--Original published at Jill Distler's Psychology Blog

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer,” Harriet Tubman. 

But where do our dreams really come from? There is actually a real science behind what goes on behind the scenes of the dreams that we create subconsciously while we are resting, and the physiological answer to this science is found within the Hippocampus of the brain.

The hippocampus is a neural center in the limbic system (neural center (including the amygdala, hypothalamus and hippocampus) located below the central hemisphere; associated with emotions and drives (Page 52 Myers & DeWall).) that helps to process explicit memories for storage. 

According to a group of scientists from Germany and Rhode Island, the process of moving memories to different storage centers during sleep, causes dreams to be produced from the experiences from the day that are being transferred to different storage locations. The hippocampus is essentially emptied every night while we sleep, to make room for more information coming the next day. It is believed that while the brain sorts through a day’s worth of experiences, that the brain is able to “steal” parts of these memories and fabricate them into some of our wildest/craziest dreams. 

Dreaming is also thought to be used as a purging method, since we can’t recall 90% of the dreams that our brains create overnight. This thought was also summarized by the famous Francis Crick, who in 1984 said, “We dream to forget,” in his development of his “garbage disposal theory”. 

Many people wonder what the crazy dreams they are having may mean, but there is no exact answer for why our minds create such specific and elusive visions to entertain us while we are in our most vulnerable state: sleep. Since we really don’t know how these images are created, we at least tried to understand how the brain is able to transfer memories to different areas of the brain. That ended up coming down to studying the electrical signals during sleep cycles, especially those signals being passed around in the structures within the limbic system, but mainly, the hippocampus and the neocortex. The neocortex being a section of the cerebral cortex (The most highly developed part of the brain that is associated with thinking, perceiving, producing, and understanding language.) that usually is known to be focused on sight and hearing, but while sleeping, helps to send memories to long-term storage.

While dreaming can be a confusing concept, they actually help the brain problem solve through endless possible experiences, both good and bad. The brain, while asleep, actually continues to work on its problems that it faced while awake. Creating dreams to allow us to “physically” work through the problems, but we only remember a few each night when we wake up the next day. The remembered dreams being the most extreme and bazaar solutions to these issues.

Although there is not a possible way to fully understand the complexity of the human mind, we can certainly try to find answers, and if we can’t, there is still many other things for scientists to discover along the way.

Sources:

https://www.pnas.org/content/104/12/5169

http://time.com/4921605/dreams-meaning/

--Original published at Phil's College Blog

Love is not easy. However, neither is telling someone that you do not love them anymore. This is a normal issue that many people deal with everyday, and there is something psychological that reveals why it can be problematic. A new study from psychologists from the University of Utah, Wayne State University, and the University or Toronto have found the explanation for this problem.
The issue is that the person who wants to break up is too concerned with how the other person will handle it. This will cause the individual who wants to break up to hold on to the relationship for the other person involved. These universities came to this conclusion by conducting two different studies to display their results to the public. The first study involved around 1400 participants and the second included an extra 500 from the previous 1400. Throughout the study, the participants were monitored by answering questions about their relationships. Then the participants were checked on over 10 weeks to see if they stayed with their partner. The second study was almost exactly the same however, it was used to see how many people thought of ending their relationship over the same time span. This allowed the researchers to have an in-depth look at both sides of the spectrum.
In both studies, the people that wanted the best for their ex-partner stayed longer than those who did not think about their ex-partner’s feelings. Furthermore, if the partner could see how much the other was putting into their relationship, they were inclined to stay in it longer because of the feelings for the other person.
In the end, people do break off relationships for different reasons, but it is true that partners do care about how their partner would feel if they left them. So next time you think your friend should break up with their partner, maybe you should give them time because maybe the process is already happening.

I found this article easy to summarize because it was about a topic I could understand because I had this happen to me. I was able to summarize the article easily because it did not have science specific definitions that would be hard to explain to the general public. However, I do feel that it was hard to fit in the reasons the scholarly article provides for why people could feel the way they did in the surveys and questions they answered. The answers such as the Prosocial Decision Making theory and Interdependence Theory could have been key bits of information that could have provided the reader with reasons why the participants felt the way they did. I believe that not having the space to put that type of information in hinders the piece’s affect. The reader was not able to see the complete side of the participants decision to break off their relationships because the reader could only see the results and not the explanation for them.

Furthermore, I decided to omit the same information as the original author as well because I would not have been able to conclude the article due to the space I was provided. The information that was left in my summary was just enough to get my point across. hat is all I wanted to put in my article because lay people do not want a long explanation with results, charts, and long definitions because that bores the reader. That is why I kept the information I did because it carried the story and kept the reader interested by not bogging them down with information that is not necessary.

