This week was a bit of a struggle in terms of catching up on notes before the quiz on Thursday. I didn't really fall behind on the reading, but I did on the notes so I had to do 6 modules in a day. I hope that taught me my lesson about keeping up. Also, we tried to run our experiment but a teacher is holding us up a little bit. Hopefully we will be able to do it next week. On the positive side, we are pretty much done with the conditioning experiment already so we don't have to worry about that. I'm going to try to completely catch up on vocab notes over the weekend and start getting ready for the test right away so I don't wait until the day before like last time...

The test on Wednesday was a little (lot) rough. I studied really hard the night before, but it was hard to commit all that information to memory so quickly. Right after the test, I thought I did decent. I did worse than I thought, but I'm still good with my score until the retake. Also, on Thursday I attempted to do the first part of our experiment in Zuengler's Integrated Science class. It did not go nearly as smoothly as I would have liked, but it was a good first trial run and I think I know what things we need to fix. I'm really interested to see what the final results will be, so hopefully the next runs go smoothly.

The quiz on sensation and perception was probably the worst one for me yet, but t still wasn't horrible. I didn't get behind on reading, but I forgot to write down the vocabulary words for hearing so those questions were a little rough. I am excited to start working on our experiment replication, though. Star and I found a pretty interesting one, but there are some little things we still have to work out and we need to get one teachers approval yet. It will be kind of difficult to replicate in a school setting, but if everything goes as planned I am excited to see what the results will be. Hopefully we can get it done by the end of the week.

The homework this week was definitely a step up from last weeks work and gave everyone a good idea of the amount of work that is required of this class, I believe. At the beginning of the week, I was excited to get down to business with the reading and start to learn about the physical brain. I have always had a very strong interest in the brain's processes, so the reading was not bad to me most of the time. Modules 14/15, however, were a little rough. It was difficult to wrap my mind around how heritability works. I found it very amazing, though, how twins who are separated at birth and go decades without knowing each other turn out to be extremely similar. I always knew that genetics obviously play a huge role in who we are and that identical twins have the same genes so they must be incredibly similar, but I assumed that the environment we are raised in has nearly as much effect. I thought this because when you spend a lot of time with another person, you tend to pick up certain things that they do such as sayings and other mannerisms. I figured if it is that easy to become like the people we are surrounded by, then a great amount of our personality could be contributed to our surroundings. This is why I was kind of shocked when I read about how little our parents/siblings have to do with who we become. Most kids are surrounded by their family more than anyone when they grow up, so it only seems logical to believe that they would develop similar traits to their family members. Reading about this made me more interested in the whole nature vs. nurture debate. I realize now why it is such a big topic in the psychology field.