Personal Bubble Issues?

Yesterday, I decided to violate someone’s personal bubble. I approached one of my friends and struck up a conversation. However, instead of standing a few feet away, like a normal person, I stood right next to him so that my face was a few inches away from his.

His instantaneous reaction was to back away. He pretended that it was just some sort of accident and tried his best to continue the conversation as if nothing happened. However, I followed him as he stepped backwards, so I was still in his face. Then he got annoyed and asked me what I thought I was doing. I answered him saying, “I’m just having a chat with you.” He asked me, “but why are you so close to me?”

“Well what’s wrong with me being close to you?”

“It’s uncomfortable”

“Why is it uncomfortable?”

“It just is!”

After seeing that he was getting angry, I backed off and told him that it was something I was supposed to do for this class. We both laughed it off afterwards. I thought it was interesting how my friend was unable to explain why he felt so uncomfortable when I was so close to him. Why do we have a personal bubble? Speaking from an evolutionary perspective, it could be for safety reasons, so it gives you time to react should anything suddenly attack you. 

Raging Hormones

I remember playing basketball with some friends in junior high, and one friend was getting extremely angry as we were playing. He was normally fairly calm and a pretty decent basketball player. But during the game, the person defending him was clearly better than him, and he was getting extremely frustrated. Every time he missed a shot, he would swear and slam the ball on the ground. 

As the game progressed, he started getting more and more physical in his playing style, pushing and shoving more and more. He also became more and more competitive until after one last blocked shot, he finally snapped. He screamed that it was a foul and asked the person defending him if he was looking for a fight. My friends and I were able to break the two of them up and finish the game without things getting worse.

I think this was a case in which hormones were influencing my friend. It is likely that testosterone had a role in his behaviors because he was expressing a dominance reaction during the competitive interactions during basketball. There also may have been some cortisol affecting him because of his stress from being shut down during such a competitive sport like basketball. I thought it was amusing to see how greatly a person's composure can change given a certain context or situation.

 

What is emotion?

I believe emotions are a set of physiological responses that occur when we are presented with certain stimuli so that our brain can learn to react a certain way when presented with the same stimuli again. So, while a child may not feel sad at a funeral, they will see all the other grown-ups around him or her, thus learning to be sad the next time that child is at a funeral.

Of course, I do think there are some stimuli that carry emotions that don't have to be learned. If someone is having fun, they will most likely smile and laugh. I think that may be a biological trait that is passed down genetically.

Emotion defines a lot of our personality. Some people have low emotional affectivity whereas others are high. Some are more pessimistic while others are naturally more optimistic. I think part of the development of our emotions comes from our personality constructs on how we view the world.

An fMRI Study

An interesting experiment I heard about using fMRI was a study investigating the brain responses to social exclusion. While it may not have been a unique experiment in itself, I find that the topic was very fascinating.

The experimenters hypothesized that social pains are similar to physical pains. They focused on the anterior cingulate cortex and found that when people are distressed after being excluded from an activity, the ACC activates. It shows that social injuries have the same effect as physical injuries and steps need to be taken to restore equilibrium. It explains how we "hurt" when we lose a loved one.

Freedom of the Mind

If I could create any device that affects the brain, I would want to create something that frees people from social pressures. I would assume that the device would affect the amygdala, since it is involved with emotional learning and possibly social context learning. While the machine frees people from social pressures, it would NOT cause individuals to forget moral and ethical rights. They will still retain the knowledge of society's constraints. The only change is how their behavior is subjected to society.

With this machine, I would hope to reveal people's true natures. I am curious to see how much of an individual's personality can be revealed in the complete absence of any social pressure. In essence, they can truly be themselves. This machine will also be useful in getting rid of any sort of social fears like stage fright, public speaking, etc.

A Brain Injury

I remember watching a video in my high school psychology class about a woman who had seizures, so the last resort solution was to cut her corpus callosum, which joined the two hemispheres of the brain. The video then continued to show the ramifications of the surgery through the various experiments performed on her.

While there were clearly negative effects from the surgery, such as the inability for the right side of the body to react to the left visual field, there were also some effects that, to me, seemed pretty useful.

There seemed to be a splitting of the consciousness, which may sound a bit frightening. But I also thought that if it could be controlled well, could it be possible to have the left and right side of your body doing separate but meaningful tasks at once? I have heard of people who are able to write different sentences with both their left and write hands at the same time. It seems like such training to perform such tasks involve the corpus callosum?

I couldn't find the original video, but this seems close! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv4K5aStdU

How to Math Well???

In high school, I loved my math classes. I enjoyed utilizing formulas and equations to reveal an answer matched up with the correct answer in the back of the book.

But when it comes to reading about math in college, I quickly lost all the original pleasure I found in math. Rather than solving my own problems and finding solutions on my own, I had to read about how others did it. I'm personally more of a hands-on learner rather than someone who learns by reading in-depth into statistical methods, so it is harder for me to understand methodologies by reading about them instead of just doing them. But an additional problem is that much of the data collected in experiments is just plugged into a computer or calculator, which does all the work for you. Am I just suppose to accept the fact that what comes out as the computerized end product is what gives the research paper significance? I'd much rather see the mathematical steps and reasoning behind each step.

Of course, this is just how I learn best. I understand that there are many people out there who can easily understand empirical journal articles by skimming through them. I think that by going through the experimental and mathematical processes slowly, I could understand everything better, thus allowing me to gradually get a faster pace in reading empirical journals. After all... slow and steady wins the race... right?