8 October 2013: Self-Concept

I am almost late for class; I rushed in and find a seat immediately. The topic of this lecture

was self-concept, all I understand about self-concept is how we see ourselves in mind. The

lesson begins with a survey of how we perceive ourselves. First, we were asked to list

down 5 different definitions of ourselves. All the sentences must start with “I am”. My

mind was totally blank while thinking how to define myself. I just realised that actually we

are not that clear about ourselves or maybe we are just afraid to define it honestly. The list

of how I define myself, I am a student, I am shy, I am lazy, I am a bad guy and I am

monkey. After that, we were asked to sit in a group and share what we had written to

defined ourselves. We stand up and read out our sentences one by one. Some people where

defining themselves based on social identity, while some were defining themselves based

on personal traits. This is such an interesting activity that allows us to see and understand

how people define themselves.

23 October 2013: The power and perils of intuition

“Our thinking is partly controlled and partly automatic”, this is the sentence located right

under the title inside the first slide. This sentence grabs my attention and I started to wonder

what it means. Our thinking can be divided into two parts; Controlled and Automatic.

Controlled thinking is about reflective, deliberate and conscious; it refers to how our brain

controls our actions consciously and normally with justified reasons of our own. Automatic

thinking is about impulsive, effortless and unconscious; it refers to how we react to certain

stimulus unconsciously and instinctively. Besides that, automatic thinking may refers to

human reflex towards certain stimuli and also refers to human’s natural reaction towards

concepts, interpretation we have formed in the past. It also refers to our emotional reaction

before thinking which makes lies identifiable. Furthermore, during this lecture we also

learned about overestimation that is formed by our brain. Our brain tends to compare the

solution we formed through prediction and the solution of the past and this creates Planning

Fallacy. After overestimation, we learned about constructing memories. We do discuss if

memory should be considered as a bank which stores our experience and knowledge. It was

later revealed that it was not stored like a bank at the end of the discussion. The class ended

while the discussion end. People who have their attitude changed will deny their change of

attitude. I gained a lot of knowledge after this class.

13 November 2013: Visual

This lesson recalls the knowledge of my Physics subject, I feel like having physic class

during that time. This lecture started by introducing vision, how eyes interact with light. The

slides contain of many information about light and our eyes, example the structure of eyes

and what is light. Light is one of the electromagnetic spectrum with a specific wavelength

and frequency. Other than that, lecture also taught us that how light enters our eyes and

transform information to our brains. After the introduction, lecture shows us that how colour

affecting us psychologically, for example red can increase our brain activity. Besides that, we

were also introduced to reversible figures. Reversible figures could be perceived in two ways

depending on the perspective of the viewer, for example the figure of the number “13”.

Moreover, we were introduced to a lot more optical illusions such as depth and distance

perception, context effect, the necker cube, linear perspective and so on. At the end of the

slides, there are many of pictures about visual illusions, we were amazed by those pictures. I

learned and gained a lot after this lecture, it is quite fun to know all the information about the

interaction between light, our eyes and how it affect our thinking.