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I have always had a great passion for literature, progressing throughout my life from my childhood when I was captivated by picture books to my more matured love of reading that persists to this day. When I came to college and found myself faced with choosing a major, mylifelong love of books provided me with the obvious answer of an English major.  Unfortunately I found out too late that the major was not what I thought it would be.  I had imagined myself sprawled for daysat a time amidst heaps of novels, which, upon having read, I would dissect and debate in classes filled with my peer English majors.  I had pictured myself in classes filled with

A Writer’s Tale of the Overactive “I” Function

Michelle Crepeau

Prof. Grobstein

Biology 202: Neurobiology and Behavior

16 May, 2008

 

Creatures in the Night and Miracles in Clouds: A Discourse on the Plausibility and Indistinct Nature of Group Hallucinations and Collective Reality

 

Can we know something without knowing how we know it? This is precisely the question that Malcolm Gladwell sets out to ponder in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Looking at scientific experiments from laboratories nation-wide, Gladwell explores the fascinating phenomenon of “thin-slicing”, or making snap-judgments without consciously engaging in the decision making process. These “thin-slices”, Gladwell asserts, are surprisingly accurate—sometimes even more so than the decisions we make after long hours of careful consideration and reflection. One particularly interesting question raised by this study is

The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller examines how one loses their self during childhood and how as an adult struggle to discover or accept ones true identity that Miller focuses on children who undergo the process of overcoming an "abusive" childhood. Abuse does not necessarily have to be physical or sexual, but in many of the cases outlined in this book they refer to a child growing up in an environment where the child loses their identity and becomes passive to emotional abuse that their parents may indirectly put them through. This results in a child ignoring his or her own needs, which results in the disappearance of the "real" self.

There are countless stories of sleepwalkers suddenly waking up and finding themselves naked in their backyards. Between 1 and 15% of the population are prone to sleepwalking, which involves people getting up and walking around while asleep and often doing bizarre things (1). Frequent sleepwalking can lead to health problems since it interrupts normal patterns of sleep. But what causes sleepwalking and are there ways to control it? How does this relate to the structural mechanisms of neurobiology that we have learned over the semester?

Julianne Rieders

Continuation on the Cultural Cognition Theory

            In my last paper analyzing Richard E. Nisbett’s theories about Cultural Cognition, I asked if stereotypes of the East and West affect research on this topicwithout elaborating on what these stereotypes are. Furthermore I failed todiscuss why China, Korea, and Japan could be considered a cohesive group, whichI called East Asia, in which members share similar ways of thinking.

Recently, a new genre has been receiving the attention of internet users: the weblog. Using blogs, we can filter out the facts of our offline world and develop a new online external identity. This paper will discuss the nature, use-value, and appeal of this online external identity, discuss the importance of the consistency of the external self-both online and offline, review the relevance of the unverified information in blogs, and talk about how anonymity affects the way we perceive our own identity. Additionally, I hope to shed some light on the blog as an emerging genre and talk about what the blog's worldwide success reveals about human nature and psychology (and vice versa).

 

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