Final Reflection

Throughout the spring semester I had my ups and downs and learned a lot of the psychological views on different subjects. In this semester I learned so much, from how the brain and sensation works all the way to psychological disorders and everything in between. Our first lesson was over brain and behavior. I learned in a TED talk about a certain neuroscientist who believes and convinced me about the purpose of the brain. I learned that the brain is there and evolved to control movement. I also learned about a neuroscientist who created a brain-controlled exoskeleton who helped a man who was paralyzed to kick the first ball in the 2014 World Cup. These two neuroscientist believe the same thing, and they convinced me to agree with them. Along with that, I learned about sensation and perception. Sensation and perception are two key components to how we all use our senses to relay to our brain about our surroundings. It allows for us to be aware of the objects and hazards that make up our environment which allows us for the need to trigger our survival instincts if needed. Two of the most important senses that give us the greatest amount of information is our ability to hear sounds and to see our surrounding.  In week 5 & 6 we learned about development of a child. One big thing on this module was the nature-nurture debate. The development of a child begins with learned attributes, such as language and expressions. Also, biological attributes such as height skin color, and hair color. The debate began with the idea that if you were to take the child from a family and place into another family with a different lifestyle from his/her original family, which features will the child develop while growing up. Following that, we learned about learning and memory. The function of memory has blown the minds of psychologist throughout history when studying the brain. Psychologist have studied how we perceive information and translate that into our memory in order to understand how to counteract some diagnosis that effect memory such as Alzheimer. Module 5 we learned about the motivations and emotions. The two fundamental components of affect are emotions and motivation. When we experience emotions or strong motivations, we feel the experiences. We become aroused with what is going on because our feelings are involved. Module 6 was very interesting about the psychological disorders that affect the brain. Mental Illness is not something to take lightly. Mental illness takes over people’s lives every day and they have no idea. I interviewed some different people about their mental illness and you would be surprised how many people have their anxiety and depression that affect the way they live their lives. It can be managed but tough.

A topic that stood out to me was the sensation and perception. It is crazy how our sight and hearing can be used to trick our brain into falling into illusions. There are pictures and videos that play mind games with us based on what we think we see. Our eyes aren’t the only thing that plays the tricks. Auditory illusions, for instance, whenever we hear a distorted message, we are unable to make up the message. Our senses allow us to be able to survive in such an ever changing world that we are surrounded by but they also can be the key to how we are fooled in certain situations as well. Our brain can only use the information that it has being given and our brain is not always right in deciphering this information. This is why were our so easily fooled by certain illusions that leave us wondering how it is all possible to make something so simple that we still are unable to comprehend.

            Thinking about our past class discussions, our first class meeting stood out to me because there were less people in that group. I was more prepared on the past subjects and I was able to interact more with the students and professor. We talked about the topic I was most interested in throughout the semester. Which was the sensation and perception n. Dr. Priss gave us her opinion and her point of view on the subject and I really enjoyed speaking and getting her thoughts.  

            From the technology point of view I learned the benefits of taking an online class by interacting by video calls and blogging. I think that using the blog helped me learn more by being able to read and understand every one of my classmate’s real point of view that they probably wouldn’t say in class. I shared opinions and thoughts on my blog that I never would’ve said in from of my whole class. I think that was the main knowledge I learned based on the online part of this class.

My favorite experimental task that we did was the module 3 task. I enjoyed getting a tri fold and being able to gather pictures of my life and how I was affected by every photo I used. I used photos that show my story, it shows how my life has shaped because of certain things in my life. I got a flashback of all those moments in life and actually relived those moments. I really got to engage in this task and reflect on how my life has been since I was a child. After working on this project and reflecting on my journey, I am encouraged and proud of who I am today. I believe that I have been blessed with a great foundation of life and was raised in an environment that has prepared me for success. I am excited to see how my future will turn out.

My favorite blog post was our M7, we had a choice on what we wanted to do as an experiment and then share what we found. I enjoyed taking the 240 question quiz that shows you your top 5 strengths. Our assignment was to take our top three strengths and apply them in a different way for the next week. I changed the way I incorporated faith into my decision making. My second one was my kindness and generosity, I volunteered at a food drive and enjoyed it very much. My third and final strength was gratitude and gave back to my parents for all they do. Overall this task made me a better person than I would’ve done on my own. I hope to continue to live this way and I would’ve never know if it wasn’t for this blog post.

I enjoyed reading Tyler Burchette’s blog post. He really put deep thinking into his post and it was very easy to read. He gave a very good overview of each subject and then got into detail with very good facts and his thoughts.

My blog post I had a hard time getting my deep thoughts out and expressing them. Hayden Clark would comment on my post and it really opened my eyes to show that I can give more. I was late to realize that I could give more into my post. Along with Hayden, Dr. Priss was one who told me to really get into more detail in a comment. I took her advice and actually enjoyed writing my blog more than I ever have.

The lecture video over personality, personality it's a unique and relatively consistent pattern that we find in our behavior or it can be our thoughts or your feelings so when I say that it I'm just meaning to say when we look at a consistent exhibition of behavior in a context repeated over time I think thatis what forms a person's characteristic feature it helps us to predict someone's behavior it helps us to predict their personality based on their prior response.

I did not enjoy any of the TED talks if I am being completely honest. I watched some for the first couple of modules and simply could not get interested in the subject. After a while I just didn’t watch them simply because I wasn’t learning from them.

Out of all the topics the strengths test and blog stood out the most. Like I stated earlier, this topic affected my personal life so much because of how it made me change the way I utilized my strengths and created a better person out of me. I learned to be more kind and generous, also I learned that my “strengths” can be so much stronger than the way I was using them. I also used the tips on how to cope with anxiety. I struggle with anxiety and was happy to learn about how it affects the brain and how to live with it.  I learned a lot about myself with the anxiety test with the pdf that tells more about generalized anxiety disorders.