Finally, my perspective on journalists have changed for the better because of this series. I never understood how hard it would be to keep an audience engaged and wanting to read without boring them with the unnecessary information. I never thought of how hard it would be to create a story with so much detail in the background but summarize the information into an article that makes sense in a defined length. Without doing this series, I never would have understood the editing of information required in order to release results to the public in a manner the public wants, while still keeping the integrity of the information by keeping the entire article credible with the information presented.

Links:
https://hellogiggles.com/news/why-people-stay-unhappy-relationships-study/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000139

--Original published at Bogo's Blog

            Doctor Elliot Ludvig from Warwick’s Department of Psychology, with colleagues at Princeton and Brown Universities, came up with an experiment that displays that forming good, or bad, habits depends on how often an action is performed rather than how much satisfaction the action ensues. The researchers created a computer simulation, where digital rodents were given a choice of two levers, one of which was associated with the chance of getting a reward. The lever with the reward was labelled the ‘correct’ lever, and the lever without the reward was labelled the ‘wrong’ lever. The reward was swapped between the two levers, and the simulated rodents were then trained to pick the ‘correct’ lever. Doctor Elliot Ludvig, Associate Professor in the University of Warwick’s Department of Psychology and one of the paper’s authors, commented, “Much of what we do is driven by habits, yet how habits are learned and formed is still somewhat mysterious. Our work sheds new light on this question by building a mathematical model of how simple repetition can lead to the types of habits we see in people and other creatures. “

            When the digital rodents were trained for a short period of time, they managed to pick the new, ‘correct’ lever when the lever with the reward changed. However, when they were trained extensively on just one lever, the digital rats stuck with the ‘wrong’ lever stubbornly, even when it had no chance of giving them a reward. Rather than having a chance of getting rewarded, the rodents stuck with the lever they were trained on. Dr Amitai Shenhav, Assistant Professor in Brown University’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences and one of the paper’s authors, commented, “Psychologists have been trying to understand what drives our habits for over a century, and one of the recurring questions is how much habits are a product of what we want versus what we do. Our model helps to answer that by suggesting that habits themselves are a product of our previous actions, but in certain situations those habits can be supplanted by our desire to get the best outcome.” This model could potentially be a small step towards understanding human habits more concisely.

Reflection

            When I was writing the summary for the article, I did not really think too much about the five questions because I felt like a summary should stay true to its source. Changing the summary so it fits all five categories would be changing the story and, hence skewing the truth. I did have some difficulty in keeping the summary concise enough to fit the length of the article. The most difficulty was deciding which details to cut out and which to keep, while keeping the reader in mind. I did not want to have the length required but end up writing a confusing summary. To make sure the limited number of words were enough, I used quotes from the people who ran the experiments. My summary was aimed at the general public, so I tried my best to keep it to basic terms to avoid confusion. The main mission was to make sure that the summary was understandable by everyone and easily interpreted, so anyone could pick it up and know what is going on.

            Doing this has given me some appreciation for journalists because it is very difficult to make a summary on an experiment and keep it interesting. If I had to pick between my summary and the article, I think it would be the article because going over both, mine is missing something. The article seems to appeal more to me, possibly because it was written by someone with more experience. The article also had an interesting title that made you want to read it more, granted the title was clickbait and overstated the extent of the experiment I still find it effective.

Citation:

University of Warwick. “Train the brain to form good habits through repetition.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 January 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190128105227.htm>.

--Original published at Jessica K's College Blog

As far as anyone knows, sleep is a very important aspect of life. While it helps people feel refreshed and energized in the morning, it also helps repair the body and sort out old and new memories for the next day. However, there are different stressors in life that may disrupt a person’s good night sleep, leading to a stressful night and stressful morning.

A study performed by the University of Surrey tests a group of lab mice for the connection between lasting stress and the subsequent change of sleep cycles. In a nine-week period, the mice were introduced to the scent of a predator on random intervals, increasing stress measuring the changes in rapid-eye movement sleep (REM) and non-REM sleep (nREM). During that time, mice exposed to the stressor decrease social activity with other mice, and increase in depressive behavior.

As for sleep cycles, mild stress increases REM activity in the mices’ brain, while nREM stays the same. With the increase in REM sleep, which is in between wakefulness and sleep, generally prevents the body to repair itself and reduce stress in of itself, leading to less energy in the morning.

With the information made, the increase of mild stressors in life may lead to a stressful waking experience, and if the effect continues, may cause symptoms of antisocial behavior and depression.

So while people encounter their own forms of stress on a near-daily basis, too much stress can be just as detrimental as any tragedy, big or small.

For more information on the topic, visit the summarized study below.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190128101104.htm

--Original published at WilliamsCollegeBlog

One of the big topics surrounding the generations today is the attention span of everyone in daily lives. A large issue comes with children diagnosed with the attention problem Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which affect about 1 in every 20 children. It is scary how easily our attention can flip from one serious matter to the latest email popping up on the screen. Cell phones and any other mobile device has become part of a person’s life and will not go anywhere without it. This idea of having multiple screens in front of a person became a study too good not to dive deeper into. A group of researchers from Cambridge University, led by Barbara Sahakian, decided to look into how we could use mobile devices to enhance one’s attention span and keep them on task.

