Dreams

Summary

Each human being in the world while sleeping is dreaming. It does not matter if he remembers them or not, it is proved that approximately each individual is dreaming 1500 dreams a year. Dreams are a part of the sleeping process and it is also important.

First of all, sleep is very important for human’s body, because a good night’s sleep can improve memory. Secondly, dreams reflect person’s waking experiences. If his day was pretty bad, probably dreams will be unwelcome too. Other fact is that if person is trying not to think about something before going to sleep, he is likely to dream exactly about it. Finally, dreams help people to solve visual problems that they are facing each day, also it is inspiring their creativity.

All in all, dreams are closely connected to what is happening around each individual every day; they reflect most of their empathies and problems.

Richard Wiseman

Professor Richard Wiseman started his working life as an award-winning professional magician, and was one of the youngest members of The Magic Circle. He then obtained a first class honours degree in Psychology from University College London and a doctorate in psychology from the University of Edinburgh.

For the past fifteen years he has been based at the University of Hertfordshire, and in 2002 was awarded Britain's first Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology.

Prof Wiseman has established an international reputation for his research into unusual areas of psychology, including deception, luck and the paranormal. He has published over 50 papers in refereed academic journals, including articles in one of the world’s most respected science publications, Nature.

He has given invited addresses and keynote speeches in Britain and abroad, including to The Royal Society, The Royal Society for the Arts, Microsoft, Caltech, and The Royal Institution.

Prof Wiseman’s research has been featured on over 150 television programmes, including Horizon (BBC), Body Shock (Channel 4), 20/20 (ABC), and Dateline (NBC). He is regularly heard on BBC Radio 4, including appearances on ‘Start the Week’, ‘Midweek’ and ‘The Today Programme’. Feature articles about his work have regularly appeared in The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, and a recent poll revealed that he was the psychologist most frequently quoted in the British media.

Prof Wiseman has written three best selling books. The Luck Factor presents a comprehensive account of his ten-year research project into the psychology of luck. This book has now been published into 14 languages and published in over 25 countries. Quirkology, examines the curious psychology of everyday life, including laughter, lying, and love. His most recent book, 59 Seconds, investigates the science of self-help and rapid change.

A passionate advocate for science, Prof Wiseman is well known for his media appearances, high-profile talks, live performances, and large-scale studies. He has been invited to speak at The Royal Society, Microsoft, Caltech, and The Royal Institution. Over 1 million people have taken part in his mass participation experiments, and his YouTube channel has received over 8 million views. Prof Wiseman also regularly acts as a creative consultant for print, broadcast and new media.

His work has been supported by grants from several prestigious organisations, including The Perrott Warrick Fund (Trinity College Cambridge), The Leverhulme Trust, The Wellcome Trust, and The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA).

Prof Wiseman was the recipient of The CSICOP Public Education In Science Award in 2000 and the Joseph Lister Award For Social Science in 2002. In 2004 he was awarded a NESTA DreamTime Fellowship for his innovative work in science communication, and in 2005 served as President of the General Section of The British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Most recently, Prof Wiseman has helped create Telepath - a mind-reading psychological app for the iphone. 

The mystery of memory

Summary

There are a lot of things that has to be remembered in human’s life. Passed so many centuries since science of memory appeared. Nowadays many people are focusing on human brain and how does it recall and save remembrances.

It is very simple how our brains work; each time a new memory is made a new pattern is created in our brains, which stores the new memory. Many things in our brain is recalled only for few seconds or minutes and after that it is being deleted or it is transferred to long term memory. Our memory seems to be endless. If people are trying to remember something, memories from long-term memory are recovered to so-called “working memory”. After that information is sorted to procedural memory (remembering “how” to do things) or to declarative memory (remembering how the object looks like). There is also a theory that proves that a human brain easier recognizes the picture of your friend then to recall it without any visual help. Moreover, human has eidetic or photographic memory that snapshots fragment that is associated with smells, tastes or colours.

All in all, sometimes people forget unnecessary things, but most of the important information is stored to long-term memory that is very useful to everyone’s life, that means people can improve their skills. Human has magnificent memory that is endless.

End of term self-assessment

ESP Vocabulary:
This task was the most difficult of all. It was pretty hard to learn new definitions that were in English. These definitions included many new words since Psychology has a lot of biology terms. On the other hand, new definitions that we learned in class helped me to learn Psychology in Lithuanian.

