As a part of the college experience, I have to take a introductory psychology course.
It is great.
Instructor is a cool guy who gets the point across.
But there is just something wrong with the discipline.
The textbook suggests that there is something wrong with the approach to Psychology as a whole.
A lot of redundancy and needless complication. Which is a shame because the subject matter is of supreme importance to anybody walking on the surface of this planet and existing among other people.
It is unfortunate that we are still at a point in civilization where conveying information is done in such a sterile manner. Textbooks explain things in such a convoluted way that the obvious connections between things is not readily visible.
Take for example right now - we are learning about learning.
Pavlov's dog - conditioned stimulus - unconditioned stimulus - conditioned and unconditioned responses.
A few weeks ago we were learning about memory and how the memory structure works.
Broken down to their base components - the memory system and learning system are the exact same thing.
There is a principle called habituation which is common to both. Habituation suggests that the more often something is repeated, the less likely you are to notice the details.
You REMEMBER that it is not necessary to pay attention to the details, because you LEARNED that the details are not of imminent importance.
When you take it a step further and keep the physical structures in mind (the brain and the process of perception), it becomes even more obvious that the entire process is so fluid and intricately linked that to even give one part of the process a title is to form a inaccurate separation.
That there is a long-term storage in the brain - that the most dependable type of memory is
episodic memory - those memories formed by doing something - suggests that learning occurs when people are participating in actions.
These processes are actual. They cannot be accurately conveyed in a textbook - they can hardly be communicated right now in this blog.
Learning and memory are not 2 different topics.
They are as inter-related as digestion and the digestive system.
Memory is required to learn - learning is the resulted of being able to formulate a memory structure.
Learning perpetuates itself.
We learn what to and what not to remember.
I am going to have to formulate some sort of diagram of the perception/memory structure.
I swear to god i can condense this entire textbook into a series of 4 or 5 diagrams.
or maybe i am full of shit
maybe i will work on this right this minute
Labels: Criticism, Editorial, Idiot, Psychology
