Parts of the Eye --Olivia Rosales

http://isee.nei.nih.gov/parts/eyediagram.asp

The Milgram Experiment

Mr. Doud's has already mentioned the Milgram Experiment, where participants were asked to shock people with increasingly high voltage. Stanley Milgram conducted this experiment in order to understand how the German people allowed the Nazis to conduct such heinous crimes against humanity during WWII. This video has several interviews with Milgram, footage of the original experiment, and modern psychologists discussing the implications of the Milgram Experiment.

via videosift.com

Familial Dysautonomia - Tommy Curley

Familial Dysautonomia is a disorder of the autonomic and sensory nervous system. It affects a person's feeling of pain and most other stimuli. It can also affect a person's production of tears, saliva control, muscle development, motor skills, gastronomical control, growth of spine, body temperature, sweating, and digestion. This video is a trailer for a documentary of the girl, Sam, who is coping with FD. She has done very well with it and has a positive outlook on her life. FD can be a very crippling disfunction of the brain, but it can also be treated with therapy and very manageable.

60 minutes with Tourette Syndrome

WATCH NOW! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiHecd_xbdA

This is a clip about teenager, Bianca who is struggling with tourette's syndrome. Through her involuntary tics or tantrums, anger strikes, and extreme violent behavior, Bianca's family is inclined to support and love her even more. It's heart-breaking to see how her violent actions are unstoppable and how it affects all those who are around her.


Tourette's syndrome is a chemical imbalance in the brain. Some research suggests that there is a disturbance in the balance in neurotransmitters. There is no cure or medication to treat Tourette's syndrome.

Hannah C.

Alec Weech- Illusions

This video shows several optical illusions that take advantage of bottom-up processing, and also how the illusions are created. Even though you know intellectually that you are seeing lines move across a stationary image it appears that there is actually a moving image on the piece of paper. This illusion still works despite the fact that it is explained first.

Alexander Supertramp

This movie is about a man young man named Christopher McCandless. He decides to throw in the towel on society and hitchhikes to Alaska. Christopher lived a life of non conformity, which is not usually the case with most people. Take for example the Asch experiment, where people give a completely wrong answer just because thats what everyone else does. It makes me happy to know that some people don't just live the way they do because thats what is socially acceptable. I can only imagine how much cooler the world would be without conformity.

Balance posted by Ben Stevenson

This Video explains how balance works and it also explains what happens when we turn our head. I think it is interesting how there are 3 planes that we move on. Also, i find it interesting that we can mess up this sense so easily.



Here is an overveiw on vertigo (http://www.neurologychannel.com/vertigo/index.shtml)
Vertigo, or dizziness, is a symptom, not a disease. The term vertigo refers to the sensation of spinning or whirling that occurs as a result of a disturbance in balance (equilibrium). It also may be used to describe feelings of dizziness, lightheadedness, faintness, and unsteadiness. The sensation of movement is called subjective vertigo and the perception of movement in surrounding objects is called objective vertigo.
Vertigo usually occurs as a result of a disorder in the vestibular system (i.e., structures of the inner ear, the vestibular nerve, brainstem, and cerebellum). The vestibular system is responsible for integrating sensory stimuli and movement and for keeping objects in visual focus as the body moves. Benign paroxysmal position vertigo (BPPV) is a common cause for dizziness.
When the head moves, signals are transmitted to the labyrinth, which is an apparatus in the inner ear that is made up of three semicircular canals surrounded by fluid. The labyrinth then transmits movement information to the vestibular nerve and the vestibular nerve carries the information to the brainstem and cerebellum (areas of the brain that control balance, posture, and motor coordination). There are a number of different causes for dizzy spells.


I think it would be interesting to learn more about how vertigo makes you feel dizzy

Nicole Nee

I chose to post this video because it has an interesting story and does a good job explaining how the eye works.

Daniel Weltz

I found this video very interesting because it uses what we learned in our previous unit in terms of behaviorism and structuralism as well as maturation and action/reward to make a much larger point about the reality of our justice system. In it, Dr. Jennifer Woolard, an assistant professor of psychology at Georgetown University, argues that the government should rework its juvenile justice system because it doesn't accurately reflect the insufficient developments in the minds of our youth. She goes on to say that children are not fully mentally developed until sixteen and are not fully emotional developed until a while after that. Here it is:

Zach Thayer

Since we were talking about the anatomy and protection of the ear, i found this video awhile ago so enjoy.

Incentive to Ear Protection: Nice Head Phones for <$20.

What's Wrong With Optimism by Amy Woolsey

This is an article I found on the website for Time magazine:

"If you're craving a quick hit of optimism, reading a news magazine is probably not the best way to go about finding it. As the life coaches and motivational speakers have been trying to tell us for more than a decade now, a healthy, positive mental outlook requires strict abstinence from current events in all forms. Instead, you should patronize sites like HappyNews.com, where the top international stories of the week include "Jobless Man Finds Buried Treasure" and "Adorable 'Teacup Pigs' Are Latest Hit with Brits."

