A+B=C

In psychology, learning is defined as a permanent change in an organism's behavior. This is obviously a lot different than our understood definition of the word, and the underlying difference is the word behavior. Learning in our common definition does not need to affect someone's permanent personality to be considered learning. David myers defines learning as a relatively permanent change in an organism’s behavior due to experiences, so he would say that you didn't learn unless you got through experiences. Classical conditioning is one type of learning and it is when you learn to associate two stimuli and to anticipate an event. For example, I learn to associate thunder and lightning and that thunder always follows lightning so I anticipate an event (take cover and get ready for the loud noise). A (thunder)+B (lightning)=C (take cover and get ready). Pavlov did an experiment to prove that classical conditioning works. He measured how much dogs salivate and noticed that there is a natural tendency for dogs to salivate. Over time, he realized that the dog not just salivated when he ate the food, but when he saw the person coming to give him food as well (the salivation of when the person enters to give him food was learned). From this, he proved that classical conditioning does work. A+B=C!

A Case for Marijuana

I noticed while reading the book that it had little negative to say about marijuana. I brushed it off and figured that maybe good ol' Dave Meyers got lazy and didn't want to finish on a negative note. But then we got to class and Mrs. Perl had the same problem. She had a very tough time putting marijuana down. I am here to prove that these two occurrences were no coincidences. Marijuana has been used medicinally as a way of shrinking tumors, coping with pain, and most notably as an aid to chemotherapy patients. If marijuana is so bad, then how could it be prescribed by the very people that are paid to tell us what is good and bad for our health? Additionally, a number of states have legalized marijuana for not only medicinal use, but for recreational use as well. How could something so bad be so accepted by entire states? I don't know about you, but I'm having a very tough time figuring out how marijuana is in any way a bad drug.

Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery

After learning about extinction and spontaneous recovery in class, it made me think back to when I was a kid. As a child, I would tease my friends by pretending to throw things at them. For example when they would see a ball approaching them (unconditioned stimulus) they would naturally flinch (unconditioned response). Soon they learned to associate my arm motion towards them (conditioned stimulus) with the ball approaching them. Therefore, they flinched as they did before. Flinching now became the conditioned response. If I would pretend to throw the ball they would still flinch. But after doing this several times in a row, they would stop flinching. They had stopped anticipating the ball coming towards them. They had gone through extinction. But the next time I actually would throw the ball at them, and they did see it approaching them, they went through a spontaneous recovery. They relearned to flinch when they saw my arm movement because they reassociated the arm movement with the ball approaching the them.

drugs

Our book mentioned a few different types of drugs: halogens, depressants and stimulants. I wanted to talk a little about a stimulant our book did not mention: Ritalin.
There are many drugs similar to Ritalin, and they are all stimulants. For most people They act as normal stimulants but for a select few things are different. For a small portion of people taking certain stimulants will actually calm them down. These select few kids have a little disorder called ADHD. The number of people diagnosed with ADHD or ADD is increasing every year. The number of people diagnosed rose over 5% each year from 2003 to 2007. While it might be helping a lot of them it is certainly hurting a lot more as well. There are so many pills flying around now that it is an easy drug to acquire. These drugs are becoming more ond more of a problem each year. Kids who are diagnosed are selling their meds to their peers. For their peers it is a fun experience. But it is also a dangerous one. Our book told us all about the side effects of taking stimulants. Most of them do not seem very pleasant and the bad outweighs the good in my mind. Besides the long term effects there are many immediate side effects as well. Perhaps the scariest of them all is the possibility of overdosage. I have heard a few stories about kids being rushed to the hospital because of Ritalin, or similar drugs, and I do everything I can to make sure that it is not me or caused because of me.

Meth and Ecstasy = Bad

Arguably the two worst drugs are meth and ecstasy, and they are both discussed in this chapter. In Drivers Ed with Max Maxwell, he showed us some pictures of people who addicted to meth, and how it completely changed their physical appearance. It is insane to see because it takes average-looking people and makes them look revolting. 
Lets just go through a quick overview of these 2 drugs:
1. In terms of methamphetamine, the effects are wide-ranging including irritability, insomnia, hypertension, seizures, social isolation, depression, and violent outbursts, and not to forget that it is highly addictive and makes you look old and decrepit. The reason why some crazy people use this drug is because when you use the drug, you release the dopamine, and that stimulates brain cells that enhance energy and moods, and it is so worth it because you end up looking like the person on page 201, which would not be fun.

