This blog post is a connection to Chapter Nine: Intelligence and Language.
While reading through this unit, I was particularly intrigued with the language portion of the textbook. I thought it was crazy how U.S. states have passed laws that outlaw bilingual education. This reminds me of "tally sticks" in Ireland in the 19th century. In order to push English as the official language of the country, schoolchildren had to wear tally sticks on a piece of string around their neck. Every time they spoke in Irish Gaelic, a tally would be scratched into their stick. At the end of each school day, children would receive punishments based on how many tally marks were on their tally stick. Although outlawing the teaching of bilingualism isn't as extreme as Irish tally sticks, they both discourage the use of languages other than English, which I think is absurd.
In a time when Spanish is becoming more and more common, it is important to know different languages -- especially in a country as diverse as America. For instance, when I was volunteering at a camp this summer there was a Spanish camper who didn't speak English. In order to keep him informed and on task, we had to translate all of the instructions into Spanish for him. If I hadn't been learning basic Spanish since I was six, I wouldn't have been able to help the camper. This is a common occurrence in South Florida, and it really pushes the importance of knowing multiple languages to communicate with as many people as possible. Although knowing English is typically crucial to success in numerous fields, bilingualism is extremely beneficial as well.
Furthermore, this unit also reminded me (once again) of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks. In the first case study, Mr. P lost his spatial intelligence, but still exhibited exceptional musical intelligence. As seen in Gardener's Eight Types of Intelligence, there are various ways people can display intelligence, even if they lack one type. I fully believe in this model and I don't think that a single test can truly determine someone's intelligence. People excel in a wide variety of things, and poor performance on an IQ test doesn't indicate a lack of intelligence.
Sunday, July 16, 2017
Sunday, July 9, 2017
Jogging My Memory
This blog post is a connection to Chapter Eight: Remembering & Judging.
Memory plays an integral role in our daily lives, whether it be reminiscing on childhood memories or desperately racking your brain for a confirmation code you wrote down an hour ago. In fact, memory is a vital component of learning, and a lot of academic learning in school relies on your semantic memory, or a part of your long-term memory that processes concepts and facts that you didn't learn from personal experience (like your multiplication tables or the formula for photosynthesis).
Personally, I love to learn, especially through podcasts and videos I find online. Reading through the processes of memory explained in this chapter got me thinking about my many experiences listening to podcasts while jogging. Although I am typically listening to podcasts focused on wildlife and the environment, I have learned about everything from strange diseases to the history behind specific words. However, I don't always retain all of the information being monotonously spoken into my ears during my workout. Whether due to distraction or a lack of visual aids, I find that sometimes the information I hear doesn't make it to my long term memory, and I occasionally ask myself what I just listened to for the past ten minutes.
Further, something else that this chapter made me think of was the popular podcast series, Serial. In this series, investigative journalist Sarah Koenig reports on a murder in the Baltimore area in 1999. High school senior Adnan Syed was found guilty of killing his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, but may friends, family members, and acquaintances swear his innocence. Throughout the episodes, Koenig unveils several inconsistencies in stories and gaps in memories while interviewing several people who knew Adnan and Hae. Koenig suspects that Adnan, for one, may have forgotten the events of the day Hae went missing because up until he discovered she was missing later that night, it was a completely normal day that blended in with the rest (in the case that he is innocent). Other inconsistencies may be attributed to the fact that the murder happened eighteen years ago, and a significant amount of time has clearly passed. Similarly, I once watched a 60 Minutes segment where they experimented with recall and memory by setting up a fake robbery and then asking bystanders questions about it. However, they planted fake-bystanders in the interrogation room who didn't actually see the crime, but said incorrect facts to see how many people's memories they could interfere with with their false information. Evidently, human memory is a tricky, and the result of several complex processes.
Memory plays an integral role in our daily lives, whether it be reminiscing on childhood memories or desperately racking your brain for a confirmation code you wrote down an hour ago. In fact, memory is a vital component of learning, and a lot of academic learning in school relies on your semantic memory, or a part of your long-term memory that processes concepts and facts that you didn't learn from personal experience (like your multiplication tables or the formula for photosynthesis).
Personally, I love to learn, especially through podcasts and videos I find online. Reading through the processes of memory explained in this chapter got me thinking about my many experiences listening to podcasts while jogging. Although I am typically listening to podcasts focused on wildlife and the environment, I have learned about everything from strange diseases to the history behind specific words. However, I don't always retain all of the information being monotonously spoken into my ears during my workout. Whether due to distraction or a lack of visual aids, I find that sometimes the information I hear doesn't make it to my long term memory, and I occasionally ask myself what I just listened to for the past ten minutes.
Further, something else that this chapter made me think of was the popular podcast series, Serial. In this series, investigative journalist Sarah Koenig reports on a murder in the Baltimore area in 1999. High school senior Adnan Syed was found guilty of killing his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, but may friends, family members, and acquaintances swear his innocence. Throughout the episodes, Koenig unveils several inconsistencies in stories and gaps in memories while interviewing several people who knew Adnan and Hae. Koenig suspects that Adnan, for one, may have forgotten the events of the day Hae went missing because up until he discovered she was missing later that night, it was a completely normal day that blended in with the rest (in the case that he is innocent). Other inconsistencies may be attributed to the fact that the murder happened eighteen years ago, and a significant amount of time has clearly passed. Similarly, I once watched a 60 Minutes segment where they experimented with recall and memory by setting up a fake robbery and then asking bystanders questions about it. However, they planted fake-bystanders in the interrogation room who didn't actually see the crime, but said incorrect facts to see how many people's memories they could interfere with with their false information. Evidently, human memory is a tricky, and the result of several complex processes.
