Cultural and Gender

In the gender sex difference the probability of genetically based differences between the quality of male and female memory remains unknown, the results suggest that females currently hold the advantage in episodic memory. That is because in future experiments women have a better developed sense that give them advantages from men."Dreams are private, so the only way someone else would know about it is if you talked to them about it," he says, "so it's an interesting test of the social interaction model." The researchers found that, as they had hypothesized, Caucasians' average age for their first remembered dream was almost one year younger than that of Asians--5.6 years old compared with 6.4 years."

http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.aspx
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220104244.htm

Article #3

Some researchers at the University of California, Davis, called Weiwei Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar, and Steve Luck, a professor of psychology, both at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain. The test consisted of the accuracy of a short-term memory and the probability that the memory still existed. The experiment concluded that “either had the memory or didn’t have the memory,” Luck said, “and the probability of having it decreased between four and ten seconds. The memories did not gradually fade away.” This may happen in real life because the short term memory happens very often now in days because there are people having a very short term memory.



http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429091806.htm

Article #2

Authors were Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stijn van Osselaer, in the experiment what the authors did was tested different slogans with participants and found differences in how the messages were perceived. The three men thought that the effect was not due to the differences of language or maybe the participants difficulty in understanding copy written in foreign languages. "We find that the emotional advantage of consumers' native language depends on personal memories and the language context in which those memories were generated". The researchers found that the effect happens more in women than in men. They believe that women have a stronger memory for emotional events than men. This can happen in real life because sometimes you cant comunicate with other people because or they cant speak your same language or they cant speak at all, so you try to use common signs to comunicate with them.



http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215111433.htm

Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is "the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health or behavior not attributable to a medication or invasive treatment that has been administered". The H.K study is very effectiveness like the first article said " studies have shown that placebos are effective in 50 or 60 percent of subjects with certain conditions,"pain, depression, some heart ailments, gastric ulcers and other stomach complaints." And, as effective as the new psychotropic drugs seem to be in the treatment of various brain disorders, some researchers maintain that there is not adequate evidence from studies to prove that the new drugs are more effective than placebos". This shows us how people can be fooled easily, because someone comes and tells you this can cure your problem than you are really thinking positive of that cure adn you make your mind believe its true. Problems that these studies may have, are not a lot because placebo effect is just to prove that people can be tricked very easily and how sometimes illness isnt cured just by medical things. Placebos for me is very effective because its cheapier than all those medications people waste a lot of money in artifacts that sometimes cure you or maybe not. But to take the risk it is whole lot better placebos.

Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease is characterised by loss of neurons and synapses in the cerebral cortex and certain subcortical regions. This loss results in gross atrophy of the affected regions, including degeneration in the temporal lobe and parietal lobe, and parts of the frontal cortex and cingulate gyrus.In the size of specific brain regions in patients as they progressed from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease, and in comparison with similar images from healthy older adults.This disease will eventually kill you but slowly it makes you completly loss control and you stop understanding what is around you.You no longer understand reality from fiction. They still haven´t found any cure for this and every year more people are affected by it. Something that also comes to my atention is that medicins and puzzels just help your mind be good for a while but after a certain amount of time it will all go away. I think that thier should be more reasearch and more doctors and specialist trying to find a cure for alzheimers since it is and uncontrolled sickness since there is still no cure for it and death still comes with it.

Experiment 1

Dr.Louise Faber and his collegues made the experiment,the brain's equivalent of adrenaline, affects the amygdala by controlling chemical and electrical pathways in the brain responsible for memory formation,leading to better treatments for conditions such as anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. This happens in real life because when we happen to have a incident that made are brain traumatized we keep it stored in our brain for a long time, and that is how the long term memory works on real life thats why some people had to be treated or some people had died because they cant live with that trauma and they dont know what to do.

What is memory?

