Speak

Well I have read it and it was good! The girl Melinda who just entered high school is a typical lonely girl and is being ditch by all her old friends because she has called the cops on a party they all went to. Though the real reason why she called the police is not something she wants to talk about, so she struggles through the year with her marks decreasing and the relationship with everyone is getting worse. Can't really say more, otherwise I would tell you the end and that would make the book not as well.
The audience is high school students, the book is written of a girl this age and we are just the people who can relate the most to her. It has some beautiful descriptions and her emotions are well described as well. It could be a little bit more well written I think, it's sounds a little childish which makes it not as meaning full anymore. The art project she is doing all year, this part could have been more described at some point, the author only talks about it a little but over the whole book over, but once she could have gone into it real deep so we have better picture of what she is actually handing in the end of the year, as the book is also about this art project. I liked it, I have been through similar struggle and I understood exactly the way she thought and why she has done the things the way she did. The stories shouldn't always be about the rich and beautiful, we all have feelings and we are all just as worth as the the other people in this world, no matter how we look or how much money we have. So if you want to get a different perspective out of the high school stories which are all out there and want to experience something new and full with emotions, then I fully recommend this book.

Psychology -Unit 3 – Chapter 2

     Neuroscience and Behavior

Neural Communication

In reality, everything psychological is simultaneously biological. Viewing each person as a biopsychosocial system lets us study behavior from multiple levels of analyses. At the biological level, neurons and other cells compose organs, which form larger systems (digestions, circulation, information processing). At the social-cultural level, people live in specific times and places and are subject to specific environmental and social-cultural influences. At the psychological level, people's thoughts and emotion interact with their biology and personal history to produce that unique individual. Scientists gain much from their study of neural processes in other mammals and in relatively simple animals because humans and other animals have similar neural systems.

The body's circuity, the nervous system, consists of billions of individual cells called neurons. Neurons send signals through their axon, which is sometimes encased in a myelin sheath. Neurons receive signals from other cells through their branching dendrites and their cell body. If the combined signals are strong enough, the neuron fires, transmitting an electrical impulse (the action potential) down its axon, by means of a chemistry-to-electricity process in which ions are exchanged. The neuron's reaction is an all-or-none response.

When action potentials reach the end of an axon (the axon terminals), they stimulate the release of neurotransmitters. These chemicals messengers carry a message from the sending neuron across a synapse to receptor sites on a receiving neuron. The sending neuron, in a progress called reuptake, then normally absorbs the excess neurotransmitters molecules in the synaptic gap. The receiving neuron, if the signals from that neuron and others are strong enough, generates its own action potential and relays the message to other cells.

Each neurotransmitter travels a designated path in the brain and has a particular effect in behavior and emotions. Acetylcholine, one of the best-understood neurotransmitters, affects muscle action, learning, and memory. The endorphins are natural opiates released in response to pain and exercise.

Drugs and other chemicals affect communication at the synapse. Agonists, such as some of the opiates, excite by mimicking particular neurotransmitters or by blocking their reuptake. Antagonists, such as curare, inhibit a particular neurotransmitters release or block its effect.

The Nervous System

One major divisions of the nervous system is he central nervous system (CNS), which consists of the brain and spinal cord. The other is the peripheral nervous system (PNS), which consists of the neurons that connect the CNS to the rest of the body by means of nerves (bundles axons of the sensory and motor neurons). Sensory neurons carry incoming information from sense receptors to the CNS, and motor neurons carry information from the CNS out to the muscles and glands. Interneurons communicate within the CNS and between sensory and motor neurons.

The peripheral nervous system has two main divisions. The somatic nervous system enables voluntary control of the skeletal muscles. The autonomic nervous system, (picture) through its sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions, controls our involuntary muscles and glands.

Reflex pathways are automatic inborn responses to stimuli, and they do not rely on conscious decisions made in the brain. A single sensory neuron, excited by some stimulus (such as a flame), passes a message to an interneuron in the spinal cord. The interneuron activates a motor neuron, causing some muscle reaction (such as jerking away from the heat source). In contrast, neural networks, found in the brain, are clusters of many neurons that together share some special task. These complex networks strengthen with use, learning from experience. Each neural network connects with other networks performing different tasks.

The Endocrine System

The endocrine system is a set of glands that secrete hormones into the bloodstream. These chemical messengers travel through the body and affect other tissues, including the brain. Some hormones are chemically identical to neurotransmitters. The endocrine system's master gland, the pituitary, influences hormones release by other glands. In an intricate feedback system, the brains hypothalamus influences the pituitary gland, which in turn influences the brain.

