Blog Entry 1 - Prologue

Prologue

I know very little about the subject of psychology. I'm not even sure I can define the term "psychology". The study of the human mind? That's the best I can come up with. So I would say what I hope to get out of this class is to come to a closer and more intellectual understanding of psychology as a whole and in terms of "occurrence and reaction". How we as humans behave, why we behave in the ways that we do. Why do I yawn when I see someone else yawn? Why do I always feel like bugs are crawling all over me whenever I see them outside or in movies? I would also love to come to a closer understanding with my mind as well after learning the material. In terms of knowing why I think the way that I think. Am I an introvert in an extrovert's body? Was there a significant event that happened in my life that effects the way I behave now? I have so many questions for this subject of science, I hope that I can find the answers to at least some of them.

Looking through the syllabus the one topic that caught my eye the most was sensation and perception. How our senses effect our thoughts and our thought process? Maybe how we perceive something differently in different sceneries or scenarios. I don't really know what to expect from this topic because I would think in the mind of a psychologist this topic name is quite vague and underlies a more broad view of sensation and perception than I can imagine. I can't exactly tell you why I would say I'm the most interested in learning about this topic because going through the syllabus again, I don't really know much about any of the topics in terms of psychology. I can take an intelligent guess and give an ill-defined idea of what the topics are about based strictly off of the title. Other than that I've drawn a blank. All I can really say is this is the topic I'm most looking forward to. 

I thought I had a decent idea or view on psychology until we took the Current Knowledge Assessment in class. Then I really thought I don't know what psychology's all about. On the simple true and false assessment I probably got nearly half of them wrong just because they were basic statements that I've heard over and over again and had thought a lot of them were true. Or at least had expected them to be. A lot of them shocked me when finding out they were false. Fortunate for me, "Teaching styles need to match learning styles for effective learning", was false. I have no idea which learning style or teaching style works best for me. So just knowing I can effectively learn with any style is quite reassuring. Another statement I found quite interesting to be false was, "Autism has drastically increased in the last decade." I remember as I was working one day in a restaurant serving, one of my regulars came in and talked to me about his son who has autism. As well as going on to tell me that he has autism too but a different type than his son. Also how there are more types of autism being discovered. I can't remember what types he had mentioned but just by that I would have imagined that autism is increasing especially since there are multiple types that can be passed down and more to be discovered. Maybe the term "drastically" was what was false, but to still see it as a false statement was surprising to me.