like she is a super hero and nothing could stop her. But during one of her manic episodes she had to give a speech about her work to the Neurological Institute of America, where she mentioned all of these famously recognized individuals who our society idolizes, that also have had mental disorders. A few that she mentioned were Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Billy Holiday, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and even Van Gogh, who was actually in a mental hospital when he painted the masterpiece, Starry Night. What shocked while listening to this speech was not only how many people have been through this tragic and awful disease, but also how many people have truly never experienced a world where they had a stable emotion. Later on in the episode when she speaks about her disorder she says she has a “history of non-compliance” which means she goes off of her meds, because of the rush, the incredible high, and the empowerment she feels and the beauty she sees in life when she doesn’t take them, obviously describing her manic phase. Not that I can ever understand what it could feel like to go through any of this, but I believe this show depicts the disorder extremely well, showing people the side of the ill who go through this everyday, and the challenges they face.  The show also brings up how her mother was bipolar and how the disease is hereditary, and how her elder brother was lucky and didn’t get the disease, but she did. Overall, I believe that with not only our lecture on Bipolar disorder but also the show I have a better understanding of the disease.

            Today, a series premiere of a new show called, “Black Box” aired on ABC.  The show is about a world famous neurologist who, while helping others deal with their own mental disabilities, hides the fact that she herself has bipolar/ manic depression disorder. During the show the writers depict the disorder, for example when Dr. Black goes off of her medication and goes into a manic episode. During the episode, she dances on edges of windows and balconies and thinks that she is invincible, almost like she is a super hero and nothing could stop her. But during one of her manic episodes she had to give a speech about her work to the Neurological Institute of America, where she mentioned all of these famously recognized individuals who our society idolizes, that also have had mental disorders. A few that she mentioned were Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Billy Holiday, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and even Van Gogh, who was actually in a mental hospital when he painted the masterpiece, Starry Night. What shocked while listening to this speech was not only how many people have been through this tragic and awful disease, but also how many people have truly never experienced a world where they had a stable emotion. Later on in the episode when she speaks about her disorder she says she has a “history of non-compliance” which means she goes off of her meds, because of the rush, the incredible high, and the empowerment she feels and the beauty she sees in life when she doesn’t take them, obviously describing her manic phase. Not that I can ever understand what it could feel like to go through any of this, but I believe this show depicts the disorder extremely well, showing people the side of the ill who go through this everyday, and the challenges they face.  The show also brings up how her mother was bipolar and how the disease is hereditary, and how her elder brother was lucky and didn’t get the disease, but she did. Overall, I believe that with not only our lecture on Bipolar disorder but also the show I have a better understanding of the disease. 

Lucid dream (if it exists) as explained in class is the ability to control what goes in the dream because of awareness of being in a dream. I experience quite often about once a week something supposedly called sleep paralysis. That is apparently where you are wake but cannot move, make a sound or physically open the eyes. This is different from being awake and relaxed as described in class, as it is awake and panic.

The first few times, I was actually frightened and felt I would enter Limbo or something if I couldn’t break out of the sleep. This is different from being awake and relaxed as described in class, as it is awake and panic. After its steady occurrence, I learned that I was in full control of what was going on, and just try to sleep through it. I believe this would be in the deep sleep stages of REM, where it is difficult to wake up.

After sleeping through it I feel I am now in full control of my dream, and to be fair it is enjoyable,  and takes focus to remain in the dream. Many times I found myself not in full mental exertion and I would break out of the dream ever so slowly. With practice and experience during the sleep I became able to remain in control for a decently longer time.

I therefore do believe Lucid dreaming is a thing, since the control you get is phenomenal, from tasting to feeling to really vividly experiencing the dream like it is real life.

I find that the way to Lucid dream is to unfortunately sleep more than you need to. When I am dead tired, I pass out and wake up in a second it feels. When I sleep for long unnecessary and try to force myself to sleep more than needed I enter lucid dreaming. Like Freud suggested, I feel when we sleep excessively more often times it is a chance to escape from external problems, and therefore the dreams give us a chance for wish fulfillment to get past those problems.

Now for an example. My favourite and most recurring lucid dream seems to be playing in a soccer game always. it’s so real it’s amazing. It feels like a full 90 minute match, and I play with players who I either play with currently or watch professionally on the tele. I get to control my passes, shots, decision making, technique and work rate. It is literally just like a game. I believe this is lucid dreaming because I have had dreams playing in soccer games where I have had no control of how I played, and I am able to compare the two. However, what keeps me wondering if there are variations of lucid dreams is that I think it is real life, but I can control it. I am not aware that I am in a dream but I can control it still. It feels real.

