Good Bye

After listening to my teachers discuss our blogs and projects today I think I want to change my topic to perception and just perception. I, in case you haven't noticed, am kinda stuck in just doing shallow research which is not what want. I hope this works one works out well!!

My new blog is a-inkperception.blogspot.com
check it out and please take the poll

Interesting Experiment

In the book they talked about an experiment that I thought was really interesting. They asked people to pick who they would vote for for President just by looking at their picture. They found that most people who were democrats picked the democratic person and the people who were republican pick the republican candidate with out knowing anything about either candidate. Your subconscious minds job is to leap to conclutions and use all of the information you've ever gathered and the opinions your conscious mind creates tell you which choice is better. When asked why they chose this candidate over the other they couldn't say why, most said it was just a "feeling." This is the exact jod of our subconscious mind.

I just sent an email to a professor of nueroscience at Princeton University. Hopefully he responds, if he does I plan to have a lot of my questions about how a bunch of chemical reactions some how create our amazing minds answered.

Now The Hidden Brain is leading into some of the other topics it will discuss and there are some points he makes that are exactly what I'm interested in.
Points like " You know the answer, but you don't know how you know the answer," and " . . . It was clear his words upset you, but were you really aware of what was going on in your brain as you lost your temper? . . . but if you didn't conciously decide to get angry, where did the anger come from?" Vedantam also states that we make many conscious decisions every da,y like picking job applicants based on qualifications. He then proves that even these carfully thought out decisions are flawed. This is shown by many experiments run on overweight job applicants. It was proven that anyone who was over weight had a much slimmer chance of getting the job, even if they had the exact same qualifications. Not only that, but also if a healthy-weighted individual was sitting next to an overweight person before the interview they were less likely to be choosen. The hundreds of people they asked to be the interviewers did not consciously decide that the applicant was less qualified because they were in the proximity of an overweight person; their mind simply, because of it's surroundings and all of the things it has been fed and held onto, subconsciously leaped to conclutions, which is it's job.

Ch. 1 The Hidden Brain

The Myth of Intention
In this chapter Vedantam sppeaks about a women who was raped and was certain, 100 % sure, that this man that they brought in was her assulter. After the man spent 14 years in prison, 14 years of her being positive that he was guilty, they found DNA evidence that he was not her rapist. When the event occured she had memorized every detail of the mans face but in the midst of the trail she had gotten caught up and missed that this man had crooked teeth and the other had not. He then explains all of the factors that explained why she was sur esh ewas right.
1. All of the pictures of men she went through weakend her memorry of the real rapist
2. Your emotions effect you rmemory and judgement
3. To keep herself from further distress the victim enabled a defensive mechanism that kept her from feeling her doughts
4. She left out the teeth in her innicial description because her mind told her it was too ordinary and unimportant

All of these things were not the victims fault, they were natural instincts. This reminds me of a ted video I saw called "Why Eyewitnesses Get it Wrong" in it Scott Fraser explainted how our minds fill in the gaps in our memory with out our control. So we may believe that something is 100% true it could not be.  Kind of a scary concept that we cant even trust ourselves, but it is true.

I started another book...

So I was getting really bored with the other book, which happens a lot. Ill probably come back to it later. Anyway, the book is The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam and seems really interesting. Its about how we behave due to our subconscious minds and how things affect it. Ill get back to you about the first chapter soon.

sleep deprived

So sorry everybody, the tell-yourself-to-wake-up-at-six-and-you-will thing didn't work. I really wanted it to.  I have trouble waking up in the morning so if this worked I was going to be super exited, and maybe even start to believe this guy. Now I have very little faith, but ill keep on reading and see if I can find some more solid facts in it.

Ch 1 continued

Outstanding Differences and Modes of Operation

Here Murphy uses a captain and crew analogy where the captain is the eyes and the crew simply follows his exact instructions. He says your subconscious is the crew and just takes orders from your conscious. So be positive, then your feeding your self good outcomes. I think this is true I feel that bring positive really reflects well on your life but then he loses me with this story.

