REFLECTION BLOG

Week One’s blog shared who I am in a cultural sense as well as the people who shaped me. My friends and my family. It explains my hobbies as well as what type of person I am and want to be. Psychology is a pretty interesting subject. Especially sports psychology because I can use It in my career I’m choosing to pursue. By using psychology and personal behaviors my favorite coach ever, Jimmy Johnson, was able to motivate players in specific ways special to each player and is what I believe led them to 3 Super Bowls. In this week’s blog I tried to sum up 2 functions of the brain, how it behaves and grows and how it perceives the world around us. It talks about how the brains risky thought behaviors tend to peak at puberty due to grey matter being at an all-time high in the brain and gradually declining over our lives. On the other hand, it talks about how our brain perceives the world around us in its own depiction and how adding or subtracting one small detail can change our perception of the physical world. Past experiences shape the way in which we perceive the world around us. This can be shown by a girl who has been partially deaf her whole life receives a transplant in her ear, although the hearing sounds robotic, to her it’s a blessing because she had never really experience anything else but silence. A man who has been blind his whole life was able to gain a 6^th sense, echolocation. Because he cannot see he was able to adapt to the world around him and by clicking his tongue can gauge depth without being able to see. Sensation and perception can also fool the eye and mind like when the Aztecs laid eyes upon the Spanish and believed they were gods. Nature vs. Nurture is a big topic in psychology, most people tend to think of it as a black and white answer but in reality its greyer. I used intelligence to describe this and how some of my personal habits inhibited me from learning my first semester in college because of the nurture side and explained how genes for problem solving are also passed down from offspring to offspring resulting in passed down intelligence. I used Leonardo da Vinci as an example of intelligence and how he went from being considered the village idiot to probably one of the smartest men in the Renaissance due to his master being able to teach him everything he knew. Although I don’t believe personality assessment 100 percent, I do believe that a lot of it is true. I enjoyed taking the Big 5 personality test because it showed my strengths and weaknesses to each task. I explained how over time I believe these are subject to change because through time we also begin to change. Using a trifold diagram to see who shaped me was as much as a learning experience as each person who molded me. I had never really looked back and thought about it in a sense and when I did I became extremely thankful to people I had never put into light like that before. They taught me things like Humility, Sternness, An analytical point of thinking, confidence, responsibility, and faith. This went on the show how I would use these tools that were bestowed upon me and how I would use them in the future. I chose to take this week as a time to reflect on a man and his addiction to smokeless tobacco. In this interview, we were able to reflect knowledge off of each other and gain a whole new understanding to the term addiction. In it he described most of the symptoms of addiction like abuse of other substances like alcohol, as well as the withdrawal sensations like depression and anxiety. In this task I conducted an experience that involved memory on two of my friends. I asked them to record a series of words down after I read them. In this I was able to understand how the subconscious part of our brains work by saying words in the same category and watching them think they heard words that they did not because they were in the same category. I used a story about 2 people from completely different backgrounds and cultures going from being just co-workers to forming a relationship that was very important in both of their lives. I thought it was important for the reader to understand how the attributes of the blue-collar woman were eventually used by the white collar man to save his life as well as the realization by the blue collar woman that not all that is broken is lost. I used a story about a man who overcame anger problems named Jason to show just how much a psychologist can help a person in need. It was amazing to learn that a lot of the times anger has nothing to do with problems with your brain but just bad habits that were formed in the past reflecting on the present. My favorite blog of the year was saved for last. Taking a nature walk is a great experience as well as a great time to reflect on the little things in the world. I used my favorite fishing whole and instead of fishing just floated down the creek and experienced nature around me to the tiniest detail. I saw boulders that made me feel small, animals that showed me that some of their behaviors are the same of my own, as well as things that were just beautiful that I had never realized before. All of this I had never experienced when I was focused on fishing and this is where I learned the most major point in the walk. We often tend to be to dialed in to our everyday lives to experience the beauty that is going on all around us. My favorite student led activity had to be the scavenger hunt just because of my love for puzzles and the ability for them to use that to get their content they were assigned across. I liked how each hint had to do with an emotion. My favorite in class meeting had to be when we sat around in a circle and reflected on what we were thankful for. I like to look back on the things and people and realize that some of the everyday things they do are actually meaningful while we usually tend to take them for granted. Ted talks had to be the most interesting content of the course. From using the brain to control machines to a man describing how we literally hallucinate our reality into existence This really helped establish strong points to my analogy of the course content for the weeks.