preview

Consequence Of Psychology

Better Essays
Open Document

Psychology is one of those subjects that everyone takes because they must. Most people just rush through it for the credit, only delving deep enough to make a passing grade. They see it as not essential to their major, so they pay no attention to what psychology really is. They think they don’t need to know about it because they know how people and themselves process things. If they paid attention, though, they would find that psychology is nothing like performed on television. Psychology is the study of the mind and mental processes, not only how it happens but why. Have you ever wondered how you process the incredible amount of information you receive a day? Have you ever wondered what practical purpose dreaming has? Have you ever had a …show more content…

Consequence is defined as “something produced by a cause” ("Consequences"). A consequence can be good, such as getting to go to the movies, or bad, such as losing electronics privileges for a month. Without a doubt, almost everyone at one point or another has experienced operant conditioning. When you did well on a test did you get to go out for ice cream or something of the like. When you did poorly, you didn’t get to play video games a period of time. We even train animals using operant conditioning. I used to have a dog named Griffin. He loved to run so we kept him inside an underground electric fence. This way he would have as much running space as possible, but as the saying goes, “the grass is always greener on the other side.” He knew that if he got near the fence he would get a unharmful but unpleasant shock. As he was a stubborn dog, he didn’t accept his boundaries. He began pushing the boundaries and figured out that the faster he ran the closer he got to the shock line before getting shocked. Eventually, he figured out that, if he ran as fast as he could, he could cross the shock line with very brief discomfort. He continued doing this because he learned that if he ran fast enough, he could have all the space to run that he wanted. Unlimited space was his consequence for racing across the shock …show more content…

As I was researching these I became interested in how the mind processes newly learned information. Specifically, why do we dream? I came across a hypothesis that dreams are how the mind decompiles information learned during the day. Francis rick and Graeme Mitchinson postulated that dreams are actually a way to defragment our internal hard drive. They thought that, when you create new memories and connections, your brain puts things in the most convenient spot for rapid storage. They hypothesized that when you sleep your mind fires more rapidly and randomly, so that it can “loosen” new pathways. They thought dreams strategically relocates certain memories that are related and places them together (Simons, 2015). Another hypothesis is that dreams a way the mind processes anything traumatic. This could include anything from having accidentally cut yourself to having experienced strong feelings for someone (Breus, 2015). One day I was deer hunting with my dad and brother in the evening. We were all in different stands and it was getting late and dark, and I accidentally fell asleep in the stand. My dad was walking around in the woods looking for me, and when he saw my reflective orange hat he yelled to try and wake me up. This caused me to flinch and fall fifteen feet out of the tree. I walked away relatively unhurt considering what had just happened, but later that night when we got home, I repeatedly had dreams

Get Access
Related
Get Access