The main method for looking at such a study was designing an application where players would have to remember certain patterns or look for sequences in a list of numbers. The game, Decoder, was invented by the research team and requires concentration in order to complete a level. As people grow, the part of the brain responsible for concentration and attention is meant to grow and help people be adults. Decoder is supposed to help sustain such attention and allow for motivation amongst players.

For the researchers to get accurate results, they went out and setup an experiment. Seventy-five young adults were recruited from the local Cambridge area based on what the researchers defined as healthy and young. They were considered healthy based on psychiatric and ADHD tests. The experiment was carried out by randomly assigning the participants to three different groups, allowing twenty-five people per group. One group was given the task of playing the Decoder game, another to play the game Bingo, and the last group played no game at all and carried their lives out normally. The last group was considered the control group and was used as a baseline for the results of the other two groups. Bingo was used because of its similar stimulus but does not give the same training for attention. The perimeters for the two groups playing a game was allotted to eight 1-hour sessions of gameplay over a 4-week span.

After each session of gameplay those two groups were asked to rate their experiences based on four levels of criteria. Those being alertness, enjoyment, motivation, and positive mood. At the end of the 4 weeks, all seventy-five participants were given a test to measure the outcomes. Over the eight sessions there was a significant difference between the Decoder and Bingo group in terms of all four groups. Two other tests, the CANTAB Rapid Visual Information Processing Test (RVP) and Trail Making Test (TMT), were given to assess sustained attention by completing a task requiring a certain level of awareness and concentration. The RVP test tested a participant’s ability to react to a certain sequence while the TMT looked at the response time and completion of test.

The experiment came out as a success, with the results concluding the original thought. While playing the game Decoder, attention and concentration showed improvement in comparison to the other two groups. The experiment used participants considered to be healthy, but now there is possibilities to achieve improvement for children and adults that suffer from ADHD. People who already have poor attention abilities and get easily distracted have shown improvement when using the game Decoder.

The future for these studies is endless. The success of the first experiment showed good improvement and the research behind ADHD patients shows promising results. People who suffer from concussions and traumatic brain injuries are also able to benefit from games like Decoder because they have impaired sustained attention. The cognitive training is huge and will be able to allow large advancements in this field.

Reflection:

One of the biggest challenges I found while writing this article was keeping the information concise and not adding too much detail to a subject when details were not necessary. Most of research article brought up terminology from neuroscience and the normal reader would not understand. Keeping this in mind, determining what I needed in the article itself was not difficult. I believe that the original article did a good job describing the experiment without using all the terminology and it helped keep me in line when writing. While writing, I knew I had to keep the 5 critical questions in the back of my mind and consider what the original did. The purpose is to make the paper make sense to whoever is reading, eve though would not be looking to make sure those questions are included.

In the original article, not all the 5 critical questions were addressed, and it made for a little bit of confusion on my part. The one they missed was talking about how they operationalized their variable. I would believe that is one of the most important questions to answer in the beginning. As I was referencing the original, I made sure to include the important details that they forgot to include. Writers are known for adding a bunch of extra words to make themselves sound better and it was obvious. There was a lot of generalization and assumptions about the research that should not happened. After reading the research, I made sure to make those distinct differences. Since the original article used many of the critical questions, it was rather simple finding a way to incorporate the same ones into my article. Questions involving the selection of participants and how they were assigned were straight forward and clear questions to answer in the article. The use of causal claims is important since it secures a sense of validity for the research itself. Keeping all those questions in the back of my mind, made for an easy time writing this article.

After finishing this project, there was a lot to learn about journalism. A main takeaway for me was how generalizing is a large part of making an article sound well written. Obviously not all readers are going to be as skilled as noticing when a piece of information is missing so generalizing is the key for most writers. Once we got the scholarly article that the pop culture article was written from, the level of writing had gone down. It is once again a key factor of generalizing. Journalism is great for creating a new story based on original concepts. Audiences do not want to read about statistics relating to a study; rather they want to hear the story behind it and why they should be reading anyways. If the audience is captivated by the information, writers know it is a good piece of work.

Citations

Avramova, Nina. “This brain training app may help you stay focused.” CNN. Cable News Network, 21 Jan. 2019. Web. Accessed on 28 Jan. 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/21/health/brain-training-app-focus-attention-study-intl/index.html

Savulich, George, et al. “Improvements in Attention Following Cognitive Training With the   Novel ‘Decoder’ Game on an iPad.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 13, no.   2, doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00002. file:///C:/Users/wscho/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/For%20Will%20S%20(3).pdf