How the Mind Works?

 When I see a tree my mind knows that it is a tree because when I was born my mom or dad used to point to it and tell me that a tree was a tree.  It was tall. It was green with a long brown structure. It had what other people called leaves that fell off the tree when it started to get cold outside. I made the connection in my mind that those specific things made a tree a tree. When I saw what the world calls a tree when I was a bit older, I learned more words that people gave things related to the tree like roots and acorns. I learned more about what the roots and the acorns did. Eventually I learned what a tree is in detail or as a whole. I feel as though this is how the brain works with everything in life including reading but as we get older these connections work faster and the connections are more organized (we develop more synapse). 

When we see an object we find out the name it has been given and then learn more about it because we cant not help it..the brain wants to know more. While we are learning about that object we are learning about other objects at the same time and we may not notice everything that our brain has taken in. Our vocabulary grows and so does what we know. The brain could work like a mind map or network, establishing links or connections with names given to objects or things that make us think of other things that lead to other things! How the memory works, the chemicals that are flowing around and how the linking is taking place is beyond my knowledge. I heard once that a new synapse is formed every time we learn something new and with practice and repetition the connection becomes easier to grasp and we get better at something. Once something is grasped it can be stored into long term memory and we can resort to it or retrieve it when it comes up again in our lives however (the correlation between forgetting and time was measured many years ago) we forget certain things. I use both short term memory and long term memory to make decisions. Making a decision is even harder for me to write about because I have to pick just one which is a hard decision! The decision to get out of bed in the morning may be the easiest for me to write about. I came about this decision to write about waking up in the morning because at first I thought it would be easy (so I weighed out my options). I wake up (Sleeping is not considered as thinking). I hear the alarm designed to disrupt my sleeping and I make the split decision to hit snooze or get up. Most of the time I hit snooze 10 times and then decide that I better get up  (this has become a behavioral pattern or maybe its because I just can not make a decision to get up or not)!!! I make these decisions based off of the emotions (chemicals, anxiety) that I feel. I learned and remember that if I do not get out of my bed, get ready and get to campus that I will miss something important like class or the bus to school (negative consequences for my decisions which have been weighed out). I tend to avoid negative consequences. The ability to make such decisions is what makes me a human. I also made these connections because of society. Sometimes its really hard or exhausting for me to make a decision.

           

My notes after reading articles:

We want to improve the mind and cognitive psychology is very focused on time and accuracy.

A lot of issues we face are due to cognitive overload due to technology. However technology makes us not use our brain as much (for instance a calculator and computer programs) so maybe there is a balance...