Hello everyone!

First of all, I would love to mention once again how I'm loving how this class relates to some of my other classes. As I started my questions for chapter two this past week, I realized that it began with neurotransmitters, which is something that I am familiar with from last year's anatomy class. It was nice to refresh my memory on some ideas that we covered in class last year and also connect what we previously learned with something new.

As I began to read about the affects of drugs on the brain, I started to think how interesting it truly is. I read about the natural opiates that our brains make as pain killers for whatever pain we feel. Then, when I read how drugs destroy these opiates and bring in unnatural opiates, I thought that it was pretty much stupid. After stopping drug use, the body just feels more pain due to the lack of natural opiates. The body was just fine without the drugs in the first place! So, I think that it is very sad and unfortunate how little people really know on the subject of how drugs affect them before using drugs. The thought crossed my mind that if more people knew about this, there would be less drug use in the world. But, then i realized that no matter how much knowledge people have on the matter, drug use is addicting and would most likely not lessen that much. This just makes me very sad.

Nature vs Nurture

I know we have only breafly discussed the debate between nature vers nurture, but I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on that debate before we are going to learn it. After we have learned it you might come back to your comment and see how your view point has changed, and how much knowledge you gained.

To what extend does nature or nurture affect us in our everyday lives, and which one is the reason for our actions?

Do not be scared to state your opinion because every opinion has a value :)

Hello my dear fellow classmates,

So I actually went on line and found a really interesting article that I felt like sharing. I am convinced that this will be a great topic to discuss amongst ourselves since it is a debate that is going on to this day. We all learned that a psychologist is a little different from a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists are doctors and have the ability to prescribe medication to their patients. Many people feel highly uncomfortable with the fact that psychiatrists have the ability to prescribe us with medication. Obviously, the article brought forth numerous examples of psychiatrists who sometimes prescribed patients with an unnecessary or sometimes even incorrect medication. Now here are my questions: Do you think that psychiatrists should have the right to prescribe medication to patients (since many don’t even consider them real doctors)? Do you think that should only be a doctor’s job (although they make mistakes as well)? Let me know what you think!

What We Have Left Will Still Be Right

The brain is split into two hemispheres- the right and the left one. It used to be that people thought the left hemisphere was the dominant one and that the right one was just kind of there. We now know that the right hemisphere isn't as limited as we once thought. In 1961, Philip Vogel and Joseph Bogen thought that major seizures were caused by an amplification of abnormal brain activity between the two hemispheres. They thought that they could reduce seizures if they cut the corpus callosum, which would mean cutting the connection between the two hemispheres.

This procedure was done, and indeed, the seizures were reduced. But there was even more to be discovered. After the procedure, people with "split brains" were left with brains that still functioned, and although they worked a bit differently, they were still right. Something very interesting occurred after the procedure. Both hemispheres functioned but no longer worked together. Here is one example:
When people who had gone through the surgery were shown a picture of a spoon via the right hemisphere, they could not say what they had seen. However, when feeling different objects they could identify the spoon as the object they had been shown.

Your assignment: Pick a question and go!
1) Give other examples of what else happened to patients who had split brain surgery?
2) Has anything else been recently discovered about this procedure?
3) Why do you think this was/is important for the world?
4) Explain why splitting the two hemispheres has an affect and changes certain things?

Poor Lucy

As I was reading through chapter one in our book, I came across a cute comic entitled "Peanuts" on page 45. In this comic, a boy and a girl are playing baseball together, and the boy is disgusted by the terrible baseball skills Lucy has. The boy says, "Lucy, you're the worst player in the history of the game!" In all seriousness, Lucy probably isn't the worst player in the history of the game of baseball and the boy's statement had no proof (as Lucy pointed out). This is a cute cartoon, but it also sheds light unto our own lives. There are probably many times in a day where you make a complete generalization and exaggeration. For example, think about how many times you've said, "That's the funniest thing I've ever heard." If you really think about it, all of this is part of our every day lives. We are always saying these strong statements about the tiniest things. I also think this has something to do with overconfidence and 'underconfidence.' Someone's confidence or boldness will stir them to make these huge statements. Usually when you say these short yet powerful sayings, you feel very sure of yourself, and if anyone were to argue you would have justification right at the tip of your tongue. To conclude, I think we should all try to work on how much we make these generalizations and exaggerations because they can come to hurt someone's feelings like poor Lucy who doesn't know how to play baseball very well. They can also come back to bite you in the future.

