Creativity

Creativity is a very important aspect of life because if you are creative than you have a chance to go far in life. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and many others have become very succesfull based off of their creative minds. There are a couple of important things that consitute a person as creative or not:

1. Expertise - You have to have a basis of knowledge. This is not the most important thing, but it is one of the things you just need.
2. Imaginitive Thinking Skills - You have to be able to make connections and explore things in a new way.
3. A venturesome personality - You have to want to risks and go out on a limb for some of your ideas. Even if you do not think it will succeed at first, you have to try and try again. 
4. Intrinsic motivation - Arguablly, the most important aspect of creativity. You have to be self driven, and want to go out and make sure your ideas come into fruition.
5. A creative environment - You have to be surrounded by people who want the best for you, and they also have to be creative.

So, when you think about facebook, apple, and all of the other great creations of the 20th and 21st centuries, you have to look at these 5 main aspects of creativity and apply it to each of the inventors.

Mark Zuckerburg

1. Yes, he is a genius who was accepted to harvard
2. Yes, hence he came up with facebook
3. Yes, that is why he had the guts to pursue his ideas even though it might backfire and turn out to be a waste of time
4. Possibly, who knows, he may have done it for the money, but I also think wanted to change the world and make it better for all
5. Yes, harvard is a very creative environment indeed

You can do this and apply it to each of the main innovators of our time and see if it all matches up, and in most cases you will find that it does.

How insightful!

Don't you just hate that feeling you get after almost every test: you're stuck on question 17, you've narrowed it down to two possible choices, but you just can't figure out which one. You look at the clock--3 minutes left. In an act of desperation, you choose E over B. You turn in your test, and when the bell rings, you want to punch yourself, because the answer was obviously B. If this has happened to you, you've just experienced insight. Insight is a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem. We've learned about insight before, but not in this context. Insight contrasts strategy-based solutions to problems (i.e. heuristics and algorithms). Whoa! I've just had an insightful moment (and no Gabe Goldstein, it's not that I need to go to the bathroom). Why would I study? I've literally just decided that it would make more sense to not study at all and rely on insight. Insight is bound to happen and work, and all I would have to do is sit there and hope it comes to me. How about it?

Seriously?

Seriously Chomsky? Seriously? You seriously think that our ability to communicate through language is innate? That's just stupid. Almost as stupid as you being as anti-Zionistic as you are. Riddle me this professor know it all, why don't we come out of the womb speaking? Why can't I pop out of my mom and ask the doctor what the hell is going on? Because speaking is not innate. I'm not particularly a Skinner fan, but he wins this argument. Skinner says that our ability to speak comes through operant learning, it comes through experience and rewards for speaking. Skinner is an idiot too, you can't say that cognition doesn't exist, but he's right in this. The only reason we learn how to speak is because we mimic what we grow up hearing. We learn to say things that our parents say. Is it fascination that we pick up on grammatical structure without being taught it? Yeah, sure. But that isn't nearly enough prove to legitimize Chomsky's proposal that language ability is innate. The only reason I learned how to do what I'm doing now, communicate through language, is because I've learned the language my entire life. There is nothing inside of me that was made at my conception that allows me to speak so fiercely and critically of Chomsky. I learned how to use language through experience. Through mimicking. I don't know what my first word was, but I am positive that it was met with, "Oh my God Sidney, he talked! He talked! He said ball! Oh my God!" As a child, receiving that (excessive) praise for saying a simple 4 letter word does nothing but compel me to do it again. If my parents are happy, it means more candy. There's nothing innate about that.

Problem solving

As you know, we have concepts of things in our mind, for example, sports. Then, we have prototypes to specify categories in the concept such as basketball, soccer, and football. But, how do we solve things if they do not fit our concepts of prototypes-if they are totally random. Convergent thinking is when there is one single answer. An algorithm is a step-by-step process to solving a problem that guarantees the correct answer. For example, if you are trying to figure out a 4 digit code, an algorithmic way to figuring it out would be to try every single possible combination until you get the correct one. A heuristic way means based on previous information, you solve the problem. So in my example above, a heuristic way of solving it would be to eliminate types of combinations that you never really see such as four of the same numbers or numbers that come right after each other in order etc. An insight is a way to solve a problem, and it is when the answer just happens to come to us out of the blue. Divergent thinking is when there are multiple approaches to a question. Creativity is a way of divergently thinking. There are five things you need to have in order to be creative: expertise/knowledge, imaginative thinking skills, a venturesome personality, intrinsic motivation/doing it because you want to and not for any rewards, and a creative environment where creativity is encouraged.

