I am GAD

I am General Anxiety Disorder, but my friends call me GAD. I come to visit you when you are young and stay with you over time, but I can also come from your genes. I run in families and grow with stress. I can be found in millions of adults, and I have a greater attraction to women. You can find me in the DSM under Anxiety Disorders. I am your difficulty breathing, swallowing, and focusing every minute of your life. I stay for six months or more and give you trouble coping with things. I am there when you can't relax. I am the twitch you can't get rid of. I am there when your muscles and your head aches. I am GAD.

I Salivate At The Sight Of Mittens. Is That Weird?

Sometimes I like taking personality tests, they can be fun. The Big Five Trait test was so not fun. There were so many questions and the results were so long too. I only skimmed the results and looked at my percentages for the sections which weren't even good. When I started taking the second test, I could not take it seriously..Do I like mannish children? Do I use shoe polish to excess? What is the stuff? After I answered the questions to the best of my ability, I was ready to get my results. They were scary right. I do not understand how those questions were relevant to anything at all about my personality. It was amusing to take and sweet to see my results. I liked the second test better.

Woops..Sorry Mom..I Forgot

This week, in psych, we learned about all kinds of memory. Iconic memory, echoic memory, short term memory, and long term memory. When you think about testing your memory, you think it's pretty easy and anyone can do it. However, if I asked you what you had for lunch yesterday, you probably would not be able to tell me. We use all kinds of memory every day. For example, remembering something someone said to you earlier would be echoic memory. Remembering someones ugly hairstyle you saw on the street would be iconic memory. I found a site on National Geographic Magazine online that tests your iconic short term memory. When I tried it, I thought it would be easy. As it turns out, it is far from it. Check it out.

Conditioning

This week in class we learned a lot about conditioning. Conditioning is training an animal to do something by giving their behaviors consequences. These could either be negative consequences or positive consequences, depending on if they did what the person wanted them to do. There are a lot of different ways to condition people too. One show I watch is The Big Bang Theory. In this show, Sheldon decides to try his own experiment and condition Leonard's girlfriend, Penny, by giving her a piece of chocolate every time she does something that he considers "good behavior". The kind of conditioning Sheldon is doing is called operant conditioning. Check it out:

Wait..What?

This week in class, we learned about optical illusions and why they work on our brains. After seeing all of the illusions from class, I remembered pictures I kept seeing on the internet. The pictures were the sidewalk drawings. Although there are various artists that do these drawings, one famous one is a man named Julian Beever. He is famous for his art on pavement in countries like England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. His drawings are drawn completely deformed so you have to view it from the right angle to get the full 3D effect. For example, this image is being viewed from the right angle:

And this is the same image being viewed from the wrong angle:

A lot of these sidewalk images are really neat and are cool to see how they are made to make it 3D. Some of them I would be scared to walk over because I'd feel like I would fall in, like this one:

For more pictures like these, click here

PSA blog

My favorite video was Kayla, Leah, and Courtney's. Their video was really easy to hear and understand. Also, they had places in their video that other people didn't have in theirs. Their video was really informative and made everything in Ashwaubenon sound really nice. If people who didn't live in the area watched their video, they would be impressed with all of the things Ashwaubenon has to offer and possibly even move to Ashwaubenon, too.

Fly Away Home

This week, we learned a lot about how infants develop through the lifespan. One thing the book talked about was imprinting. Imprinting is the process by which certain animals forma attachments during a critical period very early in life. One example the book gave was Konrad Lorenz who hatched ducklings do see what would happen if he was the first moving thing they saw once they hatched. The ducklings followed him around everywhere he went. This showed that although birds imprint the best with their own kind, they can also imprint to many moving objects like other animals or even a bouncing ball. While I was reading this section in the book, I remembered a movie I would watch with my grandma when I was five or six.

The movie was called "Fly Away Home" and it was about a girl who gets in a car accident with her mother. The mother died and the little girl, Amy, goes to live with her father who is an inventor in Canada. While living with her father, developers begin tearing up the local forest behind their house and Amy discovers an abandoned Canada Geese nest. Amy takes the eggs home with her and decides to care for them. Once they hatch, they act like Amy is their mother. They follow her everywhere and she feeds them and teaches them how to do things. After realizing what his daughter has done, he contacts the locals to ask for advice on what to do. He is told that the geese he has are fine right now, but they will want to try to migrate south for the winter. The problem with this is that they do not know how to fly. The father decides to invent a sort of hang glider that looks like a giant goose to fly it in front of the geese in hopes that they will learn from it and be able to fly south for the winter. The ending always makes me cry, but in a good way..