Writing summaries:

This task reminded me school. I never had problems writing something and that means that summaries weren’t very difficult task for me. As I use English language everyday, I easily caught the idea of text and was able to shorten it as summary required. Of course, I faced some problems while writing not in direct speech.

Online Exercises:

This type of exercises was one of the most amusing. It was really interesting to test our knowledge while filling up the blanks or writing empty gaps. Of course it wouldn’t be so interesting if we couldn’t communicate with other colleagues. It helped us to know each other.

Moodle tests:

This type of tests was helpful. We could test our skills and new definitions that we learned in class. I liked it because we could do that anytime time at home. Repeating definitions is very important since the more we repeat, the better we memorize it. Sadly, I was really frustrated and angry when I picked the right answer or filled correctly in the empty blank but the machine didn't counted it as a correct answer. So it was a bit demotivating...

Online listening in class:

Listening was always my strongest skill in English language. Listening to Internet speeches was interesting because subjects were very interesting and topical. Voices were very clear and easy to understand.

Traditional listening to cassettes:

It’s very familiar to online listening, maybe a bit more difficult. What I found difficult is British accent. Sometimes we could barely understand what is said. Moreover the sound of tape-recorder was a bit too loud.

Power point presentations:

This task took the most time. I found it interesting because I could choose the topic I wanted. Also it was interesting to speak to whole class and see their reaction. It was interesting to visit different Internet sites to gather more information because I learned new information that I even couldn’t find in Lithuanian language

Speaking impromptu:

I can’t say I didn’t like it. I love to speak, speaking improves all skills. You need to form grammatically good sentences in one second and that really shows your English language knowledge. At first when we started to do it was so hard because I haven’t spoken English like half a year and my tongue didn’t helped to speak, but later I recreated what I had learned earlier and it was piece of cake!

Short-talks:

This one was a bit more difficult, because we had to speak about different topics and learn how to describe various Psychology definitions in our words. I felt that others had problems too, but time passed and we improved our skills and most of us now can talk about it pretty fluent.

You are how you wait: Queue Psychology

Every place on earth is overcrowded with people and that means everyone has to wait in lines and waste their time. No doubt people started to complain and solutions had to be made.
First of all, there are specific types of queues such as multi-server queue. Multi-server queue consist of few queues with separate waiting lines. Some companies came up with the idea to attract people that were standing in a line with a various objects such as mirrors, information tables or music. Moreover, other companies made people do something longer then usual to reach their destination instead of waiting in a queue.
All in all, the main solutions that were made have the same point. The point is that people are drawn back from the thought that they are actually standing in line.

Secret personality

Sleep is the most important thing of our daily life. Every one of us has our different sleeping position. Apparently a research has been made that our sleeping position reflects our personality. For example, people who are sleeping on their back are very opened, they are shy, it’s hard to upset them, also they are easily influenced by ideas and they often do not express their real feelings.  I don’t really believe in it, because I know people that sleep on their back and they are different as it was described in the research results, only few traits can fit their personality, like to most of us. It is very hard to make such kind of research, because you need a lot of participants to make an accurate research (about 20000-50000). What is more, they have to be from different corners of the world, since the culture in each region is different. For example, most of Lithuanians are shy and this trait can apply to most of us, no matter how we sleep. All in all, the idea of research is very good, but we must be very critical before we think of something. In my opinion this research had not enough participants to make its results accurate.

Psychology of the Internet

Nowadays Social psychology focuses on Web world, and how that affects people. They are studying how people are covering their imperfection in face-to-face communication and add socioemotional expressiveness to their online personas. This is possible if they are on the Internet. Many people in the world have their online profiles in social websites. Most of them use it to find friends or sometimes even more! We are tending to show our better side more often then the ugly. That means we have to lie about our personality. That isn’t very good, because if we try to meet friend we have added while using Internet in real life, we can disappoint him, since he will think about us not as we are. Moreover, this problem affects young children even more. There are a lot of children who are playing computer games and often they forget who they are in reality and morph into the character of virtual world. What is more, there is a lot of aggression and violence in the Internet. The fact that most of the posts and messages are made anonymous lets people to be unpunished for their critics or aggression. I call them Cable Knights.  Also a lot of children are able to watch pornography in their early age which strongly affects their mind and most of the sexual acts they see not as they should do. On the other hand there are a lot of people who can stand for Internet because they have found lots of friends.

All in all, Internet should be used properly; young children should be monitored by their parents. Internet can help us lengthen our work or make it easier to communicate with an old friend who lives far away.