Introduction to Psychology, Lecture 2

Source from youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=syXplPKQb_o

Confirmation bias: http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/c/confirmation_bias.htm

MIT source: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-00sc-introduction-to-psychology-fall-2011/science-research/

Incredible amount of information given for an introductory class. Highly recommended for a freshman and any other person who wants to know about psychology, its history and uses.

Wild Child The Story Of Feral Children

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h-GhHCBo7I

Genie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)

• This is a sad story of abuse, negligence, and delusions.
• This case puts the behavioral psychology at test.
• Something curios about this sad and terrible event in Genie's life, is that she was almost isolated from the outside world, but as one can understand from the documentary, and read something about it, one can know that she could not speak for many reasons but the one I think was also important was due to fear. Her father was incredible delusional and terrible enough to create a false state of peace by the lack of sounds or conversations, if he heard something, he would hit the cause, therefore, intimidating the person, something important to know about the behavioral psychology and Genie, that states that we are kind of empty boxes that are filled. But how can feral children understand something? by instinct? and what does the brain hides from us?
• The real experiments were made to know more about the brain and the use of language, something very important to our evolution and progress as a society and as an individual.

Introduction to Psychology, Lecture 1

Gabrieli, John. 9.00SC Introduction to Psychology, Fall 2011. (MIT OpenCourseWare: Massachusetts Institute of Technology), http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-00sc-introduction-to-psychology-fall-2011 (Accessed 15 Aug, 2013). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

Source:  http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-00sc-introduction-to-psychology-fall-2011/index.htm#

Introduction: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-00sc-introduction-to-psychology-fall-2011/introduction/

Video: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-00sc-introduction-to-psychology-fall-2011/introduction

• One topic Prof. Gabrieli conveys is how the brain interprets its information and how we perceive it. If the viewer knows about the test it wont be as effective. why? because it is already known.
• There are plenty of perception games.
• Prof. Gabrieli later shows an example where there are two groups; the forcasteres(those who observe the situation) and the experiencers(those in the situation), that expresses differently behavior in a negative situation.

Reading [Stangor] = Stangor, Charles. Introduction to Psychology 2010. (Courtesy of Charles Stangor and the Saylor Foundation.) is advised. Is in the course syllabus.

Darwin and Design, Lecture 1 review

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW)

THIS IS A REVIEW OF THE LECTURE 1 OF THE COURSE "DARWIN AND DESIGN  MADE ONLY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE. ALL THE MATERIAL IS FROM MIT AND OTHER WELL DOCUMENTED SOURCES.

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Darwin and Design

Environmental Health Sciences.

Instructor(s) Prof. James Paradis

MIT Course Number 21L.448J / 21W.739J
As Taught In Fall 2010
Level Undergraduate

source(MIT class syllabus): http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-448j-darwin-and-design-fall-2010/readings

1. Wordsworth's "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798", with an excellent commentary and additional images
2. Some background on travel, tourism and Wordsworth's poem
3. Design, the adaptation of means to ends, is a hard concept to pin down, given its many contexts. Here are some dictionary definitions and other discussions
4. A useful Wikipedia segment on design
5. Poet Robert Frost's poem titled "Design." How do his ideas of design in nature compare with Wordsworth's?

1. Wordsworth's "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798", with an excellent commentary and additional images

source(Wordsworth' poem): http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html

COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. JULY 13, 1798

-The artistic interpretation of nature, told as an mature, lonely poet in love with nature and with the feelings of calmness provided by the surroundings. A quiet, green place. possible in a garden, or a recollection of the wild, the absence of the human made metallic sounds and  the toxic contaminants. Peace found in the boundaries of the unpredictable harmony of the wild. The animals, the life, the organism living as one. (the organic life after the human made structures)

source(poem's analysis): http://www.gradesaver.com/wordsworths-poetical-works/study-guide/section5/

2. Some background on travel, tourism and Wordsworth's poem

source: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_1/welcome.htm

"The eighteenth-century vogue for these artists caused a revolution in landscape gardening, whereby formal arrays of trees, shrubs, paths, and ornaments in geometrical patterns were replaced by "landscape" gardens designed to look, from a specified vantage point, like a scene by Claude or Poussin. Walls and fences were hidden in ditches so as not to obstruct the long view; old ruins were created, Disneylike, on the spot, and servants were engaged to pose as farmers, shepherds, and hermits. The predictable next step was for people to venture out in search of landscapes in nature itself — first with an optical device called a "Claude glass," a tinted convex mirror in which one could compose, over one's shoulder, scenes in nature that resembled paintings by Claude, and then, leaving the mirror behind, confront nature face to face."

"Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes praises and minutely describes the region of his birthplace and also laments widespread changes in it resulting from the very "tourists and residents" to whom his guide is addressed. Keats's letter from his 1818 walking tour records excitement at first seeing Lake District mountains mixed with disappointment over Wordsworth's political conservativism. And Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful provides rudimentary theory to help us understand the writers' consciousness of their mental activities."

"These works are not without their political, social, and economic biases, quite apart from the fact that tourism required a degree of liberty and affluence frequently at odds with the workers and peasants of the places being visited. Gray makes fun of the "flaring gentleman's house" while praising "happy poverty"" .


3. Design, the adaptation of means to ends, is a hard concept to pin down, given its many contexts. Here are some dictionary definitions and other discussions

4. A useful Wikipedia segment on design

What is Design?

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design

A recollection of ideas, things, situations formed as one(fundamental). Implementing it via a chosen method(practical).**

5. Poet Robert Frost's poem titled "Design." How do his ideas of design in nature compare with Wordsworth's?

source(Frost's poem): http://www.starve.org/teaching/intro-poetry/design.html

In the poem Robert Frost questions the perceptions of designs. For me at a first sight the flower is beautiful, but once i look close enough, i could see life and death, and even mortality and spirituality, the connection of life through the eyes of intelligence, and the feelings of immortality, connected as the metaphorical image of a spider, and the moth, white as the combination of colors, or the lack of them, depending of the perception and the means. But most important, life as the instrument of the design. the moth has to be alive in order to be eaten by the spider and the flower had to bloom thanks to the rays of lights that she receives.

Natives view of nature

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism

Pantheism is the belief that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God,[1] or that the universe (or nature) is identical with divinity.[2] Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal or anthropomorphic god.

Video of the MIT's Darwin and Design, lecture 1

source(MIT video): http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-448j-darwin-and-design-fall-2010/video-lectures/lecture-1-darwin-and-design/

• Prof. James Paradis begins with an introduction of what is design by asking questions, presenting various examples in which one can compare its ambiguity.
• The ambiguity of a design is presented in an example of purpose and being. Are shells designed by the mollusk or a cause for survival? see: Ediacaran–Early Cambrian skeletonization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
• Prof. James Paradis the continues to talk about design and then introduces the question of nature as a design or specific purpose.
• To understand nature as a design and purpose Prof. James Paradis talks about Wordsworth's Poetical, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey; On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798" as an example of the kinds of feelings and memories modern people perceived at that specific time
• Prof. James Paradis talks about Darwin's point of view of nature, his passion, and how his voyages in the Beagel were important to his life and the theory of evolution, how he found  prehistoric fossils and the evolution of species, how we evolve.

The discipline of finishing

Conor Neill from IESE Business School

Source: TEDxTalks via Youtube

• Conor Neil talks about his definition of success and how some athletes have their mind set to compete and sometimes enjoy the moment by a recursive series of tasks, until getting where they wanted without feeling burned or pressured for it.
•  He explains a generic and metaphorical way we can achieve our goals by controlling our impulses and desires, to a certain degree.
• In the talk, he explains an example comparing two kinds of children, those who control their impulses and those who don't, implying that at the very beginnings of life, competition and division is just a way to find ourselves close to those megalomaniac richest people in the world. He does not say anything about power, corruption and greed, he just say that those who have the privileged to understand his talks are in his side, in the side of those children who did not eat the marshmallow.  
• Of course, he gives some genuine examples of those athletes whose their entire life had been surrounded by competition and some instinctively desire to win, and the catch, he says, is to enjoy it, enjoy competition as a way of life.
• Conor Neil gets his inspiration from Warren Buffet, the richest person in the world.
• He also gives some tools we ought to understand in order to be as successful as his inspiration and those athletes he described in his examples.
• Integrity, energy and intelligence.
• Conor also expressed a generic and simple kind of way to explain how some people do not succeed and succeed. His idea was that a bad idea after another is how we fail, the opposite his a good idea after another is how we succeed. Hoping everyone has that kind of a clear mind in the moments needed to think as clear as those with the right education, the right support, and the right family structure.

Personally, I enjoyed his talk, but found that it was not very honest about all kinds of personalities and all kinds of situations people have in a day a day basis. 

He said something very interesting; write you life, day-by-day, something I have heard not from him but a lot of other people, and its true, but why not write positive aspirations, ones one can reach? instead of a narcissistic diary? but narcissism is just a reflection of who we are and how we see ourselves, a mirror, but in reality that does not mean anything if the world is a combination of all those mirrors, so, better to write, like what he said, positive ideas about how to improve the way we change things.