Random Stories about Life

Although the phenomenon known as social loafing is a well-established psychological finding, I too, like the counter example given in the book, can argue against its proposed ubiqui-ty due to my own experiences and also advocate social striving in certain situations. Being at a high school with about half Asian Americans and half Caucasians, I have had my fair share of group projects in which I work with Caucasians and Asian Americans. Although most of my friends are Caucasian, I sometimes choose to work with other Asian Americans that I am not as familiar with. Why, you might ask? Because they work harder. Caucasians feel that since there are more people in a group, the work is split between the group members. While this may be true, Asian Americans do not share this mentality and instead work harder than in a group due to a culture full of competition. In my own life, when I worked on a project that involved plan-ning a city, the other Caucasians in my group slacked off and took a less active role in the group that me or the Asian Americans in the group, who elevated themselves about their normal lev-el. As for all Caucasian groups I have been in, the standard procedure is to meet at my house, provide an hour or two of work that usually centers on me, and then have me finish the work. On the other hand, when I’m working in an all Asian American group, the work is evenly dis-persed throughout the group with the Asian Americans often times eagerly accepting more of the work share. Accordingly to all these examples, the best grades I receive correlate to the number of Asian Americans I have in my group and have a negative correlation with the num-ber of Caucasians I have in my group. However, I have a very high work ethic myself and I therefore may be biased towards criticizing Caucasians and siding with Asian Americans.

I can relate to Sigmund Freud’s ego defense mechanism of sublimation in the category of displacement. On one of my favorite television shows, Malcolm in the Middle, the two par-ents are believed to have sex every night. This strong sexual interaction, however, leads to the deteriorating household and working conditions. When the mother of the family, Lois, says that she and her husband, Hal, cannot have sex due to an infection until all the pills run out (which would be a week), he initially panics but then resolves to mow the lawn. While sex can be seen as a deterrent to work, it is a part of human nature and therefore cannot be prevented but ra-ther restrained. Instead, Hal uses that sexual energy that he has been accustomed to for every night to channel it into productive, nonsexual activities such as painting the kitchen cabinets and making a lavish breakfast. Lois also rechannels her sexual energy into productive, nonsex-ual activities such as removing the grout from showers and picking up fresh flowers. The absti-nence from sex also allows Hal to do better at his job and receive a raise, while Lois now has the time and focus to go over IRS tax returns and find $800 in overpaid fees. However, just as their lives are starting to improve, the last pill is eaten and Lois is cured. Initially, they both continue working hard and improving their lives. They try to avoid their temptations, but Lois succumbs and Hal eventually follows also. Eventually, the house returns to its old, decrepit state. As evident by Lois’s compulsive behavior to spill her drink so she could wipe it up, sublimation, as well as any other ego defense mechanism, requires psychological energy that drains mental stability out of daily life activities and produces a sort of neurotic behavior.

I have a personal response to the myelin sheath that covers the axon. We had to do a re-port on some health disorder. My partner and I chose the longest name on the list, adrenoleu-kodystrophy, or ALD for short. After some research, we learned that it is a degenerate disease that comes from the gradual loss of the myelin sheath. Although the myelin sheath is not com-pletely responsible for communication between the neurons, it can greatly decrease the time of messages between neurons. We also discovered that Lorenzo Odone was a famous victim of the disease. In addition to our project on ALD, our teacher showed us a movie about Lorenzo called Lorenzo’s Oil. It described Lorenzo’s terrible journey from a playful kid to a near vegetable. First, Lorenzo developed a kind of hyperactivity that brought about his school’s attention. He was then tested by various doctors and told that he only a year or two to live. Horrified, his parents sought out to find a cure. They contacted various doctors and support groups to help their cause, even researching themselves. The many dead ends and their son’s degeneration weighed heavily on the family, but they did not give up. Eventually, Mr. Odone experimented and found that a certain type of olive oil was able to stop the degeneration but not help to heal their son back to a fully functioning human. Lorenzo was able to communicate by blinking and swallow on his own. Although the invention of Lorenzo’s Oil can stop the degeneration of ALD, there is no way to recover the myelin sheath, indicating that further research is needed. In ad-dition to ALD, there are other diseases that cause the gradual decline of the myelin sheath such as multiple sclerosis and Alexander’s disease.

