Journal 01
Transcript of Journal 01
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.