Or, of course, you can train yourself to be optimistic through sheer mental discipline. Ever since psychologist Martin Seligman crafted the phrase "learned optimism" in 1991 and started offering optimism training, there's been a thriving industry in the kind of thought reform that supposedly overcomes negative thinking. You can buy any number of books and DVDs with titles like Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, in which you will learn mental exercises to reprogram your outlook from gray to the rosiest pink: "affirmations," for example, in which you repeat upbeat predictions over and over to yourself; "visualizations" in which you post on your bathroom mirror pictures of that car or boat you want; "disputations" to refute any stray negative thoughts that may come along. If money is no object, you can undergo a three-month "happiness makeover" from a life coach or invest $3,575 for three days of "optimism training" on a Good Mood Safari on the coast of New South Wales.

But the question, before you whip out your credit card or start reciting your personal list of affirmations, is, What makes you think unsullied optimism is such a good idea? Americans have long prided themselves on being positive and optimistic — traits that reached a manic zenith in the early years of this millennium. Iraq would be a cakewalk! The Dow would reach 36,000! Housing prices could never decline! Optimism was not only patriotic but was also a Christian virtue, or so we learned from the proliferating preachers of the "prosperity gospel," whose God wants to "prosper" you. In 2006, the runaway bestseller The Secret promised that you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, simply by using your mental powers to "attract" it. The poor listened to upbeat preachers like Joel Osteen and took out subprime mortgages. The rich paid for seminars led by motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and repackaged those mortgages into securities sold around the world.

Optimism wasn't just a psycho-spiritual lifestyle option; by the mid-'00s it had become increasingly mandatory. Positive psychologists, inspired by a totally overoptimistic reading of the data, proclaimed that optimism lengthens the life span, ameliorates aging and cures cancer. In the past few years, some breast-cancer support groups have expelled members whose tumors metastasized, lest they bring the other members down. In the workplace, employers culled "negative" people, like those in the finance industry who had the temerity to suggest that their company's subprime exposure might be too high. No one dared be the bearer of bad news. The purpose of work, at least in white collar settings, was to flatter and reassure the boss, who had in turn probably read enough of the business self-help literature to believe that his job was to motivate others with his own relentless and radiant optimism. (Read "A Primer for Pessimists.")

Two years into the Great Recession, it's time to face the truth: optimism feels good, really good, but it turns out to be the methamphetamine of run-amok American capitalism. Meth induces a "Superman syndrome." Optimism fed into what Steve Eisman, a banking analyst who foresaw the crash, calls "hedge-fund disease," characterized by "megalomania, plus narcissism, plus solipsism" and the belief that "to think something is to make it happen." The meth-head loses his teeth and his mind; the madcap optimists of Wall Street lost something like $10 trillion worth of pension funds, life savings and retirement accounts.

Fortunately, the alternative to optimism is not pessimism, which can be equally delusional. What we need here is some realism, or the simple admission that, to paraphrase a bumper sticker, "stuff happens," including sometimes very, very bad stuff. We don't have to dwell incessantly on the worst-case scenarios — the metastasis, the market crash or global pandemic — but we do need to acknowledge that they could happen and prepare in the best way we can. Some will call this negative thinking, but the technical term is sobriety.

Besides, the constant effort of maintaining optimism in the face of considerable counter-evidence is just too damn much work. Optimism training, affirmations and related forms of self-hypnosis are a burden that we can finally, in good conscience, set down. They won't make you richer or healthier, and, as we should have learned by now, they can easily put you in harm's way. The threats that we face, individually and collectively, won't be solved by wishful thinking but by a clear-eyed commitment to taking action in the world."


I found this quite interesting because in our society we're always pressured to 'look on the bright side', but when faced with any difficulty, no matter how extreme, it's hard to constantly remain optimistic. In fact, maybe it's healthy to allow ourselves to get frustrated or depressed once in a while.

What do you guys think about this topic?

mariah redman

I was debateing on posting this video on obstacle illusions or a video on hypnosis. I chose this one because we are in the process of learning about the eye and brain and all the tricks it is capable of playing on you and all the faults you wouldnt know of. you should definatly watch this short clip because it will keep you entertained and by the end youll be surprised by what your brain is truely capable of. They say listen to half of of what you see and none of what you hear, obveously neither is to be truely trusted.

Wild Child - Feral children and the critical period

Is It Real - Feral Children 4of 5
by M_I_N_D

Mythological connotations aside, 'feral children' are human children who were raised with no human contact whatsoever. In this extremely abnormal case--that could probably only happen in sparsely populated countries like Ukraine--a girl raised by wild dogs developed canine instincts and behavior. But isn't human behavior innate and hard-wired into us?
Although the prospect of a wolf child may sound like an urban legend, feral children are often abandoned during their most critical period--as young, impressionable toddlers. As we learned in class, plasticity is a pretty remarkable thing. Seeking affection and direction, we will adapt and learn under even the most bizarre conditions.

The other parts of the video highlight more of the scientific background as well as featuring other children. And this is an interesting site for more of these alarming cases of neglect. Just makes you think about how far 'nurture over nature' can take us.

- Emily Rogers

Alexa McMahon

This is interesting to see, when even the simplest answer was there and yet the man still changes his answer to be like that of the others. This almost reminds me of spirit week, I know that if I tell some friends I'm not going to dress up for a spirit day it will defiantly alter whether or not they too will.

What the bleep do we know?

Perception of things around us: (Start at 2:00)

Part 2: