Language in Children

I found the part in this chapter about how children learn and develop language to be extremely interesting. One reason I found it interesting was because it talks about how fetuses can learn some language, stories, and the sound of their mothers voice. My friend is currently pregnant and I know they read stories to the baby and stuff and I know one of my moms friends spoke Spanish and English to her baby before it was born so that it would come out and supposedly would be able to speak Spanish and English easily since she is Mexican and her husband is white. Also, in the movie Baby Mama she has her baby listen to Spanish tapes because it supposedly worked. I always thought it was funny seeing my friend, and family members talking to their baby and stuff and how they actually thought it helped with their learning to talk, but now I know it actually does help.

Also, my moms friend's kid whose mom is Mexican and dad is Caucasian is now around two years old and is learning both English and Spanish. He calls some words by their Spanish names and some by English names which is funny to hear. For instance he calls a cookie a cookie, but he calls water agua. I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out because I can imagine it will be difficult for him to keep both languages straight when he is younger and doesn't fully understand it all yet, but it is good he is learning both when he is younger because language is easier to learn when you are young. My cousin Natalie is also trying to learn English as well as Spanish. She is like four or five and is in a Spanish immersion school where she is learning Spanish and English. She is picking it up really fast and sometimes knows words in Spanish that I don't know yet, even though I am much older than her and am taking Spanish classes.

Mnemonic Devices

Mnemonic devices are very valuable in my life because I use them all the time when I am playing piano. When I first started taking lessons I learned the "Every Good Boy Does Fine" mnemonic to remember the notes on the lines and the "In the space spells a FACE" to remember the notes in the spaces. Now as I've gotten older and have to take theory tests I use the mnemonic device of "Fat Cats Go Down Alleys Eating Birds" to know the sharps in a key of music which is F, C, G, D, A, E, B. For instance, in the key of G Major I know there is one sharp and it is F sharp because I take the key, in this case being G, and go down two words, so down to "Fat", which is F, and so F and everything to the left of it would be my sharps, but since F is the last letter, there are no other sharps. Another example is for the key of A Major I would have a F, C and G sharp. I simply take A and go down two steps to G and then C and F are to the left of G so I have G, C, and F sharps. You may be wondering what happens for C and F because you can't move down two steps from them. Well, C has no sharps, so it does work, and F is a key with flats, not sharps, so a different mnemonic device is used.

Another time I used mnemonics was for my biology class when we learned "King Henry Died While Drinking Chocolate Milk". This was used to memorize Kilo, Hecto, Deca, Whole (grams), Deci, Centi, Milli. It worked really good and I still remember it.

Training My Dog

I found the part about schedules of reinforcement and about animal training in the chapter relate to my life. Me and my mom have recently been trying to train my dog Bosco to do basic tricks like sit and shake and lay down and roll over and every time he does the trick right we give him a little treat as a positive reinforcement. I find it interesting that the book says to only give the dog a treat some of the time. This does seem true though because unless Bosco knows we have a treat for him, he rarely will do the trick we want him to because he knows there's no reward. If we used partial reinforcement, he would be more likely to do his tricks all the time. Before reading this from the book my cousin told me about partial reinforcement at Christmas because he just got a dog and was showing us all the cool tricks his dog could do and told us how he was training his dog and such. We all thought it was silly to only give the dog a treat some of the time, but it makes sense now and I believe him after reading it in the book. We also watched a video on clicker training and talked about it in class and just a few weeks ago we watched one of my other cousin's dogs for them when they went out of town for the weekend and they gave us a clicker that had a "bad" noise and a "good" noise for their dog Murphy. I thought it was so random and weird that they wanted us to use it on him, like when he barked we were supposed to give him the "bad" noise and when he did something good then we gave him the "good" noise. I was really surprised to find that it worked amazingly well. Whenever he was barking a lot we would simply pressed the bad noise and he would immediately stop.

