Sleep

Many people, including myself, struggle with waking up in the morning. Learning about the sleep cycle and the way our sleep cycle works allowed me to adjust the time I go to sleep, or wake up, so that morning would be a little easier. Our bodies run through a certain cycle each day in fluctuation body temperature, release of hormones, tiredness, hunger, and more. Our varying levels of sleepiness are controlled by the amount of melatonin released by our bodies. When sleeping our bodies also go through a cycle, going through 5 different sleep stages. The longer we sleep the more REM sleep, stage 5 sleep, we get as the amount of NREM we get slowly disappears. After each period of REM sleep our bodies slightly wale up, making it easier to be fully woken up. Each cycle takes roughly 90 minutes. I have been able to adjust the time I wake up in the morning so it is as close to a multiple of 90 minutes as possible.

Illusions

Drawings can really tell you about the way we see things. Even though artists originally did not know the reasons they painted things the way they did, the way they perceived things when drawing allowed psychologists to lear more about the way we see perceive things. The most prominent cue seen in art is depth perception. Our mind sees things higher up in our vision to be farther away, relative vision. Artists are able to use this information when painting or drawing by positioning things that are supposed to seem farther away, higher up on the page. Sometimes when creating a picture artists can not place things high on the page and must find a different way to make them seem closer or farther away. When this is the case artists use the depth perception of relative size, the idea that larger objects seem closer closer while smaller objects seem farther. The third method an artist uses when trying to achieve a sense of depth in a two demential painting is by using interposition, the idea that objects that cover up parts of other objects seem to be closer. Artists do the same things our retinas have to do, turn a three demential scene into a two demential picture, and amazingly they do it in a very similar way.

Memory

When spectating on a court case one can see the possible effects of memory distortion. Lawyers are required to be extremely careful when asking questions, interviewing eye witnesses, and assuring the fact their witnesses memories have not been distorted. In class we discussed the ease in which a person's memory can be distorted. A person can skew a persons answers to questions based on the wording of their questions. In an experiment constructed by Elizabeth Loftus subjects answers about the same accident could have been different because of the word used to describe it, in her case smashed versus tapped. This can be extremely helpful, or detrimental to a lawyer when trying to defend his client. The lawyer can word his questions in a way that causes the witnesses memory to be distorted. There is also the idea that if a lie is repeated enough times, or if a person tells themselves something enough times they begin to believe it as fact. This could effect a case in multiple ways. If the jury has access to media that constantly repeats their opinion as to the guilt of the defendant they could potentially conclude in a different, incorrect result. It is important for a person to do their best to focus on the facts and not the ways in which people are trying to change them.

Problem Solving

In class we discussed the different methods to problem solving and how our thought processes and human nature sometimes get in the way of us being able to find the best solution to a problem. We often  suffer from the inability to look at a problem in a new way, fixation. This could refer to the mental aspect, the way in which you go about solving the problem, mental set. It also could apply to the inability to see the use of an object in a way other than the way it has been used it the past, functional fixedness. Having learned about these natural obstacles to problem solving we now know they exist. In the future when we are trying to solve a difficult problem we cold remember what we learned here in class and apply it, allowing us to solve problems better in the future.

Different languages are different, but the same

Language is a pretty complex thing. Whereas we all see the English language as pretty simple since we speak it all the time and don't even think about it, there are a lot of smaller parts that go in to making English what it is, and for that matter making any language what it is. It seems weird, at least to me, that there are things all languages have in common. I mean, English has a lot of letters that = one word, Hebrew can combine lots of words into one word using specific letters that have more meaning, and Chinese uses one symbol that stands for an entire word. So how do all these languages connect? They all have a basic structure.
There are 3 parts to the language structure. The first are the phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. In English, there are 40 phonemes. Even though there are only 26 letters, phonemes include sounds like "ch, th, and qu."
The next part of language structure is the morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest linguistic units that have meaning. For example, the word "dogs" has 2 morphemes: "dog" is the subject word and the "s" implies plural.
But now that we have all these parts to words, the words have to make sense. That is how we get to part 3 of language structure: grammar. These are the rules of language that enable us to communicate with and understand each other. One part of this is the syntax, the way words are ordered, and the other part is semantics, the rules used to derive meaning from morphemes, words, paragraphs, (and the list goes on). So in English particularly, you would say "fat person" to imply that fat modifies the person. And even though the syntax is different depending on which language you are speaking, it is still syntax nonetheless, and every language has specific syntax that works.
So overall, even though different languages seem totally different, they all have structure, and this means that every language has phonemes, morphemes, and grammar.

My Chinese Class

My Chinese Class

     I love taking Chinese with Dumei Yang. Despite my affinity for the class, however, learning Chinese as a language certainly isn't easy. There is so much to language. All languages have the same basic structural units. Phonemes are the basic units of sound in a language. Morphemes are the elementary units of meaning. 

     What makes it so hard to learn a new language is that I never learned Chinese at birth (of course). At about 4 months of age, infants babble, making a wide range of sounds found in languages located all over the world. By about 10 months, their babbling contains only the sounds found in their household language. Around 12 months of age, babies speak in single words. This one-word stage evolves into two-word (telegraphic) utterances before their second birthday. Shortly after that, children begin speaking in full sentences. 

    Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, studies show that picking up a new language becomes much more difficult after the ages from 0-7, and even more difficult than that after ages 8-16. I, now 17, am facing great difficulties picking up on Chinese, which is so difficult in that there are so many different sounds and letters. 

    It has also been interesting for me to watch how Rabbi Lubetski speaks to his children. He talks to them in hebrew at a young age, so in that period where children learn languages most, they will be able to pick up on both the Hebrew and English. Kudos to Rabbi Lubetski.  

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.