"Last Christmas Eve a beautiful young university student look at an attractive and rather expensive traveling bag in a store window. She was going home to Buffalo, New York for the holidays. She was about to say I can't afford that bag when she recalled something that she heard of one of my lectures which was "never finish negative statement reverse it immediately. And wonderful things will happen in your life"
She said, "that bag is mine, it is for sale and I accept it mentally, my subconscious sees it that I received it."
At eight o'clock that evening her fiancé gave her the exact bag."

He then proceeds to explain that this was because of her telling her subconscious that this bag was hers. Now I highly doubt that is true I mean it sounds pretty far fetched. I'm not saying that if you shouldn't follow his little never be negative rule I think it's a great idea. However don't expect a Porsche to show in your drive way tomorrow morning because you told yourself it would.

Next he tells a few more stories like this one and summarizes the whole chapter. In this summary Murphy specifically days that if you tell your subconscious mind right before bed to wake you up at six o'clock it will. I am going to put this to the test tonight and let you know if it worked. See you tomorrow morning.

Phoenix

I have a three year old brother named Phoenix. For a while I've been finding it quite odd that he wants to be bigger than everyone, lies blatantly, and believes that pink (along with other things) is for girls and he's a boy so he has to hate it. Now I have no idea how these things came to him, my family certainly doesn't teach him those kinds of things, so how does he get those ideas? He even one time screamed at me for calling him my baby brother because he's a "big boy me no baby!!" What's wrong with being a baby? I don't know but he sure seems to. I don't know how or why we do these things but it seems like it might have to do with the subconscious. Ill look into it and let you know.

I have not recieved any emails back from the professors I have tried to contact, I will send a few more emails and hope to get better results. Wish me luck:)

When u pick a random number is it really random?

I was watching an episode of White Collar, it's a really good show one of my favorites, and the main character mentioned some thing about things never really being random and our subconscious minds always being at work. Of course this caught my attention and really interested me so i did some digging. When some one asks you to pick a random number can it really be random? Can a number even be random or can only a sequence be random? Well I'm not sure so we'll look at both. First up just the number, so when you look at it, any number can be random if it is standing on its own, but it isn't because we make connections to every thing. If you hear the number 7 you'll almost always automatically think of something like that being the age of your cousin or your best friend from childhoods favorite number. Our brains make connections and if you're reading this you've been alive enough to some how make a connection with almost any "random" number. Now moving on to the sequence, when you ask most people to pick a random string of numbers it will sound something like 4, 27, 83, 11, 92 not like 6, 75790555567888764349000075322456456291689.35678905421235667888532355677312466789954, -11123344555, 4008, 1 1/5 right? Whether this is because of familiarity or laziness I don't know, but the second sequence was all numbers, we just don't think about fractions and negatives and decimals and the fact that numbers are INFINITE. We would need to use some pretty huge numbers to be completely random. But isn't it random to just use 6, 10, 4, 3, and 18? I mean really what is random? Here dictionary.com's definition
1.
proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern

So it would need to have no aim, reason, or pattern? That would be kinda hard to do considering everything we do has an aim, reason, or pattern! And with numbers there are so many freaking patterns it would take you forever to find a sequence of numbers with no pattern! How "random" could it be if you had to meticulously figure it out? Is nature random? cause there are patterns in it EVERYWHERE. And if nature isn't random then we sure as heck aren't. So yeah our amazing subconscious is always pattern forming and working its little butt off to make sure we can't pick completely random numbers. Good luck next time you pick your "random" PIN number:)

P.S. if you read that huge decimal number their I give major props

Book talk

I figured out I was reading the book completely wrong, it is actually set in a book format not just random sections like I thought. Oh well, I just started to read it from the beginning again. So the first section just talks about why he wrote the book and all that stuff which is boring. You don't really care about that so ill just move on to the other stuff.