2. Ecstasy is one of the weird drugs because it is a mixture of a stimulant and a hallucinogen, and it does 2 things 1) triggers dopamine release and 2) prolongs serotonin’s feel-good flood by releasing stored serotonin and blocking its reabsorption. This brings two results 1) when mixed with dancing it can lead to overheating, high blood pressure, and death and 2) an emotional elevation where you feel as if you love everyone. Clearly, Ecstasy can have its advantages and major disadvantages, but it is clear that neither of these stimulants are good for your body in the long run.

2 Stimulants - 2 Bad Results

     Drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes seem like 2 different actions in 2 totally different ball parks. One is generally much more socially acceptable than the other. However, their results seem very very similar. In all honesty, if you take out the terrible causes of what the tar in cigarettes can do to your lungs, the effects of cigarettes and coffee are right with each other. I mean, look at life 30 years ago. The harmful effects of cigarettes to your lungs were not known, so it was just as common for someone to step out for a puff than it was to pour yourself a cup of Joe. The reason for this lies behind the similar overall effects of nicotine and caffeine. 

     First, I want to define what a stimulant is. A stimulant is a drug that stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, excites neural activity, and speeds up body functions. Caffeine and nicotine are both stimulants. Given they operate in different ways, they still lead to these same results that all stimulants share.

     How does caffeine work? Well, it is an antagonist - it stops the reuptake of a neurotransmitter. What it does is it binds to a neuron's axons, triggers the release of the stimulating neurotransmitter dopamine, and then stops the reuptake of dopamine, causing a person to be energized for a certain period of time and if not restimulated results in a crash.

     Nicotine works in a different way. It is an agonist - it triggers the release of the neurotransmitters epinephrine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, dopamine, and glutamate, which, similarly to caffeine, causes one to feel a high or be energized for a period of time. 

     The stimulation is not such a bad thing. It is what results from this unnatural way of stimulating your body that is not good for you. Once you start, you don't stop so easily. Once you feel this stimulation, your body craves it along with the fact that your neurons are not able to produce the same neurotransmitters by themselves due to the manipulation you have put them through. Therefore, your body requires more and more nicotine or caffeine even to be just normally stimulated. And when you stop drinking coffee or smoking cigarettes, you go through a terrible withdrawal.

     Therefore, my advice is to stay away from cigarettes and coffee in the first place if possible. Being dependent on a substance will prove to be unfavorable down the line.

Drugs Are Bad, M'Kay?

As a class, we've officially reached every student's favorite section of Psychology: drugs. There were three kinds of drugs: a) depressants (i.e. alcohol, opiates, barbiturates) inhibit the sympathetic nervous system, b) stimulants (i.e. caffeine, nicotine, cocaine) excite the sympathetic nervous system, and c) hallucinogens (i.e. LSD, marijuana), which distort perception and conscious experience. The drug I want to specifically talk about is marijuana. You see, when we all read about these drugs, we also read about the disastrous side effects, which can help persuade any teenager to stay as far away as possible. But marijuana doesn't seem to have any MAJOR side effects. Sure, if smoked, you can cause some lung damage, but it's not addicting and it doesn't scar you for life (unlike LSD, which can bring back nightmares if one has a really bad trip). So what are the side effects to marijuana? I did some outside research of my own (*COUGH* Wikipedia *COUGH*) to answer this question that has been bothering the class. According to research, people who have addictive personalities actually CAN be addicted to marijuana. Not only that, but those who consume to much can have permanent damage to memories, intelligence, and normal brain functions. In fact, too much marijuana consumption can lead to mental disorders like schizophrenia, psychosis, and depression. So, to quote Mr. Mackey, a school official from the show "South Park," "Kids, drugs are bad, m'kay?" And marijuana is no exception. Sure, at first sight it may be harmless, but one night of fun may lead to many nights of fun. And everybody knows that marijuana has acted like a "gateway drug" in the past, leading users to want a stronger high by administering cocaine or heroin. Although I've never personally smoked marijuana, I feel that I can still tell you all to try to avoid it, because it won't do you any good, even if Mrs. Perl's TV documentary about drugs indicates otherwise.

Hypnosis: Is it for Real?

Hypnosis: Is it for Real?

     Psychologists maintain that hypnosis is a state of heightened suggestibility to which people are subject in varying degrees. My question is as follows: Is it real, or is it all an act?