I have a personal response to the concept of subliminal messages. Because of your extra credit assignment, I watched Fight Club yesterday. However, I was perplexed at what I saw sub-liminal messages inside the film, random stills placed in seemingly random places. These observations were reaffirmed by Tyler Durden’s job as a film loader in a movie theater where he inserted pornographic stills into family films. I only noticed this at three times but further research says he appears subliminally in four and randomly in another two. The first time it occurs is when the narrator is in his office and he says his job is like a copy of a copy a copy because of his insomnia. Tyler then appears behind the doctor who tells the narrator to go to support groups to see real pain. Thirdly, Tyler appears at the support group hugging Thomas, the man who talks about his ex-wife. Fourthly, Tyler appears when Marla is walking away from the support group. The times when he occurs are all related to each based on the narrator’s initial problems with insomnia. Thus, it can be said that Tyler only appears because of the narrator’s insomnia, which is later confirmed. Next, Tyler appears not as subliminally but still moderately subtly when he is seen going to the opposite way of the narrator on the movie carpet (symbolizing the differing attitudes of the two) and in the hotel welcoming video (characterizing himself as a welcome addition to the narrator’s life). In the end, in an homage to Tyler’s job at the movie theater and as a way to wake the viewer up to the subliminal and hidden messages, the director of the film inserts a clip of a penis. Thus, he symbolizes how Tyler’s reckless behavior, characteristic of the id, are in everyone and thus the problems that occur within everyone’s minds, such as the narrator’s insomnia, affect us all.

In response to lucid dreams, I have often have these. They vary between dreams that I am able to realize are not possible to dreams where I can force myself to wake up because I don’t like they way they are developing to completely changing them for the better. For example, one time I was dreaming that I was a wizard like Harry Potter and I was casting magic. However, right when the big battle was to occur, as what always happen in one of the books, I realized that I was dreaming and that this dream was unrealistic. Another example is when I dreamed that I had snuck out of the house to go to a party of some social gathering. However, when I came home, the light was on in my room and I reasoned that my parents knew that I had snuck out. At that moment, my conscious realized that I was in trouble and woke me up to get out of my bad situation. When I went back to sleep, I dreamed of several different scenarios that did not make much sense but did not get me in trouble. A third example is when I dreamed about schoolwork and how I was going to plan out my day. I debated between various scenarios and went back and forth until I finally chose one that was the best. All of these lucid dreams indicate a strong conscious that is able to overcome most challenges, including ones that are not readily conscious and are hard to delve into. The fact that I am able to change some of my dreams shows that some of my dreams take place in my reasoning center of my right brain. In addition, it can indicate that the reasoning portions of my brain are always in work and that nothing illogical can pass by me 100% of the time.

In response to operant conditioning, I have personally seen its effects on my dog. When my family first got her, she was a fairly untamed dog, having been rescued from the wild. However, today she is strictly domesticated. To do this, we followed operant conditioning and specifically B.F. Skinner’s ideas. To potty train her, we first designated an area where she could go to the bathroom, a piece of liquid-holding paper. This was done so that we could control her excretory system, something that my parents have done to me during the anal psychosexual stage. We used positive reinforcement by giving her verbal praise then petting her then giving her treats in diminishing fashion so that she would still pee but not become dependent on our reinforcements. After she had mastered the first part, we then directed her to the ideal place to do her business, the back lawn. Again, we used positive reinforcement to get her through the doggie door and excrete or urinate on the grass. In addition to positive reinforcement, she also adhered to another one of Skinner’s observations, partial reinforcement effect. Whenever my family and I ate at our dinner table, she would sit patiently besides us and occasionally bark at us when we ignored her. She would do this many times, often with a less than 10% chance of receiving food. After a few years had passed, I decided to see if I could teach her to shake her whole body. If she did it correctly, I would let her out on our balcony; if not, I would wait a few minutes then give up. First, she needed to know what “shake” meant. I would rub her hair back and forth and do it myself while verbally saying it. Sometimes it took a long time but she eventually did it and caught on. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks if there’s a positive reward in it.

In response to memory consolidation, I have personally had it disrupted. During a lacrosse game, I was going after a ground ball. I was considerably tired from all the running and the heat, so I forgot to keep my head up and watch my surroundings. Just when I was going to pick the ball up, a person on the other team ran into my head and knocked me down. I had no knowledge of trying to pick the ball up then, maybe because I closed my eyes after being hit. After my eyes went black for a second, I got up and walked over to the sideline. Besides feeling angry, I was also incredibly nauseous and disorientated. Taking off my helmet, I was struggling to stand up. Many thoughts went through my head, with the sounds of the game being washed out. After a while, I asked what the score what. To my surprise, we were actually winning even though we were down by two when I left. Apparently, because of my head injury, my brain was unable to consolidate the memories of my team scoring. Eventually, my team, Northwood, won that game but I was still drawing a blank on how we scored the last few goals. Asking several of my teammates received sincere replies that I had a concussion and I needed to go to the hospital, but I was fine. In the end, I went over to the scorebook to see that several of my players had indeed scored those final two goals. Perhaps my disruption of memory consolidation was more a result of me focusing more on my headache than on the game. Although it was a considerably hard blow, I did not officially black out nor did I forget any long-term memories.