The Brain

Clinical observations have long revealed the effect of damage to various areas of the brain. But MRI scans now reveal brain structures, and EEG, PET, and fMRI (functional MRI) recordings reveal brain activity. By surgically lesioning or electrically stimulating specific brain areas, recording the brain surface electrical activity, and by displaying neural activity with computer-aided brain scans, neuroscientists explore the connections among brain, mind, and behavior.

The brainstem is the oldest part of the brain and is responsible for automatic survival functions. Its components are the medulla (which controls heartbeat and breathing), the pons (which helps coordinate movements), and the reticular formation (which affects arousal). The thalamus, the brain's sensory switchboard sits above the brainstem. The cerebellum, attached to the rear of the brainstem, coordinates muscle movement and helps process Sensory information.

Between the brainstem and cerebral cortex is the limbic system, which is linked to emotions, memory, and drives. One of its neural centers, the amygdala, is involved in various bodily maintenance functions, pleasurable rewards, and the control of the hormonal systems. The hypothalamus sits just above the pituitary (the “master gland”) and controls it by stimulating it to trigger the release of hormones. The hippocampus, also part of the limbic system, processes memory.

The cerebral cortex is the thin surface layer of interconnected neurons covering the brain's hemisphere. The human brain's cortex is larger than that of the other animals, and it enables learning, thinking, and the other complex forms of informations processing that makes us uniquely human.

Some areas of the brain serve specific functions. One such area is the motor cortex, an arch-shaped region at the rear of the frontal lobe that controls voluntary movements. Another is the sensory cortex, a region at the front of the parietal lobes that registers and processes body sensations. In these regions, body parts required precise control (in the motor cortex) or those that are especially sensitive (in the sensory cortex) occupy the greatest amount of space. Most of the brains cortex – the major portion of each of the four lobes – is devoted to uncommitted association areas, which integrate information involved in learning, remembering, thinking, and other higher-level functions.

Language results form the integration of many specific neural networks performing specialized subtasks. When you read aloud, your brain's visual cortex registers words as visual stimuli, the angular gyrus transforms those visual representations into auditory codes, Wernicke's area interprets those codes and sends the message to Broca's area, which controls the motor cortex as it creates the pronounced words.

If one hemisphere is damaged early in life, the other will pick up many of its functions. This plasticity compensate for damaged ones after a stroke or other brain injury.

Clinical observations long ago revealed that the left cerebral hemisphere is crucial for language. Split-brain research (experiments on people with a severed corpus callosum) has confirmed that in most people the left hemisphere is the more verbal, and that the tight hemisphere excels in visual perception and the recognition of emotion. Studies of healthy people with intact brains confirm that each hemisphere makes unique contributions to the integrated functioning of the brain.

About 10% of us are left-handed. Almost all right-handers process speech in the left hemisphere, as do more than half of all left-handers. This remainder of let-handers split about evenly in processing language in the right hemisphere or in both hemispheres. The percentage of lefters decreases sharply with age, from about 15% at age 10 to less than 1% at age 80. This decline may reflect a higher risk of accidents. 

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 This is not a summary made in my own words,  because it's a lot of info and I was scared that I would do it wrong. These are the learning outcomes all put together. Next will come next weekend and in my own words again.  If you're confused with something then let me know and I can go into it with more details and examples. 

Banksy- Part 1: Visual

 These are my visual pictures of my Banksy project. I'm planning on doing more and I'm in the middle of my writing piece.

Psychology - Chapter 1

Thinking Critically with Psychological Science

Often we are mislead by ourselves, for example by hindsight bias or also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. The tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that we would have foreseen it.
Ex. After the first World Trade Center tower in New York was hit on Septemeber 11, 2001, commentators said people in the second tower should have immediantly evacuated. ( it becomes obvious only later that it was not an accident). 
Another one would be Overconfidence of our judgements.
Ex. WREAT --> WATER
How many seconds do you think it would have taken you to unscramble each of these?
People think they would have seen the solution in only 10 sec or so, when in reality the average problem solver spends 3 minutes. Try it yourself. OCHSA.  Anwser will be given at the end of this text.
Scientific approach is what help us to keep Illusions apart from reality. Curiosity, Skeptism and humality helps us to perform strong critical thinking which examines assumptions, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, and assesses outcomes.
Psychological theories organizes observations and imply predictive hypotheses.
Case study (depth study into one individual instead of a popullation or several peopel) describes behavior and suggest hypotheses, but studying an unrepresentative individual may lead to false conclusion.

