Jeffrey Lin

October 11, 2014

Chapter 3
Discovering Psychology The Mind Awake and Asleep
Nearly everything in this world goes through a cycle. For humans, each one of us has a
biological clock every day we experience a variety of ongoing consciousness. In or der to
function, the mind constructs a set of working blueprints of the environment. Zimbardo
explains that our consciousness enables us to read these blueprints and act accordingly so that
our behavior is directed in adaptive and flexible ways. Consciousness also empowers our
mental processes to analyze, compare and interpret whatever experiences weve encountered.
Structuralism in psychology is based on whats on your mind instead of why and how it got
there. Through an experiment, attention was able to be tested. Subjects were tested and asked
to listen what were being played in their left or right ear while the other side was playing
something else as well. As a result, the subjects were unable to remember much about the
story presented to the unattended ear. So attention has a limited capacity. The video went on
to talk about day dreaming, REM sleep, the Circadian Rhythm, and Activation Synthesis Theory.
VTK Circadian Rhythms
The circadian rhythm is how our body secretes hormones during dark/light cycles which then
influence our behavior and how we live in a 24 hour time frame. The location of the Circadian
Rhythm is in the Hypothalamus. The rhythm is initiated from sunlight, mental cues such as
exercise, talking to people, eating and light levels. During different times of the day, this can all
affect the circadian rhythm. This made me think, why I always want to stay up late and why I
always want to sleep in when I wake up. I also realized that my sleepiness in the afternnon
wasnt because of lack of sleep even if I got a good 8 hours the night before, but simply because
the brain is the least alert around 3:00 pm.