What is Psychology?
Professor Dominique Bentley
Kishwaukee College
Abstract
What do your dreams mean? Why can’t we tickle ourselves? This course attempts to answer these queries and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, religion, persuasion, hunger, art, fiction, and dreams. We will look at how these parts of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury. This paper is designed to help you all understand the main points of psychology and what it means.
What is Psychology?
Many things can affect what we dream about and they are not always our previous thoughts. Dreams can be a window into another world. Things such as gender, information gained during the course of time, or even sensations established while asleep all subsidize to the content of dreams. Many times they contribute more than most people think. Dreams achieve emotional homework that helps us master life’s lessons. The mind will work sub-consciously on the small things in life that are often missed because of greater problems. Many times your mind will put information together that was gathered over whichever a long or short eras of time. For instance, if two pieces of information were attained, the mind would subconsciously put them together while in a dream state. While both men and women have the ability of doing this, women have an easier time recalling their dreams. This may be because of the content of the dreams or the fact that men generally do not worry about them as much. The mind also in the dream state can process certain outside stimuli. There have been professional dream interpreters for many years. The problem with the all of the interpreters is that they looked for the meaning of the dreams and not why we are having the dreams. Though many researchers have found many new facts and information on dreams there is still a lot of info that still needs to be discovered. While the breakthrough in dreams and psyche have perplexed the scientific industry, the thought of being able to employ dreams is incredible.
In this next chapter we are going to explore certain things only another person can do for ourselves, tickling. Try it; you (mostly) can’t. It is a well-known fact that you can’t tickle yourself. Brush your own fingers across the soles of your feet. You certainly feel a sensation, but it’s nothing like when someone else does it.
But why can’t you tickle yourself? If someone else can tickle you, then you should be able to tickle yourself. After all, I can feel my own touch just the same as someone else’s can’t I?
The response is, psychologists think, that our brains have a basic function which is designed to tell whether some perception is caused by us, or whether it comes from outside. The difference between the two is significant because else your own touch might give you the same revelation as when someone comes up behind you and taps you on the shoulder. After all if you could tickle yourself, the world would be full of laughter.
Some other explorations we will come across in this psychology course, is religion. Religion and spirituality play a foremost role in the indulgent of human behavior. Religion and spirituality have been a part of human experience throughout the course of history, tapping into almost every facet of life from ethnic beliefs to the arts. Religion and spirituality incorporate a world that goes beyond our overall understanding of how and why by ascribing a higher overall purpose and meaning that spreads outside of our lives here on earth. As a professor I do not believe that a passable psychological understanding of most people cannot be proficient in the absence of religion and or spirituality. Science for example gives tolerable answers to incidences in