Week#14 'Snow Day' Assignment

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Briefly discuss how you are using what you are learning form this class in your everyday life.

18 Comments

I'm using some of the information I'm learning at my job. I take care of people with special needs and some of the information we've learned from class I've been able to use to learn about some of their cognitions. It's helpful to learn about average cognitions and how we function in order to apply this to what I see in the functionality of the people I work with. It's helped me to understand in what specific ways they may be hindered and how to help them overcome some of these obstacles and learn higher functioning skills.

I am using what I am learning from this class by applying the concepts to the different ages of people I interact with. I interact with my niece and nephew who are toddlers, my older sisters, my college friends, and my parents and other elders. As I interact with these different cohorts, I begin to see the difference in their language, long-term and short-term memory, and how they handle cognitive tasks. I also see how my elders are able to recall their childhood in relation to how my sisters and I can recall our childhood. My elders are more prone to forgetting. One concept that has really stuck out to me during family gatherings is the attention span and perceptions of my niece and nephew versus some of our older cousins that are adolescence. From our class discussions, these concepts are now more prone to me as I interact with different age groups.

I am using some of the information that i am learning with in the interactions of by social life but also my job. I have encountered many different ages within my social life and my work life and can see the differences in the language and different styles of memory. At work i work with juveniles and often those who have some form of a mental disability. Often times when working i can see the difference in how each of these kid are processing sometimes they are processing slower than others around them and sometimes they are way far ahead and can often start to recall information from their childhood as they are becoming young adults. It has also helped me to understand how people can be hinders and help them overcome obstacles that they may encounter and help them learn higher functioning skills.

I don't have a job that pertains to psychology, and I don't come into day to day contact all that much with things we have been learning in this class. However, a lot of what we have learned in this class has carried over to things I am learning in my biological psychology class including: drugs and their effects, lucid dreams, mental rotation test, and much more. Also since I find a lot of what we discuss in class to be so interesting I often relay this information on to my peers who are not studying psychology and they find it fascinating. Especially concepts concerning dreaming and drugs since they can be applied to our lives so easily. Also I have used some of the techniques we learned about dreaming on my own dreams to try and alter what happens in them and to remember them better the next day. Lastly, I have put much thought into my own cognitive maps and how I use them to do different things.

Throughout the semester we have discussed many topics that have always interested me from dream analysis to psycholinguistics. Each chapter has had its fair share of interesting topics while other definitely had their share of topics that were over my head. This is one thing I have come to appreciate about this class and psychology in general, no matter how much you think you know about something there is always more to learn. I constantly find myself discussing topics we have covered in class with my roommates and friends outside of class. Many of the topics and cognitive learning techniques we discuss in class can be used everyday in our lives and it make you look at the world a little different all time. This class has given me a greater understanding of myself and how many of my cognitive processes help me navigate my world on a day to day basis. I am constantly practicing memory mnemonics and trying to improve my short term memory while also trying to make it easier to recall memories from my earlier life. Today articles are published and released everyday discussing all the new steps being made in psychology and other sciences and I attribute that to progressive classes like ours that encourage people to question everything in their environment. This class allows you to take a step back and look at the world from a different perspective while also teaching you tricks to help navigate it.

Many of the things in this class pertain to my everyday life. For example, the tip of the tongue state happens to me all the time. Now when I or somebody else is trying to think of something and it isn't coming to their mind at the moment, I know that they are most likely in a tip of the tongue state. I have two nieces and two nephews so I have been able to think about their development when we learned about Vygotsky's and Piaget's stages of development. The most important thing I have learned from this class is that I use what we learn every day. Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes, such as memory, language, attention, and thinking. Of course, I use all four of those processes every day.

This class makes me more aware of the world I live in, and more aware of the things that I, as well as most other people, take granted of in daily life. I think about the concept we learned and are learning in class while performing daily tasks. For example, I think about what level of consciousness is involved while I am eating; it seems like an automatic process and does not require much attention, and I cannot recall what I have for lunch a few days ago. However, a certain consciousness has to be involved when I am deciding what to have for lunch. I am not “using” the class material in life yet (although I use some of the knowledge regarding learning, association, and conditioning to train my dogs, works well so far), but I am constantly thinking about the material when performing daily tasks.