Drugs-REPOST

hope it works this time!

We are currently working on questions in chapter for homework, and the answer to question 3 interested me. The question was about drugs and how they affect neuro-transmissions, and about agonists and antagonists.
The book explained that we don’t want to use to many chemicals to boost our endorphins, because when flooded with opiate drugs the brain might stop making its own natural opiates. And then once the drug is not used anymore, the brain will have no opiate.
Basically you are messing up your brain. So why do people who are perfectly happy and are just hanging out with their friends at a party use drugs? You know you are only causing harm to yourself. And why do people let their friends do it? You're only being a horrible, horrible friend. And when you push other people to do it- that's also a terrible (if not worse) friend. People need to stop acting like when you're young you should have fun and experience with drugs.
Does it not disturb you?

Overconfidence or Underconfidence

We learned in class about hinsight bias, and that we are just overconfident and overjudging what we know, or think we know.

I was asking myself then, what about those people who are known to be underconfident? I am not sure if they would behave the same way in those kind of situations since they will underestimate themselves. Mrs. Perl asked us that we should guess what grade we would get in history, and depending on certain factors we would make a decision. But if one is underestimating themselves, he most likely will say a number lower than he will get and therefore will not fit with the concept of hinsight bias. Is there a concept for such a thing too, or is there something about that person who underestimates himself?(Maybe he just tries to underestimate himself so he won't be dissappointed or is it really just a pure underestimation since he does not have confidence?)

Drugs

We are currently working on questions in chapter for homework, and the answer to question 3 interested me. The question was about drugs and how they affect neuro-transmissions, and about agonists and antagonists.
The book explained that we don’t want to use to many chemicals to boost our endorphins, because when flooded with opiate drugs the brain might stop making its own natural opiates. And then once the drug is not used anymore, the brain will have no opiate.
Basically you are messing up your brain. So why do people who are perfectly happy and are just hanging out with their friends at a party use drugs? You know you are only causing harm to yourself. And why do people let their friends do it? You're only being a horrible, horrible friend. And when you push other people to do it- that's also a terrible (if not worse) friend. People need to stop acting like when you're young you should have fun and experience with drugs.
Does it not disturb you?

Hunger

Today in psychology, we learned about five different steps included in the scientific method. I found the example that Mrs. Perl used to describe the fifth step, operational definitions, to be extremely interesting because in my science class today, we had to come up with an experiment using the scientific method, and my experiment was a lot like the example she gave. I chose to focus on the topic of hunger, which I tested out by measuring how many times my stomach growled during the day depending on whether or not I had a snack in between breakfast and lunch. This is why I found Mrs. Perl's example kind of funny when she explained that we need to define something like hunger by either hearing our stomach's growling or by saying that we feel hungry. I was able to relate the information that I had previously learned in science to what we were being taught in psychology. I just thought this was an interesting comparison between the two classes!

Statistics

Hello my dear fellow classmates,

Statistics is often used in psychology in order to prove certain behaviors and conditions by collecting data. I just wanted to share a quick thought about statistics that really started to bother me. Often statistics are used in order to prove something about people in our society. Nevertheless, these statistics may often be wrong and don’t really show the true results. The results can be manipulated in order to make them seem correct. The idea that that is possible really disturbed me

For example, I recently learned that according to statistics most criminals are African American. However, what statistics did not show was that most of the crimes the African Americans committed were very minor. The Whites are actually the ones that commit the dreaded crimes such as murder and rape. Nevertheless, because of the results of the statistics, most people will simply automatically believe that the Blacks are the ones that commit most crimes and will begin to form opinions and ideas that are actually false.

Another way through which statistics can be controlled is when the person conducting the research for the data only chooses subjects who will respond to his survey as he wants. For example, if one is trying to make a serve about how many people like chocolate ice cream out of 100 people, he will specifically choose 89 people about whom he is certain will like chocolate ice cream (I know it’s a dumb example but I was trying to give an easy one so bear with me).Therefore, it will look in his survey like most people like chocolate ice cream although there is no way of knowing if that is really the case.

It is troublesome that we cannot really rely on statistics all the time. Although there are ways to determine when statistics are “wrong” not everyone knows how o do some and will therefore base their opinions on incorrect ideas.