One kind of conditioning that we recently learned about in psych class is classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is the process of learning something in which someone connects a stimulus with a consequence because of experience. One way that this applies to me is because of the way we trained our cat, Gracie. When we first got her, my mom thought of the idea of shaking her food every time we were going to feed her so would relate the shaking of the food to getting fed. At first I was confused as to why she did this but then one day we couldn’t find her. My mom went to go shake the food and then all of a sudden we found her. Gracie recognized the shaking of the food and therefore thought she was getting fed. She is always hungry so the second she thought she was getting fed she went right to her food dish. Whenever we can’t find her or she wont come inside, all we do is shake the can of food and she runs to her food bowl right away. This has come in handy many times and it works every time.

Since my cat’s food bowl is in our mudroom, whenever we do simple things such as getting our shoes or walking out the door our cat runs to the mudroom and stars meowing because she thinks she is getting fed. After multiple time of being fed she connected the fact that she gets fed when we are in the presence of her food bowl. Whenever we get home from somewhere, Gracie is always waiting for us at the door. She clearly connects the fact that whenever she hears the sound of the car pull into the driveway that we are home.

Whenever we have food on the counter Gracie will jump on the table and try to eat it. We never could get her to stop so my mom started to squirt her with a spray bottle because cats hate water. My cat would freak out and run away. After a few times of doing this, once our cat saw the squirt bottle it would immediately jump off the counter and run away. The cat made a connection between the spray bottle and getting squirted. I think it is incredible that our cat has learned so much just from repeated experiences. After multiple times of doing things she remembers the outcome.

Many people may not believe in lucid dreaming and if I told someone that I could do that, many would not believe me. Lucid dreaming is when you are aware that you are dreaming and you may even be able to manipulate what happens in the dream. This is not scientifically proven to be true or false because there is so little evidence other than the reports that people make who can lucid dream. Well let me add to the list of reports.

I cannot tell you how often I lucid dream, but I know that it is not all the time. I remember at least one dream a night, sometimes more. So if I was aware that I was dreaming, I would remember, I always do. For me, when I first start to go to sleep I shut my eyes and lay down. As soon as I shut my eyes I start to create a story that I didn’t think of to start dreaming about but usually I am ok with it. Sometimes I don’t like the story and I try to change the story to something else. By then I am not awake, my boyfriend knows when I am sleeping by the way I breathe and sometimes twitch. The dreams at the beginning of the night are the easiest to manipulate to suit what I want to think about. Now, I don’t control every movement or detail, but I can change who is in the dream, and what major events happen, and even the location. For an example one of my dreams started out as a picnic on a grassy hill and to every side you could not see anything but grass, the horizon was half grass and half sky. Then the weather changed to a storm with no shelter and a boss from a video game appeared. I didn’t like this so I changed it to another location, a rocky mountain and I was holding a sword. That was my change because I was aware of what was happening, I needed better ground and a weapon to defeat the boss, but then without me changing it, someone else appeared. A little girl was behind the boss and the only way to get to her was to kill the boss. The boss was huge, and I recognized him as the first boss Valus from Shadow of the Colossus, he was a giant Minotaur made of stone and has grassy patches on him. Again I manipulated the dream by making myself the same size as him. I have had many other dreams that I was able to manipulate, many of them at the beginning of the night, but also quite a few in the morning before I woke up. I am usually aware of the dreams that happen about an hour to two hours before I wake up. I think I remember them because I was aware of them, I don’t seem to forget them like other dreams. I don’t always lucid dream, that would not be something I would like.

If you want to know what it is like, watch Divergent the movie about a girl who can manipulate simulations. It is basically the same concept.

What I was interested about when we were talking about social loafing in the lecture was the fact that so many people can relate to it there’s so many examples of this phenomena happening. Social Loafing is when people are in a group they are more likely to slack off and not work as hard than if they were working alone.  Because they are in a group each person believes that someone else will work harder or pick up the slack of the rest of the group. There have been many studies that show how social loafing makes people who are working in these groups use exceedingly less effort than if they were working alone. In the example of group projects this goes away if you add in some factors like; peer reviews of how much work they did, or if they are responsible for a specific area in the project and will be graded due to their own personal performance. Once these factors go in then they are responsible for their own part of the grade and they cannot rely on the others to get them the grade they want.

Other than group projects I have also seen this in my life when I did a philanthropy where you worked in a group and did completed a few physical tasks in a competition. Groups had to do a three legged race, limbo, jousting, and tug of war. What I noticed in the groups was that you could tell by watching who wasn’t trying as hard as the others in pulling this rope. It got to the point where the teams that you would assume would have won got cut out because they all thought the biggest guy would do the brunt of the work. But because they were not working as a team they all would fall over. The other members of the team had this mentality of social loafing and didn’t try as hard as they would if it was just them pulling the rope because they assumed that someone else was going to pull them to victory. And that was their flaw in the games.