Ch 1- The Treasure House Within You
In the intro he talks about how some people end up really successful and others really struggle. He says that the struggling man is full of doubts and fears and the other is full of confidence and faith. I don't think that this is really true some people that I have seen dont doubt enough and end up getting in some really big messes. But basically what he is saying is that some how he will make you the confident faithful man "born to win and succeed". He then proceeds to tell you that in order to do that you need to train yourself to use your subconscious mind (he wants you to do this by talking to your two minds out loud and demeaning your conscious mind). This all seems kinda like a load of crap to me, I am the complete opposite of gullible, but I try to keep an open mind so if you really believe in it I respect that and completely understand. Actually, I believe that if you really believe that it will work it most likely will. Now this kind of self help book is not what I was looking for. But then he starts to move into some more solid factual things not just his own theories.
Necessity of a Working Basis (each chapter has subsections)
Here he explains his working basis "The universal truth that what ever you impress on your subconscious mind is expressed on the screen of space as condition, experience, and event".Then he talks about praying which I think is very random and unimportant. Even as a practicing Catholic I thought this was very miss placed.
The Duality of Mind
Here Murphy starts to regain my interest. He explains that which I have already learned in a new way. "You have only one mind but possesses two distinct characteristics...The objective and subjective mind, the conscious and subconscious mind, the waking and sleeping mind, the surface self and the deep self, the voluntary and involuntary mind, the male and female, and many others". (male and female gave me a good laugh) So I guess the whole subconscious and unconscious being the same thing is true (according to this ,apparently Ph.D, D.D, guy). He proceeds to talk about the reasoning and not reasoning which I have already talked about then tells me to follow my unreasoning mind? Huuuumm sound a little suspicious.
To be continued....

I sent an email to Candace Pert and am now waiting on a reply. Cross your fingers!

Answer. I think.

I think I might have started to figuring out the whole thing with my dad. So the subconscious controls our instincts and it was instinctive that my dad found it a moment to be documented. Of course this instinct was brought on by every thing his subconscious has stored through out his life.

New book!

I started to read "The Power of Your Subconscious Mind" it is split up into little sections and I read the "Conscious And Subconscious Terms differentiated". It is quite obvious what it was about, but it was written in a way that made it easy to understand. What it said was that the conscious mind is your reasoning mind, it tells you what must be right and what must be wrong. Your subconscious has no reasoning abilities it simply stores anything that you once believed as true no matter how false it may be. This made me understand a lot more about how we learn and understand things. Have you ever noticed that when you learn something it's almost impossible to unlearn? Like when one of your teachers teaches you something one way then another teaches you a different way it's really hard to follow the new way. I also believe this is why older people have a hard time being open minded and willing to change, their mind has been stuffed with "truth" their whole lives while younger generations are still learning all those "truths" so are more excepting of new ideas. Sorry to cut it short but I have to go I'll elaborate on this more later.

An Update

Yesterday I went to the library and got two new books; The Power of Your Subconcsious Mind by Joseph Murphy and The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam. They seem to be more what I was looking for hopfully I'll find them more interesting than my original book. Sorry I wasn't able to start reading already, my brother broke his arm last night and I was at the hospital. I'll keep you posted on that, oh, and I'm currently trying to contact Candace Pert.

Hurray!

So I asked one of my friends to help me a little with my research, she's really good with that kind of stuff, and she found a neuroscientist named Candance Pert that looks pretty promising. From what I've seen she focuses on the science behind the subconcious, which is what I'm interested in, and has written a book called "Your Body is Your Subconscious Mind". Now i know there are people that have stubied the science behind the subconcious not just the new age stuff, bye-bye Nobel Prize.

Secret agent?

So I was so desperate for some clarity I looked in "The Complete Idiots Guide to Psychology" and found that it described our subconscious mind as sort of our "secret agent" which I found to be really interesting. In it the author explained what I have been talking about in the past few posts the whole subconscious stores every thing thing. It also gave an example of people being able to recall conversations doctors had while they were being worked on that they couldn't possibly have known. Of course the methods of getting this information can seem a little sketchy. Hypnosis, I mean, it sounds completely crazy but many people swear to its accomplishments and we must stay open minded so I say why not?

