Author Archives: Daniel Jeong Kim

Operant Conditioning

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As we go about life, we happen to learn new things every day. One way of learning is through the consequences of our actions. This is called operant conditioning. There is another type of conditioning called classical conditioning, which is different because classical conditioning pertains to events out of a person’s control. Within operant conditioning lie two different ways of changing a person’s behavior: reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcement is meant to increase a certain behavior while punishment decreases the occurrence. These two means of changing behavior is again divided into both positives and negatives. Almost every action we take has an effect that changes the rate of the behavior in some way.

As a child, operant conditioning can be seen in action in full force. A parent’s main method of teaching is through operant conditioning. A child may do something bad and the parent may punish them in order to have the bad deed occur less often. If a child does something good, reinforcement may occur in order to make it occur more. That’s how learning was often done in my household. When I would fight with my brothers, a punishment would soon follow, showing that fighting would lead to having our games taken away, and thus making us fight less. When I did well in school, my parents would reward me for my hard work which would in turn make me feel like doing better to continue to get rewarded.

Retrograde Amnesia

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The hippocampus has a very significant role in the memory making process. It is the part of the brain that turns short term memories into long term memories, and trauma inflicted on the hippocampus can cause amnesia. There are two important types of amnesia which are: anterograde and retrograde. Retrograde amnesia affects the short term memories and the extent of the memory loss is dependent on the amount of trauma inflicted on the hippocampus. It was only a year ago that I suffered from retrograde amnesia.

I went snowboarding with a close friend who was also a snowboard instructor. We had been going on black diamond runs all morning when I told him I wanted to do a jump on the terrain park. Knowing it was my first jump, my friend led me through to take a look at the park. We scoped out a small one for me to try on our test run down. That is the last thing I can independently remember. The next thing I remember is laying on a gurney in a large room with nurses tending to me. The amount of time I don’t remember is roughly 8 hours. I went off the jump, landed on my back, fractured 4 vertebrae, and suffered from a pretty significant concussion.

My friend filled me in later. I went straight down to get as much speed as possible and jumped off (unlike most people who first try jumps). This led to around 15 feet of distance between me and the ground. This would have been fine if I had landed, but for some reason that is still unknown to me, I began to do a front flip. I got 3/4 of the way around before I landed and luckily I had a helmet or else I could have been doing worse than a 2 month long concussion. Still, the force to my head was enough to knock my brain around and give me an 8 hour time lapse.

Illusory Correlation

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For most of us, trying to make sense out of the chaos that is our life is a daily struggle. It’s one of the ways we’ve come to cope with how random it can really be. We’ll try to discern patterns in things that are seemingly devoid of patterns. We’ll come up with ideas to clear up confusion. This has really helped to keep us going along as a species, yet it doesn’t always work out the way it seems. Yes, it does work sometimes, but those sometimes only matter if they can happen all the time. The rest of the time it’s just mere speculation or superstition. In psychology, this occurrence is called an illusory correlation. In the random events that continually happen in our lives, some will have a pattern that seem to have significant meaning, but this only happens because of the large scale of events that occur for the few to have had a chance to seem connected.

An example would be when I attempt to catch a ride on the CATA bus. My ipod touch only has wifi access, so the only time I have access to the internet is where I can get a connection through PSU’s wifi. This is important because I like to use the CATA-bus app to keep track of how far away the buses are from my stop, but this requires access to the internet. Luckily, I’ve been able to connect to the internet at the bus stops that I regularly waited at. This led me to believe that the bus stops had a small device that provided wifi for people to gain access to the internet in order to use the bus app. What I didn’t know was that the bus stops I regularly waited at were beside dorms and other such buildings that were the source of the wifi. It wasn’t until I had to wait at other stops that I realized that I was wrong. A couple of coincidental occurrences had led me to believe that a particular thing was true, but really, it was only because I was trying to make sense of the randomness of it all. Wifi near bus stops depended on the buildings near them to provide wifi.