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
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
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.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, December 7, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
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.
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