     Hypnosis, which I did not believe earlier in the week, is actually legitimate and can be performed if a participant is willing to be participate. Hypnotized people, like unhypnotized people, may perform unlikely acts when told to do so by an authoritative person. Highly hypnotizable people can focus attention totally on a task, become imaginatively absorbed in it, and entertain fanciful possibilities. According to an article I was reading in Business Week, Hypnosis has gained more credibility as a result of more and more research showing that subjects have altered sensory perception as indicated by PET scans, MRIs, and EEG scans. Hypnosis can be a major breakthrough in terms of medical advancements in that you can alter a patients state of consciousness. People hypnotized for pain relief may show activity in brain areas that receive sensory information button in areas that normally process that information. Those who reject the hypnosis-as-altered-consciousness view believe that hypnosis is a by-product of normal social and cognitive processes and that the hypnotized person is unknowingly acting out the role of “good subject.” 

    Hypnosis, I therefore maintain, can be achieved if the participant is willing to be hypnotized. I personally do not really understand it, and I feel that I couldn't be hypnotized, but it would be too big of a conspiracy for hypnosis to not be real.

My Sleep Deprivation

I average about 4-5 hours of sleep a night during the school week. I start the week off with maybe 7-8 hours on Sunday night and then head full stick into the lower sleeping amounts. Some nights of the week are even worst. For instance, on Wednesday night I make the CYHSB Weekly and typically go to sleep around 4 or 5, thus getting only 2-3 hours of sleep. Thursday night I try to make some of that back and push myself to get to sleep around 10-10:30. Unused as I am to going to sleep that early, I always take Nitequil to put me to sleep so I can get a few more hours of shut eye. I consider getting to bed during the week at 1 to be early. As the week carries on, I progressively get more depressed and tired, until Friday night I am ready to collapse. I normally only really wake up around 11:30 AM during the week, dozing through the first couple classes of the day.

I always took the fact I could still function with all the above a strength, a sign of greater productivity. But after learning about sleep in Psych I'm not so sure. We learned that REM sleep is necessary for sorting out the day's events and storing memories. I cannot get much REM sleep what with the amount of sleep I get. This is probably only further expounded by the fact that I go from waking moment to sleeping time in front of some form of a glowing screen. That means even when I go to sleep, my brain will still be up for awhile longer. What is scary is the fact that I do forget things. I often forget entire conversations that I supposedly had during the day. I am always forgetting which assignments are due.

But the effects are more lasting than that. I have constant shadows under my eyes. My mood shifts from moment to moment, fluctuating at alarming rates. I often seem to get down, always when I am at my most tired. I am more irritable with the small amount of sleep I get. Unless I am constantly engaged, I just start to doze off. I now seem to have an aversion to sleep, unable to get to bed early even if I try. Whenever I do want to go to bed early, I need to take Nitequil to put me to sleep. That has its own problems, such as often suppressing the much needed REM sleep.

I always just put all these things to the side, assuming that there was nothing wrong with them since I could function, for the most part, fine. But now, after learning the Unit of sleep in class I am quite worried for both my mental and physical health. Yet I am unable to do anything about my sleeping patterns. Going to sleep earlier means not completing all the assignments I need to do. Going to sleep earlier means not fulfilling all the obligations that I need to. Going to sleep earlier means missing school work and earning bad grades. Being in school has created a damaging cycle in which, to finish the work that I need to, I stay up to all hours of the night. This, however, is sacrificing my health for my grades. I am lately wondering if this is worth it, but cannot give myself in to falling behind on work.

When I read Mrs. Perl's email abou Einstein's brain I got aggravated. After reading the article I got the feeling that the scientist's were trying to say that his discoveries were a fluke, just a mistake. I also got the feeling that they were just trying to reassure themselves that in fact they are smart and that Einstein just got lucky. The more I think about it, the angrier I get; they are insulting one of the greatest scientists  to ever walk on this earth. Anyway I could not write a whole post on this while staying appropriate so I am going to talk about the brain. The article mentioned that he had extra grey matter. I had no idea what that was so I used the power of the internet and found some really cool stuff. Grey matter is where all the mental processing takes place. There is also a thing called white matter; its job is to connect the different parts of the brain. Studies show that pathological liars actually have 25 percent more white matter in their prefrontal cortex. This does not mean their brain is bigger it just means that they actually have 14 percent less grey matter. This makes them better liar because they can have information jump around their brain really quickly but there is one downside: grey matter is where critical thinking takes place so their ability to think critically diminishes. Just a little about grey matter and white matter. :)