The knowledge I have obtained from this class continues to affect my day to day life. Over Easter weekend when I was home visiting my family, I saw my niece. My niece is only 5 years old and I casually noted that some of her gaps in logical processing were due to the fact that she was in Piaget’s preoperational stage. I even considered getting out two regular glasses of water and pouring one into a tall glass to test her skills of conservation, but the only tall glass I could find wasn’t transparent and it wouldn’t help. I intended to take a neurology course before I graduated, because I have been entertaining the idea that I may go to grad school for neuroscience. However, I missed the opportunity to take the class and it will not be offered again until after I graduate. This class is structured in a way that we have exploration blogs every week where we can search the infinite knowledge of the internet to research something of interest from the chapter. This provides me the unique opportunity to do all of my required coursework for the class, while simultaneously attempting to teach myself more and more about the brain each week. Granted, the information about the brain may not be all that useful in my day to day life, but it is incredibly useful for preparing me for my desired graduate program which I would otherwise have to budget additional time to study for outside of class. Also, the information I obtain in this class is helpful in it’s own right. I learned about the evolution of consciousness several weeks ago, and that was all I thought about for about a week. I thought that if the evolution of consciousness was the result of the evolution of the brain, which was driven by the tendency to want more freedom of choices, then you could systematically trace the evolution of both the brain and consciousness back the phylogenic tree all the way back to single celled organisms. That is assuming that we did in fact evolve from single celled organisms. I then thought about that some more and objectively thought about the philosophical question of the existence of the soul. If you make the assumption that two creatures without a soul would not be able to create an offspring that had a soul, then you find yourself with two possibilities: (1) Either we do not have souls, or (2) every living thing that evolved from that initial single celled organism (including the bacteria that are currently inside you) has a soul. Granted, that may be oversimplified, but it made sense to me, and I owe this train of thought to this class.

I mostly use this information in my other classes, especially my sensation and perception class. The two have a lot of cross over in concepts and I think that has allowed me to more fully understand both classes. I also use some of the ideas at my job, and play little memory brain games with myself. I'm a waitress and am always testing my mental abilities, mostly memory.

I use what I learn in class in my everyday life to understand individual differences. This class has really emphasized how small variations in experience, brain structure, habit, etc. can have large effects on an individual’s life. This class has also emphasized that sometimes we can control these small variations through our environment and sometimes we cannot because they are genetic. Cognitive psychology reminds me of math because everything builds on itself; however, there is never one correct answer in cognitive psychology. All of these components just build on each other to create very unique individuals and we often do not realize that our perceptions are not all the same. I think this is important in understanding where other people are coming from even in basic interactions in everyday life.

Since I am a psychology major I use much of what I read and research in all of my other psychology classes I take. Not only do I use it in my other classes I usually can then help someone who is in the same/similar major as me that I know. I also work with people who have ID and the things I learned in class help me understand better on why some of my consumers, what we call those we supervise, act the way they do.

Much of the information that we learn about in this class I have been able to connect to information that I have learned both in past classes and in classes that I am currently taking. The overlap allows for me to have a better and well rounded understanding of the field and specific theories. I have specifically used knowledge from the developmental chapter to better understand the kids that I work with and their points of view on specific tasks and items. This allows for better communication and understanding in the workplace.

This class has really helped me with having a better understanding of the brain, how we think, memory, and much more. I have probably used it the most at my job. I work in a PMIC/Residential Treatment Facility. I work with adolescents with a lot of different problems and I have been able to use the topics I've researched in this class to look closer into everyday issues that I deal with at work. I also share many of the topics I learn about with my kids at work and they get the opportunity to learn and ask questions as well. I have also just incorporated what I've learned in my own life. I think more about my sleep patterns, my memory, and how I go about studying for tests.

Unlike some of the other people in the class, I don’t currently have a job that relates well to this class or psychology in general. I still manage to relate the topics that we discuss to everyday life however. For example, I’ve stated in the past that I read/watch a lot of debates and arguments and witness the logical fallacies that we read about this week constantly. I think about the many other subjects as well and also try to apply them, such as cognitive mapping or transformational grammar. I use the knowledge gained about memory and encoding as well to explain gaps in my own memory as well as other peoples.

I am using what I have learned in this class to better understand the people around me. Learning about how people perceive objects and ideas has allowed me to acknowledge different points of view. I have also learned a lot about conditions in which people I know have suffered, such as ADHD and Dyslexia. Learning more about what these people are going through has helped me to relate to them better.

In a broad sense I use a lot of what I learn in this class in my everyday life. Specifically, learning about memory, concept formations, and thinking has helped shape the way I try to retain important information. For a topical blog I wrote about assocationism and how it shapes the way we think and I feel that I use associations as a tool to incorporate what I learn into more meaningful concepts. If I associate things like Piaget's theory of development to my experiences and observations of how my little brother has developed it makes the information more meaningful and helps me to be able to recall the information more readily.

Since I did my topical blog this week on artificial intelligence, I wanted to relate that to my life. I was trying to find a business in the cedar falls area, and had to use my self phone to locate it. The language processing software on my phone made it possible to find the business. The first language processing software was ELIZA, PARRY, and netTalk. The software that most have nowadays is SIRI. SIRI was able to process my voice and give me directions. Language processing software as come light years since the first that were developed, and I assume that they will continue to grow through the years.

I am using the information in this course for my other course work and vice versa. I am in three courses this semester that cover a lot of the same material. I have been learning a lot about intelligence, memory, language, and many other related aspects of human cognition and psychology. I think that all of these things are good to know for everyday life. But that's also why I'm a psychology major - I love learning about the way people think and act.

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