Ebbinghaus's Forgetting Curve

     My favorite course in high school was AP Art History. To me, it was not always about the AP or about the tests, but it was about learning art for the sake of learning. From Renaissance wonders to intriguing modern art, the material in art history was always fun to learn. To this very day, I can still tell you about all of the works of art I have learned. Why? Because I have been to numerous museums, from the MOMA to the MET to the National Gallery in Washington D.C. In essence, I rehearsed what I learned by revisiting it and relearning the art when I went to museums. 

    What would happen had I not relearned all of the material and not visited those museums? Would I still remember all of that art? According to Hermann Ebbinghaus, after learning lists of nonsense syllables, he found that memory for novel information fades quickly, then levels out. Had I not rehearsed my art skills, I would lose most of knowledge of the art over the course of a few months/first year. However, after that year span, my knowledge of art would remain the same over the rest of my life. Without an ability to forget, we would be overwhelmed by out-of-date and irrelevant information. Our memory can fail us through forgetting (absent-mindedness, transience, and blocking), through distortion (misattribution, suggestibility, and bias), and through intrusion (persistence of unwanted memories). What we encode (whether automatically or through effortful processing) is only a very limited portion of the sensory stimuli around us. And as we age, our encoding grows slower and less efficient. Without encoding, information does not enter our long-term memory store and cannot be retrieved.

    Now here comes the real question. When I am done with this psych course, will there be instances, like in AP Art History, where I will revisit and relearn the ideas I learn in Psych class? The question remains a mystery.  

 

Wuddup Gangstas

Hey guys. Remember all that information we learned the night before the test? When we crammed? Well, we should have used some spacing effect because I am forgetting a lot of stuff we've learned. I think it's because I just learned the things for the sake of getting a good grade on the test, I didn't effortfully process everything I was learning, thus making it easier to forget. BUT! There is a solution! Marijuana. Smoke lots of it and you'll remember everything you've ever learned. I'm only joking...drugs are bad. What we all need to do is start now and review every night. Rehearsal and relearning is the key. Look back over those old tests and learn those definitions people, we need to make Mrs. Perl look good.

Peace out and grind on.

Midterm Studying :(

Studying for midterms is a major drag. There is so much information, and you really have to look it all over again, or else you will miss something. But luckily, when you do look it over, it is part of relearning, the easiest type of retrieval. So basically, the first time I tried to memorize the Bill of Rights in US History, it took some time, perhaps 10 minutes. But when I looked at the Bill of Rights again while I was studying, I was not able to recall all 10 parts right away. However, I was indeed able to look over the 10 parts again, and this time it only took me 5 minutes to memorize them.

Within my mid-term studying, I use retrieval cues that I had used while studying for my tests during the year. So when remembering the steps to writing a DBQ essay in history, I use the mnemonic "PERSIA." PERSIA stands for political, economic, religious, social, intellectual, and artistic. These are the categories by which to remember how to go about inserting outside knowledge into DBQ essays.

But as I know from last year, once I get into those midterms I have major retrieval failure. First off, there are all those terms I want to insert into my essays, but I cannot quite remember the term. I know what I want to say, but the associations in my head are not quite strong enough, and the tip of the tongue phenomenon prevents me from being able to get that information onto the paper (What was the name of that guy from Kentucky? He lived in a log cabin; big time abolitionist; 16th President of USA. Can't remember...).

And retrieval failure also comes in the form of proactive and retroactive interference. Since I am studying so much for all these finals, and I am having to go back and look at earlier things while still trying to remember the newer things, my mind gets confused. So on the test, I have proactive failure when the old material prevents me from remembering the new material, and I have retroactive failure when the new material prevents me from remembering the old material (Who was the 1st President of the USA - was it Grant or Washington?)

Midterms are evil. Can't wait until Thursday.

Oddities of my brain; Video Witnesses

I was very fascinated with the lengthy discussion in the book about the repression antics, sexual abuse, and testimonies. The idea of repression is quite an interesting one. The act of consciously blocking a memory from surfacing would seem like a feasible act, at least to me. I, as I'm sure many of you have realized, have quite a strange working brain that is obviously stretched to its limits from an overload of responsibilities and a severe lack of sleep. I often find myself repressing memories and thoughts that I do not like or make me feel uncomfortable. I am able to stop a memory or feelings in its track, preventing it from surfacing and blocking that period of time from my memory. 

