Chapter 8 - Language, Thinking, & Reasoning

This chapter does a pretty good job of rounding the bases, but what i thought was neat was how children learn language.

Confirmed by the book, babies begin to recognize their mother’s voice as early as 5 months after conception. Get ready for this because it’s adorable: Babbling, the nonsense vocalization that babies produce, aka mock conversation, is them fine-tuning their vocal tracts as well as ears to the sound of their voice. They’re mimicking the conversational tone that they hear from their parents. Comprehension of words comes much sooner than production. By 6 months they can probably recognize their own names around 10-12 months are able to produce commonly used words, a.e. mommy. They can speak about 100 of these simple words by 18 months and recognize hundreds. Come Kindergarten, they grasp language and weave thousands of vocabulary words into sentences. However, in between 6 years and 6 months, a lot of practice has been implemented. Children start speakin the one word stage, which is when children try to portray one entire thought with one word. Pretty self-explanatory. As they accumulate a wider range of vocabulary, they combine words and one word becomes two-word stage. Noun-verb most of the time.

Deaf children activate their conversational skills once they begin to use their hands more frequently. In a way, sign language is very similar to spoken language because it uses words, syntax, and extralinguistic cues like facial expression and posture.  Babies who sign also will babble with their hands. However, with different spoken languages that surround an infant, the child will pick up on the one that is spoken most regularly, usually by the mother, and everything else is a secondary language. We’ve all heard it, children learn 2nd languages better than adults, and it’s true because the critical period for language development is during these years, where the brain is still learning and growing, gained knowledge embeds much more willingly. The opposite also applies. With immigrant children who know one language and then move to America and use English in everyday life, lose their advanced speaking ability of their native tongue that they had arrived with despite their family’s usage.

Given this, I guess you could say language is more nurture than nature…but then…where did it all begin ? The chicken or the egg? Deep…this is deep stuff.

Dreaming about Chapter 5

Reading Chapter 5, I felt left out. All these odd sleeping conditions I've never been a victim of makes me pity my youthfulness. On my To Do List, I have yet to: Be abducted by aliens, awake without the ability to move, fall asleep randomly, and enjoy a night-terror. On this blog, I'm going to talk about everything but drugs and hypnosis because that was booooring.

Having the sleep cycle explained helped my understanding of dreams and sufficient sleep. It makes sense to me how during the first 2 cycles we are in deep sleep, aka stages 3 & 4. But as we lighten up towards the end, the sleep cycle tapers off from stage 2, we're ready to function by 6 hours of sleep which explains why despite my lack of sleep, i still wake up and feel completely rejuvenated. So what if i die sooner, at least i'll have lived. I feel the later i sleep, the more fatigued i feel and the sooner i fall asleep the next evening. I like that better, I'm going to keep staying up late =D. Now Lucid dreaming is something that I frequently do. It's always that stage when dreams become visual, I'll hit the bridge (which i just learned is called Lucid Dreaming) and just lie there and try to let the dream finish on a good note. Like, I'll know i'm dreaming but i just want to know how it ends, gahh frusturating.

When I was younger, I was part of the percentile the sleep-walked frequently. I would take trips to the bathroom, except never reach the bathroom at all. In the morning, I'd be informed of the mess I'd created and just laugh innocently about it because it was while i was sleeping.

As much as I want to believe Freud about symbolism in dreams, I must face the truth and realize they don't mean anything beyond what my imagination can conjure. I think that's the beauty of dreams, to think they mean more than they actually do. Like a horoscope, but metaphysical, not pseudoscience. Most of my dreams that I remember are about my ex, so I'm guessing that dreams are about desires of the subconcious- or the stream of consciousness as our book describes. Just like in dreams, we only remember things that stand out to us, because it's important. Neurocognitive theory suggests we can only dream about what we know. Our biased minds are limited to our emotions. I feel like I was better off not knowing this =( Chapter 5, thanks for proving everything I thought I knew about dreams wrong

