Savant Syndrome

Savant syndrome is a condition in which a person is limited in mental ability but has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing. A big example of this is Derek Paravicini. Derek was born prematurely at 25 weeks, who was also born with mental disabilities and blindness. Derek suffers from dressing himself, speaking, and even tieing is own shoes. But when it comes to playing the piano he is a genious and musical whiz. He was able to hear any song and play it with perfection on the piano, including mozart. Later on Derek began preforming concerts infront of thousands and even for Princess Diana. He was featured on Stan Les's Superhumans where his savantism and superhuman music ability was shared.

The Woman Who Can't Forget

Jill Price is 43 and has spent most of her life here in Los Angeles, and she remembers everything. Price can remember anything from what she was wearing, her emotions, or discussions she had with someone as quick as a snap of a finger. Scientist say finding a human being with memory that works with the precision of a computer would be like finding someone with bones made of steel.The difference is that she scans her past relentlessly. Every time a human thinks of something we get better at remembering it. Price has spent her whole life ruminating on the past, constructing timelines and lists, and figuring the connections between one February 19 and the next. Dates and memories are her constant companions, and as a result she's really good at remembering her past

Why We Need Sleep

We don't fully understand the importance of sleep and why we need it. Sleep is the time when our body does most of its repair work. Muscle tissue is rebuilt and restored. Also sleep is very important for our growth. While we sleep our growth hormone is secreated which enables our bodys tissue to grow and become strong. Our body is like a car. Every once in a while a car needs a tune up or check up. Not getting its oil changed may cause ur car to not run as smoothly as it did before. By not getting our sleep enables our mind to not clearly think as well as before. Sleep has big affects on our personalities and our sense of humor. We may become irritable and less tolerant. Sometimes you will notice that not having enough sleep makes you ornary to small things compared to the way you may act with enough sleep.

7 Sins of Memory

The seven sins of memory include absent mindness, transcience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, and bias. Here are examples and situations of all 7.

Absent Mindness is inattetion to details which lead to encoding failure. A situation of this is misplacing keys. Everyday i always place my keys on my kitchen table. One day when i was in a rush to leave (my friend picked me up so i didnt drive) i set my keys down on an end table in the living room. Since i was in a rush i did not encode that i put my keys in a new place. The next day when i went to school i forgot where i placed my keys.

Transcience is storage decay over time. In this situation it would be like  learning information in a previous chapter of a text book. After periods of time you try to remember what all the information that certain chapter contained, and struggle to reunderstand what it is you learned.

Blocking is unable to access stored info. An example of this is meeting a new person and seeing the person a different time and unable to put a name to that persons face you previously met.

Misattribution is confusing the source of information. This situation would be like mistaking from hearing a story from a friend when you really heard the story by reading it from an article or newspaper.

Suggestibility is linger effects of misinformation. An example is if someone asked "Did Bobby push you?" and later the child realizes it was a false memory.

Bias is belief colored recollections. An example of this would be a freind recalling a certain feeling that you have for them such as happiness or excitement.

Persistence is unwanted memories. A situation of this is having nightmares of sharks everytime you go to bed and wanting them to go away.

Blog Post #7 Bobo Doll Experiment

The bobo doll experiment is an experiment created by Albert Bandura. The parent of the child is taken to a room that has objects placed in the room, including the bobo doll. The parent purposely beats up the bobo doll knowing that the child is watching. Then the child is taken to the same room and portrays the same behavior by beating up the bobo doll just as their parents did. By having the children watch their parents, they learned to anticipate a behaviors consequences in situations like those we are observing. Children especially immitate people who percieve as similiar to them, as successful, and as admirable.

For example when getting into an argument with your parents they may use words or comebacks like "because i said so" or "because i know better". Having a child as be aware or hearing these comebacks will most likey use the same comebacks or words on their parents. In this example the children are immitating their parents behavior.

Blog Post #6 Classical Conditioning

Ivan Pavlov discoverd classical condtioning. Classical conditionening is a type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli to anticapted events. An example of classsical conditioning is ringing a bell and emediately have a dog salvitate. Before conditioning, when you offer food to a dog it will immediately start to salvitate, but when you ring a bell it will do nothing in response. During conditioning, you will ring a bell everytime before you serve the dog food. Ater conditioning, everytime you ring the bell the dog will immediately start to salvitate. In this experiment the (US) is the food in the mouth and the (UR) is the salvitation. The tone then becomes the neutral stimulus. After conditioning, the (CR) becomes the learned response or the bell tone and the (CS) is the salvitation which is triggered by the food.

Extra Blog Post

I think the skittle lab we did in class today was very interesting. We had to taste the skittles by using our nose for scent and then plugging our nose to see if we were able to tell the flavor of the skittle. I did not think the lab was that valid because after tasting the skittles you got adapted to the taste of each skittle, so after a while all the flavors tasted the same. Another thing that i thought was invalid was the blindfold we used. I think your eyes should be fully covered so there are no possible ways of accidently seeing the color of the skittles.