Haley's Psych Thoughts

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 ...

  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...

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...