Saturday 29 September 2012

One Month of Classes

So I've been back to University for a month now and I think I have a pretty good run-down of each of my Psychology courses. I'm actually taking nothing but Psychology which is nice even if it is 4 classes crammed onto a single day.

Let's take a look shall we? In alphabetical order:

Aging Psychology

This class, is easy. A lot of it is disorders or events that happen to people as they grow older and how they're affected. Maybe it's just because the class has just started but I find it kind of obvious that if a person has arthritis/incontinence/cataracts, they become more dependent on others and can become depressed by this.

Really, the only thing I've learned from this course so far is that people in nursing homes are often unintentionally jerks, and glare is scary to patients with Alzheimer's. Apparently it looks like water or something to them.

I mean, I finished the midterm in 15 minutes, and then stayed an extra 15 minutes just to be certain of everything. I hope the class stays this easy, and I hope she continues to bake us food for each class.

No problem.

Cognitive Psychology

The exact opposite of Aging Psychology. This course is possibly one of the most dense Psych courses I've ever taken. Every week we are given a quiz on one concept from one the chapters of the textbook.

That's not so bad, except when the text is 50 pages of stuff like this:

The arbitrariness of symbols, and the multiple realization of universal machines, is rooted in the relative notion of universal machine. By definition, a machine is universal if it can simulate any other universal machine (Newell, 1980).

Or:

The phrase marker for a sentence can be illustrated as an upside-down tree whose structure is grown from the root node S (for sentence). The application of the rewrite rule S → NP VP produces the first layer of the Figure 3-6 phrase marker, showing how the nodes NP (noun phrase) and VP (verb phrase) are grown from S.

Or:

In a dissociation, an injury to one region of the brain disrupts one kind of processing, but leaves another unaffected, suggesting that the two kinds of processing are separate, and are associated with different brain areas.


Keep in mind that all of those excerpts were from the same chapter. Cognitive psychology claims it's an interdisciplinary science, so that means that in any given chapter I'm faced with Computing Science, Philosophy, Neuroscience, English grammar, and a sprinkling of Psychology.

Oh and those quizzes I mentioned? Yeah, one random question every week on any one of those concepts. Lots of fun this course.

Conservation Psychology

I'm convinced now that we as a species are doomed. I mean, I knew that there were a lot of problems with how we treated the planet but just seeing how much damage has been done (and how little is being fixed and rectified) is really frightening. I'd need to dedicate an entire blog post to cover everything.

It boils down to humanity is consuming too much, and there are hidden environmental costs to everything we consume. I honestly don't think we can change our mentalities anytime soon but I still have the rest of the course to decide on that.

We're doomed.

Social Influences

Yeah, I don't really have much to say about this class. I also fall asleep the most in this class. I'm not sure if that's more indicative of me or the class itself. Nothing really new has been discussed that hasn't been discussed in my previous classes.

I remain hopeful.

Oops.

And from the looks of things I'll be taking a few more courses in the Winter term. I'm missing a few per-requisites for the Master's program I want to get into so, wish me luck with that as well.

It never ends.

27 comments:

  1. You managed to get all your classes on one day? Awesome! Sure it makes for a long, tiring day, but on the other hand ... six day weekend!

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  2. I'm mostly doing cognitive right now, but I'm moving on to social after that. Only the last passage you gave us made any kind of sense really. I'm sure my textbook put that a lot simpler. Basically if one part of the brain is infected, or damaged, it can damage one part of thinking, but not another, which is seen as proof that different things are handled by different parts of the brain.

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  3. I hate all of theorotical lessons.

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  4. Your aging psychology teacher bakes you food? Awesome! :D
    The last example of cognitive psychology is pretty easy man. Sounds a tad bit more like biology as well.
    Yes do the "humanity sucks" blog post! We need more of those, really.

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  5. Gosh my brain hurts but it's turned to jelly just reading the bits under Cognitive Psychology! LOL!!!!

    Psychology - it's vast and complex and utterly profound, if a little baffling! Take care
    x

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  6. well at least it's not so bad.

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  7. Yeah I agree we are probably doomed, hopefully I'm long gone by then though. Never new about the glare either.

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  8. Hmm I wonder what "social influences" is actually about.

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  9. Wow, that's a lot of Psychology classes! If I ever need to go to a shrink again, I'll call you up as soon as you have your license.

    Best of luck with everything :)

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  10. psychology textbooks can sometimes really be extremely dry :( I loved only the more practical and up to the point parts.
    I used to have 8 to 10 classes a day, so four sounds like a holiday to me :)))

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  11. cognitive sounds tough...can't understand a word of that!

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  12. This is so interesting man, as you know I've been considering psychology at university so this guide has given me a great insight, Aging Psychology sounds appealing just because of how easy it is but Conservation Psychology sounds really interesting too even if it's depressing, hmm.

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  13. I remember when I took a Constitutional Law course, and every sentence I had to read was as complicated as those excerpts from your cognitive psychology class. I suppose it is inevitable that mankind will destroy itself. I think greed is what will get us there sooner, rather than later.

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  14. Sounds like you've got it alright. Cognitive psych though.. damn. That sucks.

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  15. i'm jealous. i feel like going back to school now!

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  16. Wow! I never realized there were so many categories of psychology! Wow! Good luck!

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  17. My son is doing his psych medical internship right now – not only does he come home talking about the issues you’ve mentioned, but also provides me with free medical advice - diagnoses all my crazy habits & tendencies… ;)
    Best of luck with all your courses!

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  18. You get baked food in class? I don't even get baked food at home. I'm envious. Also, never knew about the glare thing. Just googled that. They're sensitive to glare and light changes. Interesting...

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  19. I focused a lot on cognitive psychology in school like a million years ago :( I personally found that I fell asleep A LOT in math/science...people would always try to cheat off of me and I'd chuckle inside just knowing that by doing so, they were screwing themselves up, lol.

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  20. I assume the second excerpt makes more sense if you have the diagram next to it, because that's really hard to picture on its own.

    Good luck with the master's program!

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  21. Sounds you are really OK nice!! :)
    My sister is a psicology!

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  22. I am so happy I'm so over with classes everytime I hear or read about quizzes but work is a lot more worst than studying :((

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  23. May I borrow your Cognitive Psychology book for the nights I have insomnia? Wow.

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  24. Cool rundown of your classes, the Conservation Psychology sounds interesting (even if depressing).

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  25. im glad you're enjoying uni, i am :) I was really unsure the first few days but now im happy :)

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  26. Oh how this makes me want to go back to school so bad! Haha. I can't believe a month has already gone by...

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