Sugru can fix it!

Bottom of Shoe and Grip on a Cup

     I love wearing tennis shoes because they make my feet comfortable. But as I kept wearing them, there was one area on the bottom of the right shoe that was tearing so when we go the sugru in class I looked on the sugru Internet site to get some of idea. Then I had an insight moment that my shoe could use some fixing. When I put it on the shoe and a day later it stayed on the shoe. The left is the before and the right is the after picture.

   When ever I want a nice cup of coffee or hot chocolate, I would want it in a cup. But when I pour the hot beverage in it, the cup would also get hot and I would loose a grip on the handle. At that moment I had to use either my gloves or my sleeves on my shirts that I was wearing at the moment. So then I thought a new fixation way to make it better. I would use the sugru and make a hand grip so I could have a sturdier grip to the cup. The left is the before and the right is the after picture.

24 hours to what we want to learn about....OK

Hippocampus and Memory

  

   The thing that I wanted to learn more was about the hippocampus that had to deal with memory. The hippocampus is one of the major parts in the brain. It is also apart of the limbic system that their roles have to deal with the long-term and short-term memory loss. For human and some animals there are two of them that are located on each side of the brain. But in many studies that have been done is when they took some rats from a certain part of their brain for spatial memory and also for navigation within their environment.

   Researcher notice that the hippocampus is a larger part of the  medial temporal lobe memory that is important for the memories that need to be verbalized. When there is more activity during sleep after a long training day there is a better chance to have better memory the next day. Usually those certain memories are not really in the hippocampus that long after that. In our psychology book it said that if the left side of the  hippocampus was damaged, people would have trouble remembering verbal information, but they have no trouble recalling the visual designs and the locations. But when that happens to the right side, the problem is reversed. My only question is why does it reverse if one side is damaged?

The resources that i used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus

Our Book from class

Here's a video from TED that talks about how our brain tells us where we are.

Operant Conditioning

My mom uses it on me all the time

   Whenever I need to get something for a class or just something for sport practice my mom would tell me that i would have to earn them in order to get the thing that I need. When i was a little girl I was kind of little spoiled and got what I wanted; from dolls to easy bake ovens. But now that I am older I have to start help around the house. At first when I did it, I never got a reward....but then when my mom actually seeing me doing the dishes and taking out the garbage, she started to give me money whenever i was helping. As for I didn't what I need to do she would not give me any. Parents do this to their kids because when they give their kids a reward for doing chores, then the kids know that they know they are do something good. But if they don't do what they were suppose to, then they either get taken away or they could get grounded for a certain amount of time.

 

In our book on page 315 there are 4 steps for home to reinforce your behaviors and others:

1. State your goal
2. Monitor how often you engage in your desired behavior
3. Reinforce the desired behavior
4. Reduce the rewards gradually

Taste Testing

Can we tell the difference?

   For us....taste can be very important to us. Inside our mouth or tongue has little bumps on the top and on the side of it, there are 200 more buds. Each of them containing a pore that can catch chemical from foods. But the ingredients in the drinks and food can change the taste. In an article from the New York Times called Knowing the Ingredients Can Change the Taste (article link here) was talking about know the ingredient in different kinds of beers. By telling people an ingredient from the different beers they tested, it would change the preference before they even drank them. Also in some other studies that they did was by putting a brand label on the those drinks tend to boost people's rating on the quality of them. The inter part in this article was that there were 60% of people in a blind test said that they could not tell the difference that contained vinegar but actually preferred balsamic.

  

What Makes Us Moral?

Good or Bad?

  

    This video that I found was pretty interesting. In this video from 60 minutes they did this experiment on babies if they knew wright from wrong. They do the experiment is that they put on a puppet show and have a character having a hard time with the box.a puppy in a yellow shirt helps the puppet open the box while the puppy in the green shirt just shuts the box. In the end, most of the babies choose the nice puppy. There were different baby studies but there were also studies that were tested on older kid on if the kids wanted to share the same amount of coins or have more than them. How this connect to class was that Lawrence Kohlberg talked about as we development moral reasoning, the thinking that we consider right or wrong.    

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I had an ice addiction!