Daddy Dilemma

So today my Dad came home from work and asked my brother how he'd done at his cross country meet, my brother proceeded to turn around and show him his shirt that said "Invitational Champions". Of course my dad became very happy and was all "good job son"s and "I'm so proud of you"s etc. etc.   so then he asked my mother to take a picture of him and Preston, my brother, with the shirt on. I couldn't help but notice that he never took a picture of me with my Educational Award of Honor certificate signed by the freakin' president or any of the other awards I've gotten for being smart. I mean honestly its not like Preston actually won it himself he just got it because his TEAM could run fast. And I know my dad was proud of me for all of my stuff too, it just isn't celebrated as publicly as a physical victory. Some people may disagree but I think our society puts a higher honor an physical talents. Not many people I know sit down as a family to watch the national math bowl, but they do watch their local sports teams and the Olympics. Now I'm not saying that my father purposefully decided that my brother was more accomplished then I, in fact the opposite, I know my dad would rather have us both be intelligent than good at sports. However he has grown up in America where he has been effected by society and the media and he SUBCONSCIOUSLY found this moment to be a moment of honor and needing of documentation, which is exactly what is happening all around us all the time. So I'm not yet sure how this part of subconscious works but i'll figure it out soon, and that is also why this is labeled under Random thoughts.

So I Wikipedia-ed Subconscious, after my teacher told me it was ok to use as a starting point, because I was pretty lost and confused. Basically every thing I found about the subconcious was theoretical and very "new age" "hippie" kinda stuff, which I'm really not interested in. I'm a science kinda girl and enjoy hard facts. Of course good old Wikipedia explained why, in the very first sentence "The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a definition-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings." I was a little disappointed to see this but that just means that I can be the one to make it scientific fact and well known, heck it can get me the Noble Prize. Ok so maybe not, but I can still learn a lot and actually discover something new, which would be amazing!

Now moving onto some more serious stuff,  I am also pretty confused on the whole Subconcious vs. Unconscious thing. What this article says is that when people say the word "subconscious" they really just mean Unconscious. I have no idea how to move forward on an area of study that doesn't technically exist. Yet, which is confusing me more than any thing, I have found some actual information on the subconscious, or is it all wrong? I honestly don't know.
 So then I scrolled down the article and it talked about how the subconscious is our instincts. I thought it didn't exist? well anyway I really like what this is sections saying. It explains that our subconscious stores information from every thing we see and saves it, then when we need it to survive (or even for solving puzzles and other things like that) it sends it to our conscious minds (this is the subconscious I though I was studying). There are even special people called Psychoanalysts who work on retrieving the information stored in your subconscious, which usually is stuff we cant really process or understand very quickly. The article even explains a book called "The Gift of Fear" where the author speaks of the phenomena of that feeling we get when we know something bad is about to happen. This feeling is behind your subconscious using clues from your past and forming in the present what it beleives will happen causing that feeling in your gut that tells you somethings wrong. Basically its just your subconscious talking to your conscious. Of course in society everyone says your crazy when this happens to you, how could you know, right? we aren't mind readers and we can't see the future. Most people when they get this feeling just shrug it off, but why would you, we all get that feeling don't we? Well yeah we do, wether we want to believe it or not we are animals and animals have instincts. How do animals like pigeons fly thousands of miles back to their homes (my uncle races pigeons, yeah I know, weird, but almost all of them come back every single time), or some how all the animals in an area evacuating before a natural disaster? They have instincts and they follow them. There apparently is some pretty cool stuff that our subconscious minds do even though they don't exist...?

Book fail

I had a book called "Structure of Mind" that I thought would help me with my topic but so far it really hasn't so I'm getting a new book. Thats why I haven't really been posting much. But I'll get on it and try to keep you posted on some stuff I find else where. I have also found that Freud is very well known for his works on the subconscious I'll also try to get a good book of his experiments and findings.

School all year?

School all year long? In class we discussed this after we all finished Outleirs. I believe that have school all year would reap children of many important life skills. For example how will you have a summer job if you dont have a summer? Summer jobs are important they teach about real life, which I believe is more important than the kind of "real life" school teaches us. Don't get me wrong I love school but my grandmother only went to school from 3rd to 6th grade and she is a very personable intelligent lady. You would never know she barely had an education because she learned everything she needed to know though working her whole life and really experiencing the things school is supposed to teach us to avoid. Her life was hard she moved here from another country with a small child and had to support her self. Not only this but it teaches you how to interact with people. So yeah you can see that I LOVE summer vacation! And that they shouldn't get rid of it.