1)Sensory memory is the first level of memory, sensory memory retains the brief impression of a sensory stimulus after the stimulus itself has ended.
2)perspective there are three main stages in the formation and retrieval of memory:
Encoding or registration,Storage,Retrieval, recall or recollection.
3)The capacity of the sensory memory can get a lot of things at a time, but it can go fairly quickly from the memory. They are two types the Iconic Memory that can go in less then 1 second, and the Echoic memory that can go in less than 4 seconds.
4)Short-term memory allows recall for a period of several seconds to a minute without rehearsal.
5)
6)Chunking refers to the process of taking individual units of information and grouping them into larger units.
7)Miller found that the short-term memory of different people varies, but found a strong case for being able to measure short-term memory in terms of chunks. A chunk can be a digit in part of a telephone phone number or a name or some other single unit of information.
8)Memory is the ability to encode, store, retain and recall information. Memories give an organism the capability to learn and adapt from previous experiences as well as build relationships. Encoding allows the perceived item of use or interest to be converted into a construct that can be stored within the brain and recalled later from short term or long term memory.
9)Encoding is a biological event that begins with perception. All perceived and striking sensations travel to your brain’s hippocampus where all these sensations are combined into one single experience. The hippocampus is responsible for analyzing these inputs and ultimately deciding if they will be committed to your long term memory; these various threads of information are stored in various parts of the brain.
10)Memory starts as stimuli that we sense some of it goes into short term, if hold on to it or reherse it in short term then we can move it to long term, so once it gets there that information stays.
11)The sensory stores are sensory systems, not memory systems as most people think of the term "memory."
The three-box model suggests that there is nothing in between short-term and long-term memory. However, evidence shows that information can reside somewhere between the extremes of active attention and long-term storage. Memories can be "warmed up" but outside of attention. In other words, intermediate levels of activation are possible.
12)describes memory recall of stimuli as a function of the depth of mental processing. A stimulus’ mental processing depth is determined by connections with preexisting memory, time spent processing the stimulus, cognitive effort, and sensory input mode. Depth of processing falls on a shallow to deep continuum.
13)Maintenance rehearsal is a shallow form of processing information which involves focusing on an object without thought to its meaning or its association with other objects. For example the repetition of a series of numbers is a form of maintenance rehearsal.
14)In contrast, elaborative or relational rehearsal is a deep form of processing information and involves thought of the objects meaning as well as making connections between the object, past experiences and the other objects of focus.
15)Craik and Lockhart

Memory

When you are a child you haven’t developed well the memory to remember everything for a long time. For example, the test that the kids couldn’t find the stuff animals two weeks later is because they haven’t developed well their memory so they don’t remember well things. On the other test kids do not have the knowledge that grown ups have that they know what a mirror is, but the kids some get scared because they don’t know what it is. When children are born they need to pass threw some stages that they need to develop their memory and mind, because they are not that complex as we teenagers are. That’s why some kids are more intelligent than others because they have well developed their mind, because of their environment they live in that make you the type of person you are and the level of intelligence you are. Kids learn new things by seeing the people that are around them.

The Myth of Multitasking

1. Why is multitasking considered by many psychologists to be a myth?
Multitasking looks like people are doing several activities at the same time. They're not. They're doing them sequentially, switching rapidly between them.
Substantial interference effects occur when you try to use the same channel. For example, if you're on the phone, you may be able to read a note that someone has passed you even while you’re listening to the person on the other end of the line. But you won't be able to fully understand someone who starts talking to you while you’re listening or talking to someone else.
2. To what does the term "response selection bottleneck" refer?
We examined the coordination of processing streams when two reaction stimuli are presented with minimal temporal separation. We tested the hypothesis that individuals that grouped responses to the two stimuli would schedule response preparation later than those not-grouping their responses would. Performance measures were combined with a cardiac measure interpreted as an index of response inhibition.
3. David Meyer has found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline. Why is this important?

