Blog Post #3

I did the “Time to Think?” and “Seeing More Than Your Eye Does” activities. The first activity measured the amount of time it takes for you to see a black square on the screen and click a button. In this activity, I learned that it takes a few hundred milliseconds to see the square and click the button, no matter how prepared you are. In the second activity I had to close one eye and focus on a black cross on the screen. When I did that, a black dot on the other side of the screen “disappeared” because of a blind spot in my vision. I learned that the brain tends to fill-in and make up information it doesn’t see which is why when the black dot disappeared it seemed like that area was just blank. When there was a line going through the dot part of the line would disappear, but not all of it. I thought that was kind of surprising, I didn’t realize that our brains did all of that. It’s crazy to think that a small portion of what I see is made up by my brain. Perhaps everything really isn’t as it seems?
In this unit I learned about all of the different parts of the brain structure. I knew that different parts of the brain controlled different things, but now I know when I’m having a hard time remembering something I can blame the hippocampus. I also learned that our handedness can affect the organization of our brains. For example, some left-handed people will use the right hemisphere of their brain to process speech while many other left and right handed people use the left hemisphere. I never really thought that handedness had that big of an effect on the mind. I also thought this was particularly interesting because I can write pretty well with both hands (either way my handwriting looks like chicken-scratch). It makes me wonder which hemisphere of the brain I use to process certain information.

I thought the video, “The Man With Two Brains” was really interesting! It’s really cool that a person with a split brain could draw to distinct shapes at the same time, but a person with a “normal” brain couldn’t. I also though it was pretty intriguing that he could draw the telephone after seeing it flash on the screen but he couldn’t say what it was until after he drew it. It’s also amazing that he can literally do two things at once, sometimes I wish I could do that, but I think I’ll keep my brain whole for awhile.