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Discussing the article, "Innateness and Language" by Fiona Cowie

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There are many theories and there have been many debates over how humans learn a language. It has been an ongoing question since before the 20th century that was only explained with the fact that humans have the ability to reason unlike other animals. But today we know that learning a language is much more complicated due to all the rules of putting a sentence together with the right words with the right meaning (syntax and semantics). So if learning a language is so complex, then we must ask the common question, “ How could mere children learn the myriad intricate rules that govern linguistic expression and comprehension in their language — and learn them solely from exposure to the language spoken around them?” According to famous structuralist, Noam Chomsky, the human brain is very special because it has a ‘language organ’ that is used for learning a language and eventually mastering it. Inside this ‘language organ’ are knowledges of multiple linguistic rules that we are born wit...
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Discussing the article, "The Seven Sins of Memory," by Daniel L. Schacter

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Our memory is a very important aspect of our lives that controls everything we do. Unfortunately, our memory isn’t like a tape recorder that picks up every detail. Our certainty of what we remember isn’t as reliable as we wish it was due to many factors. These factors are known as “The Seven Sins of Memory” which involve forgetting, distortions, and intrusive recollections. The three that involve forgetting are known as transience, absent-mindedness, and blocking; the three that involve distortions of memories are misattribution, suggestibility, and bias; lastly, the one sin that involves intrusive recollections and the one I will be discussing in more depth is persistence. Persistence is having a memory that keeps reappearing that you’d rather forget. Persistence can either be small and insignificant or it can have a lasting and potentially harmful effect on someone. Has anyone had a song stuck in their head that started off as a catchy, but now it’s irritating and you can’t stop h...
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Discussing the article, "Understanding Memory in Deep Learning Systems: The Neuroscience, Psychology and Technology Perspectives" by Jesus Rodriquez

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Our memory is a huge important part to our daily lives. From remembering the notes you learned in your biology class to remembering how to walk, our memory controls what, how, and why we are doing something. Some memories don’t last for very long which is why our memory isn’t like a video camera that captures every detail of the event; for example, the color of your friend’s shirt. Certain memories can go from our short-term memory to our long-term memory storage. However, there are different explanations (theories) to how we process information and store it away to remember later. The two theories are based around two kinds of psychology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology. According to the neuroscience theory of memory, there are three parts that help move the information we encode to our long-term storage. The first part is the thalamus which encodes the senses we perceive (what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell) and then moves that information to the appropriate lobe. Next, t...
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Discussing the article, "A Perspective on 3-D illusions" by Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde

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According to this article, it has been proven that what we believe to be seeing, is only but our imagination playing tricks on us. The reasoning for this is because strangely our real and imagined thoughts/perceptions are using the same part of the brain. So, our real senses, or what we believe to be our real senses, are using the same neural system that our dreams, delusions, and failed memories are using. A way that neuroscientists study how our brain perceives the physical world is by using illusions. Many illusionists or realists, as they like to call themselves, use a certain method or way to make a 2-D painting look 3-D. They use perspective, lighting, color, and shadow to add depth to the canvas and make the painting “pop out” and difficult to distinguish if it is real or not. Illusions cause people to think something is there that isn’t, think something is actually something else, or miss something entirely. These figments of our imagination, trick us to question our brain ...
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Discussing the article, "Studying mind and brain with fMRI" by Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Derek Evan Nee

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  Cognitive neuroscientists study many aspects of the human brain; for example, the different parts, what each part specializes in, damaged areas and the effects they have, and etc… . A specific technique that is getting used more and more today to study the processes of the mind and brain is functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. fMRI is used to test/study many things such as, localization, commonalities in brain activation, distinctiveness in brain activation, differences in individuals, and testing psychological models. Localizing the brain functions has been a big purpose of this procedure. Researchers also studied how two different tasks both activated the same part of the brain when they were occurring. They noticed that these two tasks not only shared the commonality of activating the same area, but they both shared the same cognitive processes. Two tasks researcher Eisenberger found that were both activating the anterior cingulate and right v...
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Discussing the article, "Embodied cognition is not what you think it is," by Andrew D. Wilson and Sabrina Golonka

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There are many perspectives that scientists have approached to the world of how people learn behaviors; for example, the biological approach and what this specific article discussed, embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is the approach that all our thoughts and how we achieve our goals throughout our daily lives is not just controlled by our brain, but by our entire body (mediated internally) and the environment via perception. In the article, they explain how human-like robots without motors or control algorithms are still able to walk just like how a human normally walks. The reasoning behind this is not because of the complexity of the brain that gives us a certain way to walk, but simply because of the structure of ours bodies. The article gives the example that humans do not walk like lions because we were not built that way. Embodied cognition shows that the brain isn’t the only part of us that we use to control how we do things. We are able to walk the way we do effortlessl...
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