Chapter 4

This chapter deals with the mind and conciousness. Conciouness refers to the moment by moment subjective experience like reflecting on thoughts or paying attention to your surroundings. There are three levels of conciousness coma, sleep, and wakefulness. Splitting the brain is a surgery in which they cut the corpus callosum.They believe doing this also splits the mind. The experiment in the book that has a split brain patient that can see two objects but can only say one because there is no sharing of information between the sides of the brain where the information was processed. Blindsight is the ability of a blind person to see somethings but be unaware of seeing them. During sleep the concious awareness of the outside is mostly turned off but the bain is still active. We use an EEG to measure the different areas of brain activity. REM sleep stands for rapid eye movement during this stage the brain is more active during the awake hours. Hypnosis is a social interaction where a person responding to suggestions, experiences changes in memory, perception, and/or voluntary action. The person is still alert though and responds to questions so scientists believe its an altered state of conciousness. The concept of flow is when people do something because it facinates them rather then doing it for a reward at the end. Addiction is the idea that you need something in order to feel good. They often deal with the brain area in charge of reward. Alcohol is dependent on your expectations as shown in the experiment in the book. People who were told they were drinking alcohol and were given water behaved like those drinking alcohol.

Chapter 3

This chapter deals with the biological side of psychology. It starts the chapter by talking about genotypes and phenotypes. The genotype is your genetic make up and the phenotype is how you look physically. Next it talks about twins there are two different types monozygotic and dizygotic. Monozygotic twins form from the same egg and result in what we call identical twins. Dizygotic form from two eggs and result in non identical twins. We can use twins to study how biology plays a role in psychology by studying the similarities in the monozygotic compared to those in the dizygotic. There are three different types of neurons sensor, motor, and inter. Sensory gets information from outside the body. Motor neurons are in charge of telling the muscles to contract or to relax. Interneurons are used to comunicate over a short circuits. Dendrites are short branching appendeges that are used to increase the neurons receptive field and detect chemical signals. Axons are outgrowths that the information travels down to other neurons. Resting membrane potential happens when the inside of a neuron is more negative than the outside creating the electrical ability to fire. When the cell fires sodium gates open and potasium goes out because of the increases of sodium. This causes the inside to become more positive and the neuron fires. Neurotransmitters comunicate with one another by sending chemical signals that bind with receptors on the next neuron. Dopamine is a monoamine neurotransmitter involved in reward, motivation, and motor control. There are four lobes of the brain the frontal, parietal, occipital, and the temporal. The frontal is in the front and it is in charge of thought, planning, and movement. the parietal is the top in the back and it is touch and spatial relations. Occipital is in the very back on the bottom and its vision. the temporal is bottom and its hearing and memory.

Psychology Chapter 1

Psychological science an emperical science focusing on the mind, brain, and behavior. There are several different recourses to better understand psychology. They have fMRI which helps them see what different areas of the brain are activated when presented with different situations. Through out psychology's history there have been many ideas about how we work psychologically but we have no definate answers on most subjects. For example the theory of dulism that states the mind and body are separate yet intertwined. Today most psychological scientists largley reject the idea but we have no way to know for certain exactly whats right. Psychology is a subject mostly dominated by women according to the text book they make up 70% of the psychology majors but early in psychology they didn't recieve the credit they deserved. In 1895 Mary Whiton Calkins completed all the requirements for her PhD from Harvard University but was denied the degree they offered her a PhD from Radcliffe instead. The first woman to get a PhD didn't happen until 1921. There are many professions that involve psychology such as lawyers, politics, and many other proffesions.