In response to measuring intelligence quotients (IQ) by IQ tests, I believe that they do not do a very good job at measuring through intelligence. Often times the questions are bizarre and very unorthodox, and thus are hard to answer. They often involve complex numbers or strange wordplay and are hard to answer. At the end of the test, some bizarre multiplication and other math is used to find your IQ. However, I find this inadequate. I do not believe knowing unorthodox puzzles is representative of your knowledge, as they are most likely not important to everyday life and are thus not practiced frequently. In addition to these magic IQ tests, school tests are not much more representative of your true knowledge. Knowing how your teacher writes tests is a way to increase your knowledge by seeing whether the answers are clustered together or spread out, how teachers use the “all of the above” or “none of the above,” the level of deception in wording à la attractive distracters or blindly choosing the first answer, whether or not spelling or grammar errors gives away wrong answers, and the use of the magic letter “c.” For the letter “c,” it has been said that it is the most often answer, but you should not automatically choose it but rather see in the instructor uses that knowledge to trick you. In addition to these teacher specific “hints,” other general patterns can give away the answer. For instance, the more common elements to an answer there are, the more likely it is. Although repeating the same letter can occur, the change that it occurs right after another decreases greatly each time it is used. Also, hardly ever are there “none of the above answers,” since the instructor is trying to see if you know something and would then not pull out of the question. Sometimes the answers to questions can be indirectly stated in other questions or directions. Thus, any test to try to 100% test IQ is bound to fail. To resolve this, I believe they should be discarded and more thorough ways of judging intelligence be implemented.

In response to detecting lies, I have found that methods from polygraphs to visually detecting lies are usually invalid and can be made to depict an opposite emotion. As your polygraph lecture earlier in the class year confirmed, polygraphs simply detect the characteristics of lies such as sweating and high blood pressure. On Penn and Teller’s show BS, an episode occurred on July 23 that stated how these machines could be fooled by tensing up at non-tense times by flexing the sphincter muscle or by controlling stressful elements such as breathing. In addition to polygraph tests, faking body language can be used to tell lies. I often do this to evade bad situations. Sometimes I will purposefully lie to little white lies so that I can train myself for when I have to say bigger lies. To do this, it is important to be all the way committed to the life and not change your mind unless it becomes apparent that the lie is not working or too much work has gone into the white lie. On smaller scales, it is important not to allow your voice to shake, as that is an instant sign of lying, and not to have your eyes water up. In addition, breathing through your nose not only gives cleaner air to the brain that is needed for the lie but also prevents you from choking for air that occurs if you were to breathe through your mouth, as any difficulties that occur in the nose can be passed by as a sniffle. Also, do not back down to the person you are lying to and try to intimidate them by inching closer to him or her. Probably the most important thing to do is to wait a while before talking, even when not lying, so you have that time to think about what to say. Of course, honesty also pays off greatly in the long run also.

In response to the social development of adolescents, I have not fallen into the book’s descrip-tion of likely friends. While most of my friends tend to be of the same gender, age, social class, and race, some of the descriptions do not hold through all the way. Though most of my friends are white, some are African American while others are Asian American and Mexican American. In addition, I have friends of different ages (usually within a year or two) and some friends that are girls. However, the main difference between my experiences are that my friends are I do not just have different believes, we often have opposite beliefs. A large amount of my friends view drinking as the highest way to have fun and a necessary way to start that fun. I however see it as a digression to having to alter your consciousness to have fun and distort your percep-tion of what is really going on. When it comes to church attendance, I just about always differ. Being an atheist, anyone who is religious is different from me, regardless if they go to church. Even with my Christian roots, I do not have friends strictly that are Christians, as a large portion of my friends are Jewish. In addition, I do not have many atheist friends, mostly because there are not that many out there. Lastly, my friends and I have very different education goals. With my high intelligence, I plan to attend a prestigious California four-year university while many of my friends want to go to community colleges where they can live away from home and party. Similarly, they do not care much about their grades in high school. In regards to what factors can group friends, I would say that all of them are correct except for what beliefs you have. In-stead, friends can come from necessity, where there are no other people to interact with and thus you are limited to just them.