While in class they made us write short journals i am now going to share those with you.

My birht date and how that applies to what the book said.
End of April
First born
I learned that i'm sort of at the middle-end of what is, by this book, considered the top range of performance. So I have exceded my expectations but not by that much. I am the oldest child in my family and have been in accelerated classes while my brother is the youngest in his class and he is not in accelerated classes. I do believe that this book states a pretty accurate representation of my experiences.

The 10,000 hours.
My Time
I think that I have spent most of my life reading or dancing. Of course I have spent more time reading than I have dancing. I have read every night for about an hour to a half hour ever since I was probably in third grade. However I started dancing at age two at about 2 hours of class a week and that grew periodically to now 6 hours a week.

My topic of choice and why.
My topic of choice has nothing to do with dancing, which is my passion. I think that this is okay because I dance for pleasure and enjoyment. I can dance for fun forever but I know that my intellectual self will not be satisfied with it as a career. Basicly everything involves reading so that is still going to be a part of my psychological aspiration.

That is some of the journals I've written in class have to how Outleirs relates to me and why I chose this subconcious project.

The subconcious controls our instincts. One of the examples I found most oftenly was the car driving one. Basicly it explains that when you are learning some thing you have to focus on it really hard and not have any other distractions, but after a while you no longer have to consciously think about it and it becomes instinctive. That is what the subconcious mind does it allows you to do things and yet still be able to be doing some thing else. One day when I was walking home from school (I was probably in fifth or sixth grade) I saw this tree that had grown into the sidewalk I had seen this tree hundreds of times and wondered if some one was walking and not paying attention if they would run into it. So I tried to distract myself and see if I walked directly into it, i didn't. I realized that with out thinking about it what so ever my body swirved around the tree, my steps nautaly moved along the curve of the sidewalk around the tree, even though I felt as if I was still walking in a perfectly straight line. This always puzzled and amazed me and now I know exacly why that happens. Our subconscious mind is a powerful thing that allows us to lead our lives the way we do.

So I was reading this article online and based on what it said I came to the conclution that our subconcious is basicly what controls how people percieve us and how we preceive them (or what makes you you). The subconcious mind holds all of our experiences and controls how we react to things, the way that you react to things and your experiences are what, I beleive, makes you you. Preceiving has a big part in how we act for example when your speaking to some one and you use a certain word that word could be a "trigger" to a specific experience, and everybody has different experiences linked to different "triggers" and different ways of percieving those triggers. So even if, for example, you say something and you mean it as a compliment that person may take it as an insult. So my studies on the subconscious mind are turning out to be useful in real life situations, I hope they are for you too!

In class we had to read this book called outliers, it was a great book I would recomend it, but moving on we are suppoesd to share what we larned. I learned that if I work really hard and get 10,000 hours on one single thing, and get the exact right opppertunities, oh and if I was born at the right time I can be really successful. This I think is a little ridiculous but in many cases the author proved it true. I honestly don't know what to beleive, I just think if I keep working hard and make opppertunities for myself i'll end up ok. Although I do hope I end up more than just ok.

Hey guys! ok so I'm supposed to tell you what I already know about the subconscious, which isn't much. I once heard that every thing you see and hear and feel is somewhere stored in your brain and thats the part of the brain that we can't really get to, I of course was fascinated by the fact that we have a  very important part of us that we have no way of reaching or really understanding. I would really like to know more about where all of this is stored and how it is organized in a way that we basically can't ever find but is still used and important to our lives. Hope you'll join me in this journey to the unknown!

~America

P.S. If you know anything about this stuff comment and let me know!!

    My mission for this blog is to share my thoughts and findings about the subconscious with the world, or whoever happens to be reading this, so that people can see things form the perspective of an average ninth grader. I will do this by sharing everything I find and ponder about the subconscious, I will also strongly elaborate so that people can fully understand my thoughts.

Hi! and welcome to my blog. I'm a ninth grader that has created this blog for a class project and am really exited to start this new experience!