Surveys are another research source as they gather information from a large number of people. Wording effects (subtle influences in the sequence of phrasing of questions, Ex. people are much moire likely to approve "revenue enhancers" than "taxes") can affect responses. Random Sampling chooses people by chance so it helps researchers archieve a sample that represents the population under study.
Naturalistic Observation is as it says the study of a person in their natural environment. It only describes and cannot explain behaviors.  

A correlation coefficient is a statistical mearure of the strength and duration of the relationship between two factors. In a positive correlation (FIG 1. ranging from 0 to + 1.00), the two factors rise or fall together. In a negative correlation (FIG 2.  ranging from 0 to - 1.00), one item rises as the other falls. This diagram here is called a scatterplot. A correlation doesn't provide the cause of something, only it's possibility.
Ex. Low self- esteem could cause Depression.
                                 or
Depression could cause Low self-esteem
                                                                                       or
                                     Distressing events or biological predisposition could cause both. 

There is also illusory Correlation which is when you think there is an relationship between something, even though there is none. Random things happen but we like to make meaningful connections out of them.  
Experiments discover cause-effect relationships. They manipulate  one or more factors of interest, and contolling other factors. In a double blind procedure neither the researcher nor the participants are receiving the treatment or a placebo. This way the researcher expectations will not influence the experiment.

 Statistics help us organize, summarize, and make interferences from data. It is imporatant to think critically when looking at bar graphs as they can be tricky and their range may only have minimal difference but shown as big. There are 3 measures of tendency. The mean, median and mode. Mode would be the most often occured number, median the middle score and mean the arithmetic average which would also be the most used one. There are also 2 measures of variation like the range which is the gap from the lowest number to the hightest and the standard deviation which shows how close the number are to the average. The 3 principles of making generalizations from samples woud be :
1. Representive samples are better than biased samples.
2. Less-variables observations are more reliable than those that are more variable.
3. More cases are better than fewer.

 That is another quick summary made by me. If you have questions, corrections, concerns or whatever about it then please comment! I hope you enjoyed :)

Answer for OCHSA --> CHAOS    


 

The lovely Bones – Movie

The movie “The Lovely Bones” is a good movie in my opinion. I don't like to compare it with the book

because as a matter of fact, books are mostly always better than the movie. A movie is just not a book, and I think to like a movie where you have read the book before, you need to let go of the book for 2 hours, because this movie can't compete with it. There has been pretty much only 1 movie I thought was better than the book, and that was “Into the wild”, and the reason for that was that I didn't like the way the story was told. That being said, I liked it.

It had good animations and displayed most of the story with some gaps, but not a lot of changing. The actors have been well chosen and played some good roles. The storyline is easy to understand, even if you hadn't read the book, so there is no trouble in watching this and not understanding it. It can make you cry, in my case it did, and has a lot of emotions. The way of showing her heaven was pretty accurate of how most people would think of it, which I thought was a good idea. It had beautiful landscapes and also enjoyable music that fits and makes you feel with the story. The actor of the murderer has been well made and you can really see what for a creepy and in order kind of guy he is. It just makes you think “ why does no one see it is him?” but they just can't figure it out.

Just the way it has been made was really something I enjoyed, it's a lovely fiction story made to a decent movie, but if you're someone who is judging the movie constantly with the book, then you only ruin it for yourself.  

The Lovely Bones - The Book

This is going to be my first book review on here. Next will be the movie.

This is the review of the book 'The lovely bones', written by Alice Sebold. I mostly liked the book because of the way she starts, the beginning catches the readers attention. She starts off with Susie Salmon dying within the first pages, which makes you actually think and wonder how the story can possibly continue. And as I continued reading the book, it just got more and more complex, showing how the family felt about their daughter being murdered. It shows you that the family members don't have as easy of a time getting over the loss of loved one as it's usually shown in stories, with death being not a big issue of life's being. I really enjoyed reading that part because it makes you feel with the family.
Another part would be Susie seeing and actually telling the whole story while watching earth after she died. It's a good thing to do, in my opinion, because then you can actually know how she thinks about everything and if she likes the way things go on.
Also, the way that you switch from her heaven and then to earth a few times makes the story more interesting, instead of just having the story only about her watching earth or her only being in heaven. Also, that it switches back and forth at random times instead of having the earth story being told first and the time she spends in her own heaven being told after. 

