1/2 a cookie + 1/2 a cookie = 2 cookies????

What I found really interesting this week was Jean Piaget's stages of cognitive development. To learn about the stages we watched videos of children in each stage. It amazed me that you can break a cookie in front of a kid in preoperational stage and they think they have two cookies. Also, if you spread the same number of quarters over a larger area they think they have more money. This is all part of the preoperational stage of cognitive development.

Another behavior that occurs in this stage is animistic thinking. This is giving inanimate objects human characteristics. No wonder kids at this age have an attachment to dolls or stuffed animals. When I babysat kids in this stage of development I always ended up playing house or with dolls. I found out that they have a very creative imagination. The most difficult aspect of children in this stage of development is their egocenterism. When siblings started arguing it was always a lot harder to get them to settle down because they can only see the situation from their perspective.

Mental Disorders

The brain is very complex and from what we have learned this week a lot can go wrong. If one part of the brain isn't functioning correctly it starts to fall apart. That is what makes mental disorders so tragic. First of all, you are trapped inside a body that can't interact with the outside world. Also, many of the different mental disorders progress slowly and eventually kill you, because there is no cure. Even though we don't have a cure we know how the disease will progress, which seems worse.

For the project we did this week I learned about Parkinson's disease. It is the most common  Parkinson's is thought to be caused by the lack of dopamine, which helps the brain control the muscle movements. So as Parkinson's progresses you keep losing control of your movements. Walking, talking, and simple tasks become a challenge.   

I remember ... do I?

The topic that interested me the most this week was false memories. Our mind is susceptible to receive false information, which we start to believe as true. The video we watched showed that our memory can easily be altered just by seeing false pictures. With this recent discovery we now know that memoirs and eyewitness testimonies may not be as accurate as we think.

I always thought I had a good memory, but now I'm starting to question it. My family told me stories when I was little and now that I heard them I can picture it and it starts to feel like a memory. I can see the colors objects were, what people said, and how I was feeling. How many of my memories are real?   

Also every time we retrieve memories we change a few details. This reminded me of a teacher I had in middle school. He would tell us stories about his life and each year we noticed a change. For example, he told us he had to jump over a fence to the runway to catch his plane (this was a LONG time ago) and each year we noticed the fence kept getting higher and higher. First, it was four feet then six and then 9 feet. We never thought much of it, we just said he was crazy (we still think he is), but he may not be as crazy as we thought he was.