Is human nature naturally evil or not? Sigmund Freud believed that it was, but Carl Rogers countered that and said humans are basically good. However, I do not thing such a complex issue as good and evil can be described with simply a blanket statement, and I do not think something as advanced and complex as the human brain could be described in a single sentence. Instead, I view human nature as changing to fit its needs. Using the influences of evolutionary psychologists, I believe that human beings are just like any other creature because they are all living and thus adhere to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. This theory states that those individuals who are best able to survive and reproduce will do so and continuously improve the condition of that species. Not surprisingly, humans will follow this same process because they are just like any other species, albeit more advanced and much more complex. How humans are able to survive and reproduce often results in conflict. For instance, when there is a scarce resource such as food, water, space, and mates, individuals will often compete over that and will try to secure more of that thing as a reserve. Those who are able to survive longer, because of their “greediness,” will be more likely to pass on their genes in what Charles Darwin called natural selection. Thus, a middle ground is found between Sigmund Freud’s theory of aggressive and destructive humans and Carl Roger’s optimistic view of humans as peaceful and humanistic. When it comes to people doing good out of spontaneity, people are biologically motivated to help others of the same race (after their own needs are fulfilled) as that helps the human race expand. In a sense, life is paradoxical in that it naturally wants only the best individuals to continue but also wants the species to flourish.

In response to the Robbers Cave Experiment, I have experienced a similar situation. Last year, my team and I were practicing lacrosse. We were having a fun time together, with everyone being respectful to one another. At the end of the practice, my coach told us that we were going to split up into two teams and race against each other. The race was designed so that we crossed over two times. The members of the losing team were told that they would have to run an extra time. My coach left before the race, putting our assistant coach in charge. In the beginning of the race, everyone was competing admirably against one another, but after the first few guys (and when the race was beginning to end), the tension started to heat up. Some of the guys would give the other person the impression they were going to hit them when they crossed over in an attempt to slow them down. Often, this resulted in shoulders brushing against each other but some of the time people actually hit each other. Because we carry sticks in lacrosse, some of the people would hold them at the other person, trying to give the impression that they were going to impale them. Instead of trying to run fast, we focused on making the other team lose, so some people even intentionally hit the other person when the two lines crossed over. Eventually, all my teammates agreed that we should not hit each other. However, I was the last one in the race and I saw that we were losing and that I would be somewhat blamed for losing the race. So, I intentionally ran into another player of the other team but acted like it was his fault. When my opposing player and I got back (he had won clearly), everyone was yelling at each other and almost physically fighting. Our coach came back and saw what was happening and made us run several laps. Throughout those laps, we channeled our energy at one another to our coach, and we acted friendly towards one another.

My family, from my knowledge, has had two people with psychological disorders. When I asked my mom today if anyone in our family had a mental disorder, my mom surprisingly said yes and that my aunt had bipolar disorder. Although this was the first time I knew of this, I could see how she came to have this distinction, even with taking medication to limit it. Often she would become angry and not soon after would become jovial and want a hug (a manic episode). As the person states, she also had “boundless energy.” However, due to her medications, her disorder is greatly lessened so that she has characteristics of a cyclothymic disorder. Although I do not know when they developed this disorder, she was also known back in the day to “commit illegal acts,” as the book cites as characteristic of them. As well as my aunt, my female cousin appears to have anorexia nervosa although she has never been diagnosed with it. She displays several symptoms of it, ranging from being obsessed with body mass index (which she coincidentally calculated today when I was eating lunch with her) to being afraid of being considered fat. In addition, she does not have the highest self-esteem. Whether she has developed these behaviors because of the mass media’s focus of promoting thinness dangerously or because of track is unclear. Whenever she eats (as in today), she often orders low carbohydrate meals such as salads and even when she does so, she only eats a little bit of it and then takes it home. She also takes energy bars and Ensure. Lastly, she also runs a lot and exercises frequently. Although her conditions could be signs of anorexia nervosa, I do not believe that she has because she seems to be in control.

Through counterconditioning via systematic desensitization, I have learned to control my anxie-ty during strenuous and nerve-racking tests such as the Standardized Academic Testing (the SAT). The media, mostly movies and television shows, perpetuate the idea that the SAT is very important to getting into college and future success. Because of this, I was considerably nervous about taking the SAT. To overcome this, I did a couple of steps. First, I took the PSAT in my sophomore year. While this told me that I had a relatively good chance to get a high score on the real thing, I was not satisfied because it was above 200 and was not like the real test, which was longer and had an essay. The next year in March, I again took the PSAT with similar results. Feeling fairly confident, I took the SAT in the fall. I was still quite anxious, especially after the essay since I am not the best essay writer. However, as the PSAT had predicted, I got around 2000. Although this is good for many people, it was not for me. My family and I committed to taking the SAT again the next spring. To do better, I signed up for SAT review courses, but those were cancelled. For Christmas, my parents got me a huge 800-page SAT re-view book that I initially put aside but about a month before actually started to do. In addition, I started to go onto the College Board website and complete the questions of the day. When it was time for the big day, I was academically and emotionally set to succeed. Overall, I did very well. A few months after the test I received the news that I got a higher score. I had learned to settle my anxiety over the SAT in baby steps, something that can be hard for many people.