Hello, and welcome back, this week we had three assignments all together and as always more things to do within them so lets dive in!
This week we started with a video lecture by the professor during this, we discussed perception, and what the problems of perception are and what the two processing pathways are as well. So with that, the two problems of perception are that there can be too much input for us to process and understand and there is more information in the world than we can even possibly hope to perceive. I also feel like this goes back to the fact that we are not easily able to multitask so if we attempt to take in too much information we may miss some important information.
As previously mentioned as well there are two processing pathways as well. These are the bottom up processes and the top down processes as well. The bottom up process is driven by sensory information from the physical world while the top down process is active in seeking and extraction of sensory information by our knowledge, beliefs, expectations and goals.
Next, we watched another lecture from a different professor who was teaching under grads at MIT and this video was filmed in the spring of 2018. The video in general is called 1.2 - How Can We Study the Human Mind and Brain? Marr’s Level’s of Analysis and it was published by MITCBMM. Overall I felt the video was interesting and obviously the professor is really knowledgeable on the subject she is speaking on I just unfortunately did not take any notes on her lecture I just listened but I quite enjoyed her presentation and I am sure you will too.
That was it for our first assignment of course of the discussion post we did for this one that I usually do not share, but next is assignment 2!
This assignment was fairly easy, we had a few articles to read and our discussion post to answer. So it wasn’t too bad so lets dive in.
First article is called How do our brains reconstruct the visual world? written by Alex Burmester. The article itself was very interesting, it explains how our eyes works and how it pairs with the brain to give us our vison. I found it to be very interesting and informational. I was also lucky enough to learn a bit more about this in another class I am in as well! The author also included an interesting graphic as well which if you don’t want to read the article, I will share it below!
Next we moved on to read ‘Noisy’ neurons put a limit on visual perception, which was written by Adam Hadhazy. This article was also quite interesting and informational and I am sure you will enjoy it, so feel free to read it yourself!
We then moved on to the final article of this assignment which was called Brain’s limits lead to unconscious choices in what we see and remember written by Melissa Healy. This article ended up explaining how our brains limit could also limit what we see and remember. But, with the brain doing this it’s all from an unconscious perspective, so its not anything we can truly control.
That is it for assignment 2 and now on to assignment 3!
We started off by reading Cognitive bias cheat sheet written by Buster Benson. This article goes through and explains what cognitive biases are and problems of biases and what could be possible solutions for them as well. One thing I loved about this article is the small comic it starts with because it is so true and it is what so many of us do!
Then we ended up looking at the cognitive bias codex, it starts with a basic bias and then goes into a more specific bias and then you get the answer of what the bias could be, not necessarily what it is.
Overall it is a very detailed wheel and a bit hard to read but it was definitely very interesting to look over especially since you tend to recognize some of the biases on there.
Overall that was it for this module, as always I will share the review sheet and I will see you for the next one!