 The 48 hours:

    Those 48 hours was a hard. I had to hide this from my mom and I had to hide it from my friends. But the hard part was trying to find a place that I can get ice from. The place I thought was the foods room, but they need it for a food lab that they were doing. I knew that the training room had some but I didn't have enough time to see if I could get some. When I went him I filled some tiny cups and put it in my bottle the next day. The second of this the ice lasted the whole day.

   How this made me feel to lie to my mom and my friends was pretty hard. First my mom kept asking what I was doing with a bunch of ice in my cup. What I said to her was that I like my water with a lot of ice in it so I can chew on the ice. Then I told her she didn't need to worry and then she was fine with it. But with my friends thought that I was going a little crazy. They kept asking why I was going crazy and I told them I just was having a bad day. They were kinda of worried and I told them Ill be better tomorrow.

   To me, I was even surprised that I was acting all crazy just to get the ice that I wanted. I kept asking people around the school when I can get some. My mom and my friends noticed that I did in that 48 hour period and they didn't like it one bit. They next day they were like are you back to your normal self and I said yes. I can see how parents that have kids that are doing drugs. Sometimes they want to help them but they can't do anything. They can try to talk to their kids about it but there kids would probably will say they don't have a problem.

I need better balance and coordination.

Blog #2

       Ever since I got into sports, I would need some kind of coordination and balance. For track and field, you need the coordination from running to throwing shot put. My main even in track is throwing shot and discus. The main thing that you need is balance and coordination. In balance, you would need to control the way how you want to hold the shot put and the discus.The other par for balance is the way you want to stand and how you want to stand. For coordination is for the amount of speed to have to get the out of your hands. You are probably thinking how this connects to class? The cerebellum mostly helps out with coordinating movement and and the balance. If you ever injured your cerebellum, it would be a hard time walking, keeping the balance or shaking hands. For example: David Beckham plays for a soccer team in California and he has to find the perfect time to hit the ball in the net. He has to do that while the other team tries to block him. Like my mom always tells me it's better to be coordinated then not. (I know that part is not funny)

Rat gets a digital cerebellum?

  

   This article was about restoring the an artificial cerebellum into some rats that have lost function in the brain. With a new cerebellum. it could soon replace parts of tissues that might have ruined from different kinds of conditions. Matti Mintz from Tel Aviv University in Israel created a synthetic cerebellum that which it can get sensory from the brain-stem. What it can do is that is sends a signal to the different areas of the brain-stem to send the information. One of the functions was of the cerebellum is to help coordination and time the movement. They tested the chips in two ways: one way was turning it on and the other time was not even connecting the chip to the rat. Like this person, we wanted to learn the way the cerebellum move and learn the sequences. And also to learn about the motor reflexes that everyone has. If we ever lived without our cerebellum, then we wouldn't find our way and we would keep losing our balance and falling all over the place.

The link for the article link is in the title.

It's time to begin a new class

Expectation for the class:

     How I feel about taking this class...well I am little nervous about it. I have never taken an AP class, but I know I can get through this class. But when I took the regular psychology with Mrs. Wollersheim, I loved learning about everything in the class. The bad thing was that it was only one term class. Then when I signed up for this class, I knew there will be a lot of reading...which i'm not really a fast reader. So that means I'll read in advance so I don't forget. The one thing I am mostly scared about this class is the quizzes and the test. In all my life in school, I know that I am not a good test or quiz taker. But I can get better and I just got to study more for them. The topics that I am excited for is The Biology of Mind, Memory, and Psychological Disorders. 

Blog #1:

    In all the math class that I have taken through high school, we have learned how to make graphs. Sometimes graphing number can be tricky. Within the problem there are all these different numbers that you need to for the x-axes and the y-axes. For the homework assignment for this class we had to make a scatter plot graph and find the direction. On the sheet that we got with students scores from the AP exams, their grade and their ACT scores. At first...I didn't where to begin; then I thought I should take the the score of the AP exams and the ACT composite score and put it one the graph. Whenever Psychologist are doing some experiment or a study, they do this so they can look at their results to see if it was a good experiment or they could think that there is one thing that could be wrong and might have to re calculate.