Conditioning

I believe that we all, including myself, are conditioned to like certain products in advertisements that play happy/upbeat music in the background. It's basically reversing the country music experiment we did in class, except with a positive stimulus.

Upbeat Music      Feeling Happy
     UCS          =        UCR

Product        Upbeat Music           Feeling Happy
  NS       +        UCS              =               UCR

Product    Feeling happy
CS      =         CR


A great example of this would be an Ipad commercial:
http://en.vidivodo.com/500719/2010-oscars-ipad-commercial-_-stuff

Brain Disorders

After all of the brain disorder presentations I decided to look more into other brain disorders and I came across some pretty weird ones. A lot of the symptoms I had already heard about at some time or another but I didn't know they were actual brain disorders. Here are some examples:
Anarchic Hand Syndrome- also called "alien hand syndrome", someone with this disease has  no control over one of their hands and that hand appears to have a mind of its own. The hand can unbutton buttons, remove clothing and manipulate close to anything. This is most common in people who have had the two hemispheres of the brain surgically separated (usually to cure symptoms of epilepsy), after brain surgery, after a stroke, or infections. There is no cure.
Foreign Accent Syndrome: Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare condition following a head injury, trauma or stroke. This syndrome causes someone to speak their native language as if they had a foreign accent. Research has shown on that patients suffering from this condition, the brain’s speech center was affected and damaged.
There were a lot more crazy ones but these are two I thought were pretty unusual.

http://www.blogissues.com/2007/12/04/26-strange-unbelievably-bizarre-and-weird-mental-disorders/

Insight

Last week when we were doing our problem solving unit I came across an article that I found pretty interesting. It begins with a story about a fire fighter who is placed with an impossible situation. He and his team were fighting a forest fire and just when it seemed like he was going to be trapped in the flames, he had an insight. He was able to lie on the ground, the fire went over him and he was left unharmed. The article goes on to discuss how the brain's process for insight and quick problem solving skills is very complex. The brain first searches for answers in the logic centers of the brain (left hemisphere). If the problem is difficult the brain accesses the centers for insight (right hemisphere). To get insights though, you generally have to be relaxed. This explains why most insights come when the mind is at ease. Finally, the article talks about how there is a lot of criticism for corporate team building because they take people away from work. But when you think about it this makes sense because if the brain is able to relax, the employees will have a better chance to solve their most difficult problems with insights. I thought this article did a good job putting the things we talked about in class into real life situations.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Teambuilding-Insights-and-Problem-Solving---How-the-Brain-Cracks-the-Puzzles&id=2009339

Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and Karen Horney

Carl Jung was very educated and for a while believed in many of Freud's theories about the unconscious. He tended to have lucid dreams and thought he was connected with humanity as a whole although he didn't know why. Through all his dreams he came up with a theory called collective unconscious. This theory was that the unconscious was all of the dead, not just ourselves. All of the contents in the collective unconscious are called archetypes. An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience something in a certain way. Jung's theory of archetypes is similar to Freud's theory of instinct.  

Alfred Adler believed that every child experiences the feeling of inferiority by being around more capable adults. The child is drived growing up by the original feeling of inferiority and strives for power and recognition. If a child fails to do this they then develop an inferiority complex, or a pattern of always feeling inferior and different from others.

Karen Horney disagreed with Freud's theory of penis envy. She proposed the idea of womb envy, saying that men have feelings of inferiority because they cannot give birth to children. This theory created more interest in the psychology of women.