The research that the book was proposing though about how traumatic events cannot be repressed made me stop and think for a second. I had to look back in my mind at previous attempts I had made to repressed more traumatic events and the success rate I had with it. I realized that, like the textbook had said, it's not really possible to totally repress traumatic events. What happened with me was that my mind was confused. It knew that something had happened, sometimes even what, but because of my repression attempts, I was confused on the validity of what had happened. I couldn't and can't be sure if what I was remembering had actually happened. This was different from the less traumatic events that I can totally erase from my conscious memory. 

Thinking about my own mind, as unusual as I think it might be, made me think about others, specifically the thoughts of witnesses used in court cases. If I could so easily manipulate my own mind and displace and even place memories, could others as well? What would this mean in a murder trial? Could a memory of the murderer be a figment of someone's imagination, manipulated into their mind? Or would it be possible that an accomplice repressed, or erased per se, the memories that would incriminate his friend. I've long maintained that the best liar is one who can lie to himself, for if he is lying to himself, it's not a lie he's saying, but the truth. That is, the lie he is saying is what he believes is true and it is therefore not a lie to him. This would allow someone to "beat" a lie detector and honestly swear to tell the truth in court. It made me think, should we continue to have eyewitness accounts allowed in court. 

An underlying theme of Skyfall, the latest James Bond film, is the modern debate of human agents versus technology. Q, the tech head, says that "I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pajamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field...[But] every now and then a trigger needs to be pulled." His message was that the rest of intelligence can be done through the latest technology with minor support from actual agents. The antagonist of the film, Silva, upon bringing Bond to his base, says that if Bond wants to do anything, be it steal billions from a stock market or take out a country, he just needs to click the button. Why can evidence and court cases not be the same. London has over 10,000 cameras watching its streets as part of an over invested attempt at having "eyes at every corner." Although the project was said to have been a fail, the cameras still track all. Across our country as well we have cameras constantly monitoring us. Every ATM, grocery store, and even school has cameras trained on our every movement, watching all of our actions. Why can we not just use those as the testimony? The video footage is far more reliable than human memory and cannot be changed. 

Mnemonic Devices

Mnemonic devices are very helpful. They help us remember certain things when they are tough to remember. One very famous example of a mnemonic device is the order of operations. It can be remembered by the sentence, "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally," or simply the abbreviation, PEMDAS. Taking the first letter of each word can help us remember the order of operations which is, parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. Another interesting mnemonic device is the method of loci. This is when you go through a certain area and mentally mark different parts of that area with different labels in order to help you remember what you need to do. For example, a public speaker may mentally note the different corners of a room with different labels in order to help him remember the points that he needs to speak about. Mnemonic devices can be very useful to teenagers like us who need to remember and memorize a great amount of material for tests and classes.

Chunking Expanded

     I know Addess posted a blog regarding chunking, but I wanted to expand on it and bring in some real life examples. George Miller proposed a hypothesis regarding the magic number 7. He concluded that humans tend to really only remember about 7 items at a time before they begin to forget anything added to a respective list. The idea of chunking deals with short term memory being limited as opposed to your long term memory. If you chunk the numbers together, or simply group them, you may be able to remember a lot more. Say for example I created an experiment where I told the class to memorize the following numbers: 81419952012. Most people wouldn't have a terrible time memorizing them, though many people would certainly forget a few. Now what if I told you to break up the numbers into segments. It is easier to remember 814, 1995, 2012 than memorizing it all as a whole. Another reason you may (or lets say me in this case) not have such difficult memorizing these numbers is because of the self-reference effect. 814 is associated with August 14, my birthday, and I was born in 1995. This year is 2012, making it easy to memorize that. When things begin to have connections to me personally, it becomes much easier to remember it.
     The Guinness World Records officially recognizes Lu Chao as the world record holder with 67,890 decimal places memorized in the number pi (as in 3.14159 etc.). How can memorize so many digits. While Lu Chao is clearly a genius that has a great memory, he probably also utilizes chunking and makes associations to group the numbers. This was probably very helpful in memorizing all of those digits. All in all, chunking is very helpful in memorizing data.