Overall I really enjoyed it and recommend it for eveyone who loves fiction and heartbreaking stories. If you're a person who is into extreme fantasy then this might not be the right thing, as you might not be able to enjoy it as much. Otherwise it's a great story with a lot of emotions and thoughts about life after death. 

Edited by Carrie Unger 

Credit:  Picture  

 

Psychology - Prologue

Psychology's Roots 
First of all we need to see Psychology as a science. The study of behavior ( anything an organism does) and mental process ( experiences).
The roots of Psychology go far back in History to Asia, China, the Middle East and Europe. Many people in those regions wondered about humans and tried to understand the human nature, so they looked carefully at our bodies and how our mind works in relationship with it. Buddha and Confucius focused over 2000 years ago on power and origin of ideas. The ancient Hebrews, Socrate, his student Plato, and Plato's student Aristotle have thought about whether mind and body are connected or distinct, or whether human ideas are innate or results from experiences.
Rene` Descartes and John Locke reengaged in the 1600s, aspects of those ancient debates and Locke coined his famous description of the mind as a "white paper".
Empiricism is the view that pretty much knowledge comes from experiences and that science should rely on observations and experimentation which have been the ideas of Francis Bacon and Locke.
Psychology was born in the 1800's in Leipzig, Germany by Wilhelm Wundt which he did by doing the first real experiment.
Edward Bradford Titchner tried to do more experiments and through that attempt to understand now mental and behavioral processes help us to adapt, survive and flourish.
William James and other functionalist tried to explain why we do what we do.
Psychology was a "science of mental life" until the 1920s. John B. Watson and F.B. Skinner, which were 2 American behaviorist, changed the focus of Psychology to the study of observable behavior. It was in the 1960s when humanistic psychologists draw attention to the importance of environmental influences, personal growth, and the needs for love and acceptance. Also the focus of psychology's interest has been refocused by the cognitive revolution to mental processes, with special attention to perception, information processing, and memory. Todays Psychology views itself a a "science of behavior and mental process" which cognitive neuroscientists are trying to tell us.

Contemporary Psychology
The big debate in Psychology is whether nature (view of Plato and Descartes, gene) or nurture ( view of Aristotle and Locke, all other influences, from conception to death) was more important. Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism - the principle of natural selection - by which nature selects chance variations that enable organism to survive and reproduce in particular environments. Now they believe that every psychological event is simultaneously an biological event.
The biospsychosocial has  3 level of analyses, the biological, the psychological, and the social-cultural level. There are many different perspectives of how psychologists study human behaviors and mental processes ( including the neuroscientific, evolutionary, behavior genetics, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive and social - cultural perspective)
Psychology's subfields encompass basic research ( often done by biological, development, cognitive, personality, and social psychologists), applied research ( sometimes conducted by industrial/organizational psychologists), and clinical application ( the work of counseling and clinical psychologists).
Clinical psychologists study, asses, and treat ( with psychotherapy) people with psychological disorders, psychiatrists also study, asses, and treat people with disorders, but they are medical doctors who can prescribe medical as well as offer psychotherapy.

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So that would be it. I might as well put a little dictionary on those words up there soon so you can understand the concept better, unless you know all these words anyways. If you have any questions in this topic then comment and I'll respond as soon as I can.  I'm going to put up an review on every unit i'm going to read, which is really exciting. I hope you're interested!

Credit: Picture, Wilhelm Wundt

Cocteau Twins - Alice

The Lovely Bones 

So this is the music for the movie The lovely bones. It sucks that you just can't only upload audio on Blogspot so I had to make a video to share the song. But anyways this is a lovely song and I think it fits to the story. Enjoy!

This is the list of Books I'm going to read and you'll probably see a feedback on

• Watership down
• A  long way gone
• Speak
• The compass rose
• The perks of being a Wallflower
• Wuthering Heights
• Ishmael
• Holy the Firm
• Franny and Zooey 
• Lavinia 
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Huckleberry Finn (reread)
• Dr. Faustus 
• The Temples 
• Hamlet 
• Waiting for Godot 
• The picture of Dorian Gray
• Heart of Darkness
• The Catcher in the rye
• The three Theban Plays (Antigone, Oedipus the king, Oedipus at colonus)
• Psychology (Yes I will post things about this book on here more often)
• The lovely Bones (Just finished reading, Feedback soon) 
• and more but I haven't decided about the rest yet
• When something is crossed out it means I've read it