Bipolar Diasorder

The Bipolar disorder is a mental illness in which you have tremendous mood changes that vary from a manic stage to a depressive stage.  Normally when you are a little kid and suffer of bipolarity your mood swings change for depressive to madness and maniac.  So when you are a kid your mood swings are only angry and maniac.  The bipolar disorder can only be treated but it cannot be cured.  It affects equally men and women but it is most common to appear in the ages between 15 and 25.  The best treatment for bipolarity is the lithium doses which take out the maniac and the depressive moods; it leaves you in the middle.  If none of the treatments work then you are told to do the ECT (Electro Convulsive Therapy).  This treatment works by making you have a convulsive attack, which is like restarting your brain.  The depressive side of this illness brings suicidal thoughts and thoughts of killing anyone that is why this illness is considered to be very serious.

IA Loftus and Palmer

This experiment was conducted by two scientists named Loftus and Palmer.  This to psychologists had an extreme uneasiness because they knew that memory was not an accurate way to store past events.  They knew that memory could be distorted with the most minimum event.  So the aim of this experiment was to investigate how information supplied after an event, influences a witness’ memory for that event.  This means that they wanted to investigate if something as simple as an adjective could distort somebody’s memory.  They did this by showing a group of 45 students of the University of Washington.  They showed the students seven video clips of car crashes.  These videos were the ones used to driver classes to show them what could happen in the roads.  The clips ranged between 5 and 30 seconds of duration.  After each clip the scientists asked to answer some question but certainly guess the speed of the cars involved in the collision.   They separated the group of 45 kids into 5 groups of 8 persons.  They made a different question to each group, but the basic question was “About how fast were the cars going when they ***** each other?  Each group had a different word; these words were smashed, collided, bumped, hit, and contacted.  The independent variable was the different words that described the incident, and the dependent variable was the estimated speed that the students gave.  The entire experiment lasted about an hour and a half to two hours.  The results of the experiment were these ones:

Verb               Mean Estimate of Speed (mph)

Smashed                     40.8

Collided                      39.3

Bumped                      38.1

Hit                              34.0

Contacted                   31.8

As the results show the experiment proved that in deed the change of one word can distort an eyewitness memory.  Loftus and Palmer gave two explanations for these results in the first experiment.

1.       “Firstly, they argue that the results could be due to a distortion in the memory of the participant.  The memory of how fast the cars were traveling could have been distorted by the verbal label which had been used to characterize the intensity of the crash.”

2.      “Secondly, they argue that the results could be due to response-bias factors, in which case the participant is not sure of the exact speed and therefore adjusts his or her estimate to fit in with the expectations of the questioner.” (Loftus and Palmer)

Sex Differences in Memory and Cultural Differnces in Memory

Gender Differences

The difference in memory of the genders does exist.  Women have an episodic memory more efficient than men.  They have advantages that beat one another, but both have specific strengths, different but at last are strengths.  Let’s say there is a man and a women trapped in a forest, the man would find his way back faster because he has a better short and long term memory.  Evolution has developed this, women have a better memory to remember women faces and this has been proved to be truth.  The truth is that women have better memory to remember faces.

Cultural Differences

When was your first memory? Probably when you were at the age of 4.  Many psychologists had a question; does the difference of cultures make a difference in your memory?  Well the truth is that it does have difference and it happens to be that the culture that has the best memory are the Maoris, they got a better memory that Caucasians and Koreans and many other cultures.

The Placebo Effect

The placebo effect for me is a way to completely full the subject.  In my opinion when you give a placebo to the subject, the brain has a reaction because it is fooled and it reacts as if it really received the medicine.  So in my opinion when you receive a real medicine your body does a big part, so this may mean that most medicines have no real effect.  This again shows the strength of the human body.  The problem with placebos is that with the minimum disagreement with the medicine and the placebo effect will not occur, because the brain will not be fooled and will not let go the chemicals that make the chemical reaction that will make you feel better.  I also think that if the medicine companies would put four or six placebos in the bottle of pills and nobody would notice it because you are expecting to receive the real medicine, and when you expect it, and do not even imagine that placebos could be in the bottle but it will always make you feel better if your body can handle the sickness that is tormenting you in that precise moment.  If they told me to take a pill and I feel that it did not work I would only think that the medicine did not had effect on me, but I would never guess that I took a placebo.  The placebo effect is real but, at the same time is an illusion because it occurs but it doesn’t occur.

Alzheimer

The Alzheimer´s disease is for me the worst sickness that any human can have, because it is carving you little by little until there is no part of your memory left.  With the video that we see in class I learned that it is not sure if you are going to have it or not but the truth is that when you have Alzheimer´s disease you lose your independence because you lose your ability to understand the world until you become an old baby.  The worst part of this disease is that there is no cure for it what makes it lethal in the worst way possible but with no suffering in a physic way but it kills you in the mental way.  I imagine that is horrible to remember something one day and when you notice that some chunks of your memory are missing and when you know that you have it and that that is the cause for your problems.  The poor old men and women lose their ability to reason until they do some stupid things and actions like placing a toy in the plate of the food and this is because of their ability to reason where things go.  I can imagine the suffering of a person that is very close to someone with that disease because they lose the person that they have known for a life time and is incredible.  The sons and daughters and wives and husbands go through too much suffering because it gets to a point where that person stops to be himself and that person gets lost in the memory of the disease!

Memory

In this video I learned a lot of things about memory. For example babies go developing year with year their thinking abilities.  The most amazing thing of memory is that our mind forgets things that are not as useful as others because if we remembered everything our brain would be charged with too much information.  This is also incredible because I learned that babies have a peculiar way of thinking different from the adult humans.  For example for the babies, you are older if you are bigger so if they see a man who is very big they are going to think that he is very old.  Diseases like Alzheimer’s are horrible in people and I would not wish that for any people that I know in this world.  It’s incredible how amazing the memory of the Homo sapiens is.  Also the man who has problems with his memory in the video, I feel so bad for him because I can notice that he would be happier if he could have his whole memory.  For the humans memory is the most useful tool that we can use in learning and millions of other tasks, our life are based on memory.

3 articles

part I

The experiment was conducted by the Dr. Faber.  This experiment talked about the amygdale and how it controlled the strong emotions in our life.  She said that the strong memories of events of strong feelings are quick snapshots.  She said that in moments of extreme emotion the brain let’s go a hormone that combined with the electric pathways makes a strong feeling.  This may go on real life because this can explain traumas and why they last for an entire life time.  This may help psychologists help people forget of the trauma.

Part II

Weiwei Zang and Steve Luck were the psychologists that conducted this experiment.  The experiment was based on two experiments.  The first one they showed a image with 3 squares with 3 different colors, and then 10 seconds after that they showed a spiral with the entire set of colors and then they showed the 3 squares but colorless and one highlighted and they asked the man or woman to click on the spiral where the color that approached the most to the color of the highlighted box.  They showed that “The memories are not like flashlights that get progressively weaker as the battery runs low,” Luck said. “They are more like a laptop computer that continues working at the same speed until it suddenly shuts down.”  This may relate to real life because it shows how short term memory works and that we can do some tasks with it.

Part III

In this experiment that was conducted by Keith Paine and Elizabeth Korrigan they wanted to show that memories could not been forget intentionally.  Well in their experiment they showed that and they argued that because of emotional feelings it was impossible for them to forget something intentionally.  This is important for people in common day life because if something bad happens to you cannot forget it intentionally because every time you remember it you are recalling it.