Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts

Our sleep cycle and the different stages of sleep.

So what happens to we're asleep? Despite the fact that we spend a good portion of our lives fast asleep (around a third), most of us aren’t really aware of the fact that we experience different stages of sleep and different times of the night. Sleep is a vastly complicated science, and a typical night of sleep consists of just five sleep stages. Though sleep can also be divided into two broader stages, non-rapid eye movement (NREM), and rapid...

The Stroop Effect.

The phenomenon The Stroop Effect first discovered by American psychologist John Ridley Stroop is where the brains reaction time slows down when processing conflicting information. This happens because of interference or the use of incompatible functions in the brain causing the decreased reaction time within the brain. This phenomenon is usually studied with a stroop test where a researcher first takes note of how long a participant takes to...

The Zeigarnik Effect: The need for closure.

First identified by gestalt psychologist Kevin Lewin, the zeigarnik effect is where we tend to remember incomplete tasks more often than tasks that are completed. This effect was first discovered in 1927 when Kevin Lewin sitting in a restaurant in Vienna noticed that waiters only remembered orders while they were in the process of being served thus incomplete, and when they were completed they later had little recollection...

False memories: Do you remember when......?

Often the human memory is seen as something that is similar to a video tape where once something is recorded it cannot be altered, changed or tampered with. Even when someone is 100 percent sure that a situation or an event took place in a particular way they can still be wrong despite their certainty, in reality the human memory is susceptible to change and manipulation regardless of how solid and reliable you think it is. The human memory...

3 quick facts about memory.

Ever wondered about the workings of your memory? Thought about how it operates? How we use it from day to day? Our memory is something we take for granted, though we use for pretty much everything we do, we often don't know how it actually works. Similar to being able to drive a car everywhere but not knowing how it runs in the first place. Unsurprisingly the memory is complex and involves several parts of the brain when in use. Some memories...

How we learn: The Principles and Mechanics. Chapter two

So in the last chapter I spoke about the general physiological aspects of how we learn and process information, and continuing from that I will be visiting some principles and concepts discovered by psychologists to help anyone reading this to have a more concise understanding of how learning takes place. Classical conditioning. If you have a steady interest in psychology you may have heard of the name ''classical conditioning'' floating around,...

How we learn: The Principles and Mechanics. Chapter one.

It’s funny how from a very young age we are told the importance of learning and gaining knowledge so we can eventually leave school and education to be very successful in our lives. We have teachers telling us what we need to learn and take in, we have our exercise books so we can refer back to anything we have been taught and of course we have our parents teaching us what to do and what not do at home and lastly we have our friends showing...