The topic that I have found to be most memorable this semester was learning about the ways in which we remember things. This concept is extremely pertinent to all college students, as we are asked to recall and recognize a wide body of knowledge for various classes. Learning memory techniques, such as chunking and mnemonics, has proven to be an effective way to study. I can remember a greater amount of information in a smaller amount of time by using these techniques. I found the lectures that included slides of numbers that we were asked to memorize for a short period of time to be particularly interesting.
Learning about the ways that the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information can affect the processes of learning. That is to say that we can consciously affect what we remember by knowing how we remember things and how our memory works. For instance, if one wants to remember a famous quote, one could repeat the quote a few times to move the sentence from sensory memory to short-term memory, and continuously reviewing the quote could move it to long-term memory. Thus, we have the knowledge to go about remembering something in a more informed manner.
As the picture shows, mnemonic devices can help us to chunk information into units that are easier to remember. The information that we have learned about how our memory works is something that I will remember for quite some time.
lahrx059: April 2012 Archives
Jonathon Haidt is an influential psychologist and author of a recent book, titled "The Happiness Hypothesis." The book features eleven steps to achieving happiness. One of the chapters, "The felicity of virtue," talks about the loss of virtuous qualities in contemporary society and how we, as a country, can return those values to everyday life, ultimately improving our general level of happiness. For, Haidt argues, simply acting in a virtuous manner makes us happy.
One might ask, then, why do we praise things that are not virtuous; doesn't it reduce our happiness? We have to look no further than Jersey Shore and South Park to find shows that thrive mainly on partying and (generally) offensive jokes, two things often not associated with being virtuous. So why is it that many people are happy when watching such shows? Aren't we seeing an extension of ourselves and our thoughts through the less-than-virtuous characters displayed in these and other shows?
Haidt would argue that giving up these shows that many people, myself included, find entertaining. In fact, Haidt reasoned that "we've reduced virtue to just being nice," thus losing most other virtues. So how do we get back to being a virtuous society?
Jonathon Haidt is an influential psychologist and author of a recent book, titled "The Happiness Hypothesis." The book features eleven steps to achieving happiness. One of the chapters, "The felicity of virtue," talks about the loss of virtuous qualities in contemporary society and how we, as a country, can return those values to everyday life, ultimately improving our general level of happiness. For, Haidt argues, simply acting in a virtuous manner makes us happy.
One might ask, then, why do we praise things that are not virtuous; doesn't it reduce our happiness? We have to look no further than Jersey Shore and South Park to find shows that thrive mainly on partying and (generally) offensive jokes, two things often not associated with being virtuous. So why is it that many people are happy when watching such shows? Aren't we seeing an extension of ourselves and our thoughts through the less-than-virtuous characters displayed in these and other shows?