After talking about social loafing in psych a couple of lectures ago, I was reminded of a concept I had learned about first semester in Econ 102. Social loafing refers to the tendency that people have to slack off in groups. This occurs because people feel that if there is a group present, someone else will do the work. The sense of anonymity associated with groups allows for people to feel like they won’t be seen if they slack and no one will identify them as the weak link. The sense of group anonymity reminded me of the “tragedy of the commons,” which is a concept I learned about in econ. This is when people feel like they can break the rules in order to get the most benefit if they feel that no one will know they did it. A main example we talked about was perhaps a bit dated. We discussed how if there’s a big open field that is meant for public use, farmers may take their cattle there. They think that their own small action will bear no consequence. However, the problem is that everyone thinks this way and before long the farmers will collectively be responsible for a totally depleted field.

These two concepts are unfortunately all too real and relatable in college life. Professors love assigning group projects almost as much as students love to hate them. Working in a group project, people never have an equal division of work. Often times, one or two of the group members do either very little work or no work at all. This leaves the other members of the group scrambling to pick up the slack. This is easily one of the most frustrating things to happen academically to a college student. Though sometimes people do work harder if they’re anticipating that they’ll be evaluated for their participation at the end, this seems like it’s more the exception than the rule.

Ashley Fay (925149402)
Psych 100 Extra Credit Blog Comment
Taste aversions occur both consciously and unconsciously. These are a type of psychological condition that occurs quite frequently in childhood, but also occur in later stages of life. It is a learned behavior that can either be due to a particular food or to an incident that occurred simultaneously with the exposure to a particular food.
It is developed when an individual makes an association with a food. This aversion created is a negative association, meaning the something bad and uncomfortable happened to him or her when they were exposed to and ate the food. For example, when I was growing up I ate a turkey hoagie from Wawa, only to become violently sick from it later in the night. For quite some time and till this day I have avoided deli turkey or anything type of hoagie with deli meat. Upon the sight or smell of one I would become queasy and nauseous. Looking back, I now realize that my sickness was not induced by the hoagie but that I had had dairy earlier and forgot to take my lactaid pills, which led to my nauseous reaction and sickness due to my lactose intolerance.
Another example is when I tried green apple Smirnoff for the first time. I immediately got sick from drinking only a little bit of it. Upon that experience I avoided another flavored green apple and even avoided green apples themselves. I soon realized that my sickness was not due to the intake of the vodka but to a stomach bug that I picked up from my best friend when visiting her at college for her birthday. Even though I have came to this realization, I still avoid it till this day.
This idea that the brain can easily cause conditioning to occur after just a single pairing of the neural stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus and result in a conditioned response.

The other day in class we discussed the affects of individual behavior in the presence of others. One of the idea’s mentioned was social loafing. Social Loafing can be defined as the tendency of an individual in a group to exert less effort toward attaining a common goal than when tested individually. Basically, people do not try as hard or at all when involved with or surrounded by others.
This idea reminded me exactly why I despise group projects. I was never a huge fan of group projects in high school, but when I got to college I realized that working in groups was even worse. I was assigned random group members for a Freshman seminar class first semester, and it was easily the worst experience I have ever had. No one in the group communicated with each other, and no one would answer e-mails or group messages. I think the other members in the group just expected that someone else would take responsibility and do the entire project on their own simply so their individual grade would not suffer. Two days before the project was due, another girl and I concluded that we would have to do the project entirely by ourselves. Completing this project caused unnecessary stress and aggravation. The project was meant to be divided up for 5 people, and only 2 people ended up helping with the project. Granted, it is natural to slack off sometimes, but it is completely unfair to leave a massive project up to two people. Everyone’s grade will suffer anyways when two people are left to complete work meant for five. Although we had to fill out team evaluation forms for each group member, everyone still ended up receiving the same grade regardless of the fact most people contributed absolutely nothing.
I guess it is easy to slack off in groups, especially when working with friends, but it is definitely an aspect of behavior that I do not like. I don’t know if there is a solution to social loafing, especially when it comes to group projects in college. If no one does anything, then everyone fails. It’s a lose-lose situation no matter how you look at it.

Lucid Dreaming is a dream that you are aware off and are able to control the dream.  It is very hard to track those who claim they are able to Lucid Dream. In high school my psychology teacher taught us various tricks that people Lucid Dream preform.

1)Check your watch vary often throughout the day. Always make sure you see the time each time you check your watch. In real life the time will change and in a dream you will be able to notice that time does not change.

2)Push against your hand every so often. Applying pressure to the same spot continuously out a time period will allow you to do that in your dream, confirming that you are able to control movement in your dream.

3)Read the same line out loud every morning and night. In a dream you are unable to dreama and this will allow you to tell if it is a dream.

My teacher should us a video that showed a participant try these things throughout the day and then Lucid Dream at night. We all then went home and were told to try to Lucid Dream. I know that night I did not, and I know I do not do any of the steps above either. But there are times I will wake up from sleeping and feel like I was in real life controlling my life but it was a dream. I am not hundred percent sure this is Lucid Dreaming but there are moments asleep I feel like I am controlling an outcome. In addition, many times I will not remember my dream but i will get this overwhelming sense of De Ja Vu, as if it already happened but it really happened in a dream. I wonder is it common to mix dreams and real life up because they always feel so similar?