I’ve always been confused about what I’ve wanted to do for a career because I’m interested in so many different things, such as nutrition, psychology, the body, spirituality, and art. To many people, each one of these things is so different from one another but I believe they are all very connected and I’m inspired by the idea of people from different backgrounds and degrees working together to accomplish a goal. I believe it’s beneficial for a field to recruit people from other areas to create insight, which is that aha! moment when solving a problem, according to E. Bruce Goldstein, author of the textbook Cognitive Psychology. Why shouldn’t someone with a background in art go to medical school to use their precision skills to perform surgeries? Or why shouldn’t someone with a degree in psychology go to law school to use their knowledge on perception to help settle a case?

I believe this diversity can be used to our advantage by overcoming obstacles in problems faced on the job. The traditional uses of certain objects cause people to get stuck in functional fixedness, which is an issue many people face when solving a problem. When you have a different perspective from someone who comes in without the same background, I believe problems could be solved quicker.

When I was a little girl, my dad bought this cassette tape that would help you remember longer lists of numbers faster. The program gave you a visual to attach to each number, for example when looking at the number two, you should think of a light switch because it only has two options: on or off; for the number three, you should think of a tree, because they sound similar, and so on. Actually, those are the only ones I remember because I didn’t care about those things when I was seven. After you have visuals, you string them together in a story of some sort. Now that I’m learning some of the components that make up memory, I’d like to evaluate if this program was a piece of junk or if it really did have some substance behind it.
The method of the program was to give you visuals so you could string together a story. In chapter five of our cognitive psychology textbook, this is described as holding something in the visuospatial sketch pad, in the working memory. Not yet on the path to long term memory, which is the goal of the program, but there might still be some hope for that. The visuospatial sketch pad is more prominently related to short term memory, which is memory that is held for a brief period of time. However, with conscious rehearsal it can be encoded into the long term memory. What I question is the likelihood of this happening.
What’s stopping someone from rehearsing this enough and turning it over into the long term memory bank? Nothing. But the long term memory has a bias towards remembering semantic coding versus auditory and visual coding. So, the challenge would be to give more of a meaning to this story, preferably episodic and semantic together, to help kick it into the long term memory. This means that you would have to have a personal experience to create the meaning. For example, if you wanted to remember the number 32, think of trees and a light switch, then go outside and find one tree (because too many trees and you might think the number had many three’s) then let the next thing you do be to turn on a light switch. This way, you have the personal experience and meaning to the number 32. This is a lot of trouble to go through to remember the number 32, but I doubt people would have bought the program if this was the method.
In conclusion, this method of using visuals might get someone to the short term memory stage without a great deal of rehearsing. Therefore, the promise of remembering many numbers for long periods of time might be a bit ambiguous for the reality of it. If you’d really like to remember a reasonable amount of numbers, such as 5 or 9, at a time, repetition might be your best bet.
Goldstein, E. Bruce. Cognitive Psychology. Belmont: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2008. Print.

I find chapter 3 on perception fascinating because we all mostly have the same means of sensing our environment but we don’t always have the same way of perceiving it. The term that stuck out to me the most while reading this chapter was mirror neurons. They are neurons that fire as if you were performing a task that you observed someone else perform.

I had heard it before on a Psych show from Netflix. A man set up a table with a divider. Someone would sit at the table with both arms extended out on the table, but one would be on the other side of the divider, out of sight. The experimenter would put a fake hand on the table, in place of the missing one, with a sleeve leading up to the shoulder of the hidden arm. So, here comes the fun part: he would prime the person by running a soft brush up and down the fingers of both the real and fake hands in a synchronized manner. He then took out a hammer and hit the fake hand very quickly and the person would be stunned for a moment, feeling as if their real hand had just been smashed by a hammer.

I love this example because their reactions were priceless, and I believe it is a perfect demonstration of not only mirror neurons, but also audiovisual mirror neurons I haven’t been through that experiment, but I have a bit of an idea of how it might feel. I have a very hard time watching a lot of those “funny accident” videos on YouTube showing skateboarding accidents and other accidents where people get injured because sometimes it’s as if I can feel their pain. Other times, mirror neurons can be a great thing because you can also feel very strong emotions on the other end of the spectrum. A couple months ago I watched a video of men in the service coming home to their loved ones (I don’t suggest watching it right before you go to bed because you won’t be able to stop crying) and it was such an amazing feeling. I was sobbing, the snotty kind.

Mirror Neurons are just one of the really cool aspects of psychology that links us all to each other. It’s a big reason why we are able to empathize with others, and I cannot wait to learn more about this topic.