Memorizing Chapter 7

The Paradox of memory: Why we can memorize complex ideas but sometimes forget where we parked. Our memory tends to memorize selectively, basically on the importance level that we associate each possible instance. There are 3 systems of memory that each event must go through in order to be recognized. At first we have Sensory Memory, which is the brief storage of perceptual information that lasts for no more than 3 seconds. Sensory, like senses, we’ll hear, see, smell, taste—Sense something that will peak our interest and continue into short-term memory. Short term memory is the most important, most used; in fact you’re using it right now while you process what I’m telling you about memory, nuts huh? Short-term memory is the thing you’re thinking about at the moment; essentially we’re always in this mode. But Marco! What about long-term memory? Oh yes, we’re getting there. Short-term is pretty neat because we can draw long-term memories back or at least imprint them into our LTM through rehearsal. It’s when we quiz ourselves, and think about things multiple times that help us remember something important is coming up. The opposite of rehearsal is called decay, and it’s when we forget things but I doubt you’ll forget about the concept of decay, pretty self-explanatory. We memorize things best by chunking information, like numbers and dates. Por ejemplo, 1,639 (One thousand, six hundred, and thirty nine) is easier to remember than with separate digits—one-six-three-nine. Am I right? Well if you’re too good for 4 digits, then try ampin up the number there, sport. The average span of short term memory is 7 plus or minus two meaning we can jugle 7 plus or minus 2 pieces of information within our STM. Basically, just walk away knowing chunking information works best, and you’ll be just fine. And if the connection with the event is strong enough, it will stay in our long-term memory as long as continue to rehearse it frequently. There are different ways we access our LTM too, get excited.

Explicit memories are the memories that we are consciously aware of, the ones that we dig for when we’re thinking, so think VOLUNTARY. Semantic, think meaning and relevance, like factual events-knowledge, book smarts, whatever you wanna call it, this describes semantic memory. The other type of explicit memory is called episodic memory, referring to autobiographic events, things we see 1^st person in our heads, also voluntary. Explicit, things we gotta think about? If you can capture that in your short-term memory, rehearse it and store it as semantic memory, I think we can move on. Well done, blogger.
The other type of LTM is called implicit memory, which is made up of four sub sections of memory, the things we can recall automatically, or INVOLUNTARY. When your mom tells you to practice your tennis serve and develop muscle memory so you don’t have another losing record this year, she’s alluding to procedural memory which is motor memory, also relevant in speech, even in vocal music. 2 other implicit memory subtypes sound a lot like Procedural memory, they are Conditioning and Habituation but I’m not really sure how to describe them seeming as their Marco definitions would probably sound a lot like the one for procedural. Ok then…well the final type is called priming which is our preparation or response time to a stimulus that we’ve previously encountered. Our actions are guided by primes them, kinda neat. The example in the book goes like this: Fill in the blank—Queen, K_____ and most of us will probably think “King”, yeah? Well we’ve been primed to do so based on the word Queen. I wish I had a personal example, but my episodic memory is failing me.

Well that’s the first couple sections of C7 and probably the most exciting, fare thee well, bloggers!

Learning about Learning - Chapter 6

One thing that I never put into perspective is where we draw all our knowledge from. Observing, trial-and-error, etc. What's cool is all those things we thought we knew about learning all have neat, little labels. So lets get crackin, Chapter 6, Geronimo!

Now everyone has seen this episode of The Office
http://www.spike.com/video-clips/0jnov0/the-office-the-jim-trains-dwight
and now that you have, you'll probably remember Jim saying something about a certain scientist who taught dogs to salvate. AHA! That scientist was reknowned, Russian physicist, Ivan Pavlov. He noticed that dogs responded to food by slobbering profusely over the sight of food. He soon noticed that the dogs also reacted similarily to his footsteps before dinner. He saw that the dog slobbering at the sight of food was an unconditioned response (meaning an involuntary action, something the dog innately did) and that the food was the unconditioned stimulus, because the natural response to delectable morsles is to slobber over them. Pavlov recognized that his footsteps set off an alarm for the dog so he designed an experiment to test his theory of this "alarm". Pavlov had his pooch strapped into a harness, and set a dish of dog food behind a blind. He then would set off a metronome before feeding the dog, and eventually, just like in the video, the dog began to salvate at the sound of the metronome. It knew food was on the way. The metronome represented a conditioned stimulus, meaning it was learned, aquired, to drool in response to the ticking noise.
Likewise, Dwight Shrute was conditioned to the computer sound, but he expected a treat to be presented and it wasn't offered. What a fool! Actually, that type of experimentation, withholding the altoid or doggy dish is called extinction, because it is the removal of the conditioned stimulus causing the response. The Dwight would soon learn that the computer noise would not always follow an altoid. However, should the altoid ever be rewarded again after the noise, a spontaneous recovery would be established and Dwight would pick up his old habit again. This is called Classical Conditioning, should Dwight or the dog hear a similar noise, but not the exact same one, they may respond in one of two ways.
Stimulus gerneralization is when the stimuli is close but no cigar, regardless the same response will be made as if it was made by the original stimuli. Stimulus discrimination would be the ignorance of a similar stimuli, or a less pronounced response as it says in the book. If there's one important thing outta Chapter 6, this is it!