Bambuti Pygmies

The most important god of the Bambuti pantheon is Khonvoum, a god of the hunt who wields a bow made from two snakes that together appear to humans as a rainbow. After sunset every day, Khonvoum gathers fragments of the stars and throws them into the sun to revitalize it for the next day. He occasionally contacts mortals through Gor or a chameleon. Khonvoum created mankind from clay. Black people were made from black clay, white people came from white clay, and the Pygmies themselves came from red clay. He also creates the animals that are needed by hunters. Arebati is a lunar deity and Sky Father. In some sources, he was said to have created humanity from clay, instead of Khonvoum. Tore is a god of the forests who supplies animals to hunters. He is also a thunder god who appears as a storm and hides in rainbows. Most importantly, Tore appears as a leopard in the initiation rites. The first Pygmies stole fire from Tore he chased them but could not catch them, and when he returned home, his mother had died. As punishment, he decreed that humans would also die, and he thus became the death god. Pygmy peoples see their rainforest homes threatened by logging, and are driven out by settlers. In some places they have been evicted and their land has been designated as national parks. They are routinely deprived of their rights by governments, which do not see these forest-dwellers as equal citizens. In Cameroon, the life of the Bagyeli is being disrupted by a World Bank-sponsored oil pipeline which is to be built through their land. The Batwa of eastern DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda have seen nearly all their forest destroyed, and barely survive as laborers and beggars.

Colin Turnbull

World War II brought a stint in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve after which he was awarded a two year grant in the Department of Indian Religion and Philosophy, Banaras Hindu University, India, from which he graduated with a master's degree in Indian Religion and Philosophy. In 1951, after his graduation from Banaras, he traveled to the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo with Newton Beal, an Ohio schoolteacher he'd meet in India. Turnbull and Beal first studied the BaMbuti pygmies during this time, though that was not the complete goal of the trip. An odd job Turnbull picked up while in Africa at this time was working for the Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel. Spiegel hired Turnbull to assist in the construction and transportation of a boat needed for his film. This boat was The African Queen, which was used for the film of the same title. After his first trip to Africa, Turnbull traveled to Yellowknife in the northwest territories of Canada, where he worked as a geologist and gold miner for approximately a year, before he went back to school to obtain another degree. Upon returning to Oxford in 1954, he began specializing in the anthropology of Africa. Turnbull remained in Oxford for two years before another field trip to Africa, finally focusing on the then-Belgian Congo and Uganda. After years of fieldwork, he finally achieved his anthropology doctorate from Oxford in 1964.

What influences our perception?

Messages that tell us we are expected to fulfill roles influence our perceptions. Demands of our roles influence our perceptions. Cognitive abilities shape our perceptions and cognitive complexity refers to the number of different knowledge schema used to organize and interpret people and situations. Cognitively complex people tend to be flexible in interpreting complicated phenomena and integrating new information into their thinking about people and situations. Less cognitively complex people are likely to ignore information that doesn’t fit neatly with their perceptions or to use it to replace the impressions they had formed. Person-centered perception is the ability to perceive another as a unique and distinct individual. Person-centered perception reflects cognitive complexity because it entails abstract thinking and a broad range of schemata. Person-centered perception is not the same as empathy is the ability to feel with another person.

Perception is Reality

A phrase that comes up a lot now a day is "Perception is Reality." Although this concept is wrong on a factual basis, it is reality in terms of living in today's society in which interacting and relating to others is a necessity for survival and success in today's world.One thing that can fog a person's perception is biases created by past experiences. Take, for example, the perception of the world a person might have if they were raised in a loving, supportive family. That particular individual's perception of self and others, and the world we live in, would be one of optimism, which opens the mind, creating a filter that feeds the individual the information that will help a person grow and succeed.

Why is Psychology important to me?

Psychology is important to me because I had learned many things, for example I’ve learned that life has many different perspectives it's just the way you are raised by your parents. What I like more is that in psychology opens your eyes in many different ways so you can help open other people eyes.

Why is psycology important to me