Deja Vu and Hypnosis

I found the part in this chapter about deja vu to be very interesting. I'm one of those people who always experiences this. I will be like talking to my friend or something and all the sudden I'm like "Oh my goodness! this is totally deja vu!" It also reminded me of the movie deja vu that I had seen. I find it interesting that there's no real exact reason why we have moments of deja vu. I wish this part of the chapter was longer.

Another part that I liked was the part about hypnosis because we had one come to our school for one of the snowball or homecoming weeks recently. One of my friends got hypnotized and she was convinced that all the silly things the guy made her do were real and that she could not recall doing them. She said she was in a trance and that it worked. I on the other hand, being the skeptic I am, was completely unconvinced of this and believed that she was aware of what was going on and was just going along with it to make people laugh and to fit in. After reading the part of hypnosis I know that really people are aware of their surroundings when they undergo hypnosis. Also, it said that people undergoing hypnosis on stage "feel compelled to do outlandish things because they're under intense pressure to entertain a certain audience". This is exactly what I thought too.

Exam One Reflection

I was fairly happy with my results from exam one. I was very stressed out prior to taking this exam because I did not know what to expect, but know that I do, I think I can better prepare for the next exam. One thing I am going to change is my reading habits, I tended to just skim the chapters and then had to read them all the week before our exam which put a lot of stress on me. One thing I found to work good was a study group. Collin grove, Kristen Adams and I got together Friday night and quizzed each other and went through memory tricks to remember certain things. On Saturday Kristina Worm, who already took the class, quizzed Kristen Adams and I again which was very helpful too. I will definitely use a study group again for the next test. I plan to try and learn stuff more spaced out and as we go instead of cramming more at the end. I am learning a lot through this class already and I notice that when my mom or someone will say things sometimes I find my self being like "Oh, that's confirmation bias" and stuff like that, which I find very cool. (: I am working to improve on staying focused when I watch lecture at home and take breaks half way through them. For the most part, I will continue to keep doing what I have been doing so far in this class.

Subliminal Persuasion and ESP

I really found the part of subliminal persuasion to be very interesting because in health class last year we talked about it and our teacher showed us a video where it was used and had us see if we could spot the images that were flashed in the video really quickly. None of us had seen anything so he proceeded to go through the video and make it stop at the exact part where the message was being shown so we could see it was actually there because we didn't believe him. I think it is very interesting how people used to do this because when you first think of it, it actually seems like a really good idea. Problem is, it doesn't really work, most likely, because it is an extraordinary claim and there is no scientific support to prove that subliminal messaging works.

Another part I found to be interesting was the ESP trick where we had to pick a card and then read on and the book guessed which card you picked and the book got the card I guessed right. The trick totally got me at first. Once I saw that they had taken out my card from the second set like they said they would I went back and looked at the original set and was like, "okay did I pick the most obvious card for some reason?", but then I picked a different card and noticed it wasn't there in the second set either and that the first card I picked still wasn't there either and then I looked at the explanation for it and felt really dumb :) but this just goes to show unintentional blindness in a way because I was so focused on my one card that I didn't even look at the others and realize that all the cards in the second set were different from the ones in the first.

Stem Cells and Adoption Studies

One part in this chapter that I found interesting was the part about how much of our brain we use. I had always heard that we only use 10 percent of our brain, which, according to this book, is a myth! I had seriously always believed that to be a fact that we only use 10 percent of our brain, so it is shocking to me that really every part of our brain has a purpose and function and that we use most or all of our brain capacity all the time. Another part I found interesting was the part about stem cells because I had heard about stem cell research and all the new advances and debate with using them and researching them so I found it interesting to know more about them and their functions. I think it's very cool that we can turn these cells into specialized cells of our choosing in order to benefit and treat people. I think there are many great medical advancements that can made by using this amazing technology.

Also, I liked the part about Adoption Studies because I know a lot of people who are adopted or who have adopted children. I agree with this book that while genetics to play a role in shaping someone, environment and how someone is raised can have a huge affect on what genes stay prominent and how the child is. I think sometimes people rely to much on genes for if they aren't getting good grades or something they will just say, "Oh it's genetics" and blame the problem on genes, when really genes only have a small influence on things and there are many other factors in affect.