Friday, July 7, 2017
Books & Brains
This post is a connection to Chapter Three: Brains, Bodies, and Behavior.
While reading through the portion of my Introducing Psychology textbook pertaining to brain function this year, I was strongly reminded of one of my favorite authors, Lisa Genova. As a former neuroscientist, several of Genova's novels feature main characters suffering from neurological diseases that impair their brain function, such as Still Alice, Genova's New York Times bestselling novel (and eventual hit movie) focused on a woman suffering from early-onset dementia. My favorite book of Genova's, however, is Inside the O'Briens. Though it may be a bit of a tear-jerker, Inside the O'Briens is riddled with heaps of information on what is referred to as the "cruelest disease known to mankind," Huntington's disease, which is the illness that the O'Briens find themselves suffering from. Huntington's is passed down genetically through family members, and is the result of excessive CAG trinucleotide repeats within the HD gene (above the normal maximum amount of 36). Huntington's disease primarily affects the brain's basal ganglia, which then inadvertently impairs other areas of the brain, and causes cognitive, muscular, behavioral, mood, and psychological issues. For example, Joe O'Brien is seen suffering from unexplained involuntary muscle movements prior to his diagnosis, and later remembers his mother suffering from depression and cholera (from Huntington's) when he was a child.
Something else that came to mind while reading about brain function was my cousin who was recently diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). After experiencing temporary blindness and muscular issues, she visited a doctor who revealed her disease. MS is an autoimmune disease where the nervous system attacks the myelin sheath of nerves in the brain and causes numerous symptoms, such as anxiety, vision loss, involuntary movements, slurred speech, and more. There are also different types of MS, and while some patients worsen steadily over time, others experience bouts of symptoms during relapses and remissions. Although a decent amount of information regarding MS is known, a lot has yet to be discovered, like a definite cause for the illness. Diseases like MS show how much information has yet to be discovered about the brain and its impairments.
Lastly, this week I began reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, which brought me back to thinking about all of the parts of the brain I learned about. In his intriguing collection of case studies, Sacks details several strange neurological impairments and diseases experienced by various patients he encountered over the years. In the first chapter, Sacks recounts the story of a puzzling patient, Dr. P, who exhibited an array of strange behaviors when he visited Sack's office for a diagnosis. For instance, before leaving Sacks' office, Dr. P grabbed his wife's head and tried to pick it up because he mistook her for his hat -- hence the name of the book. Eventually, Dr. P's condition was dubbed "face blindness," and is a result of complications with the right fusiform gyrus, which is part of the temporal and occipital lobes of the brain and -- although scientists haven't fully identified its function, they know it has something to do with recognition pathways. Diseases and impairments like the ones written about by Genova and Sacks and the one exhibited by my cousin truly demonstrate the complexity of the human brain, and remind me of how many different functions in our bodies it controls.
While reading through the portion of my Introducing Psychology textbook pertaining to brain function this year, I was strongly reminded of one of my favorite authors, Lisa Genova. As a former neuroscientist, several of Genova's novels feature main characters suffering from neurological diseases that impair their brain function, such as Still Alice, Genova's New York Times bestselling novel (and eventual hit movie) focused on a woman suffering from early-onset dementia. My favorite book of Genova's, however, is Inside the O'Briens. Though it may be a bit of a tear-jerker, Inside the O'Briens is riddled with heaps of information on what is referred to as the "cruelest disease known to mankind," Huntington's disease, which is the illness that the O'Briens find themselves suffering from. Huntington's is passed down genetically through family members, and is the result of excessive CAG trinucleotide repeats within the HD gene (above the normal maximum amount of 36). Huntington's disease primarily affects the brain's basal ganglia, which then inadvertently impairs other areas of the brain, and causes cognitive, muscular, behavioral, mood, and psychological issues. For example, Joe O'Brien is seen suffering from unexplained involuntary muscle movements prior to his diagnosis, and later remembers his mother suffering from depression and cholera (from Huntington's) when he was a child.
Something else that came to mind while reading about brain function was my cousin who was recently diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). After experiencing temporary blindness and muscular issues, she visited a doctor who revealed her disease. MS is an autoimmune disease where the nervous system attacks the myelin sheath of nerves in the brain and causes numerous symptoms, such as anxiety, vision loss, involuntary movements, slurred speech, and more. There are also different types of MS, and while some patients worsen steadily over time, others experience bouts of symptoms during relapses and remissions. Although a decent amount of information regarding MS is known, a lot has yet to be discovered, like a definite cause for the illness. Diseases like MS show how much information has yet to be discovered about the brain and its impairments.
Lastly, this week I began reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, which brought me back to thinking about all of the parts of the brain I learned about. In his intriguing collection of case studies, Sacks details several strange neurological impairments and diseases experienced by various patients he encountered over the years. In the first chapter, Sacks recounts the story of a puzzling patient, Dr. P, who exhibited an array of strange behaviors when he visited Sack's office for a diagnosis. For instance, before leaving Sacks' office, Dr. P grabbed his wife's head and tried to pick it up because he mistook her for his hat -- hence the name of the book. Eventually, Dr. P's condition was dubbed "face blindness," and is a result of complications with the right fusiform gyrus, which is part of the temporal and occipital lobes of the brain and -- although scientists haven't fully identified its function, they know it has something to do with recognition pathways. Diseases and impairments like the ones written about by Genova and Sacks and the one exhibited by my cousin truly demonstrate the complexity of the human brain, and remind me of how many different functions in our bodies it controls.
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