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.