BioHeros

Hey everyone!!

Today I'll be making a superhero story based on my day and month of birth, which is September 12. Therefore, I'm gonna relate my hero to the temporal lobe (auditory processing, language and speech comprehension) and norepinephrine (preparing the body for action). My hero is named SuperSense. SuperSense has enhanced senses, specifically his ability to process what he hears at an extremely fast rate, and when he hears the cries of the innocence, his physical abilities increase. He walks his crime-ridden city, listening for the cries of the innocent before swooping in to save them before any harm can befall them. However, the story behind SuperSense's rise to becoming a superhero is rather sad and lonely. His father was ashamed of his existence because he was born from someone besides his wife. As a result, SuperSense was locked away in a box with soundproof walls, so no one would hear him cry. Over time, he developed a keen sense of hearing and eventually heard THROUGH the walls and then could hear the code being put into the box to escape. When the time came for him to escape, he used his hearing to escape where he was locked away by hiding whenever he heard footsteps. Whenever he got close to being caught, his physical abilities would increase, allowing him to scale buildings and hide in trees. Now SuperSense makes sure no one else's cries will ever go unheard.


Let's look at the rest of the superhero squad!

1. Calming Listener/CL (Joseph G. Per 1) - CL has the ability to calm people down by listening to them.
2. No Pain No Gain/NPNG (Katie Z. Per 1) - NPNG is a superhero that uses an ability allowing her to stop people from forming traumatic memories!
3. Agilityman (Jason L. Per 7) - When he sees someone in danger, he becomes extremely agile and saves them.

How good is your memory?

Hey everyone! Today I'm going to be sharing with you some results that I've received from a few memory tests and what I think about them. Luckily for me, it looks like my memory is at least average.

The first test I took was a memory test that required recalling as many of 12 words as I could. It said that I would need to focus on each word for a couple seconds, so each time I looked at a word I would pair it with an image of that word in my head. For example, I imagined a blue vase for the word vase and a family of tigers for tiger and so on. I ended up recalling 11 out of the 12 words, forgetting the word book, which seems like it should be the easy one. However, maybe because I assumed it would be easy I did not focus as intently on it and only imagined a generic book. Overall, I think the test was a pretty fair judge.

The next test I took was also a short term memory test, but this one showed pictures and then asked me to recall the words associated with those images. It said it would give me thirty seconds, so I did not expect as many images as had popped up. I looked at each image for about a second, thought hard on its name, and then moved on. I had a little time left after that, so I started to connect thoughts together, like airplane with globe. Well, it didn't go so well as I completely forgot three of the words, light bulb, rainbow, and clock. Looking at those words, it seems crazy that I forgot them, but I feel like that connects to my last test and it's the "easy" ones that you forget exist. I also learned that connecting images in your head really does help you remember them as I recalled every single pair that I had time to think of. The test was fun and seemed to work fine.

I did two more tests, a facial recognition one where you had to piece all the parts of a face back together from choices and a penny one where you had to recall what a penny looked like. I got all the parts of the face right and the penny one right too. The face one was pretty easy because the options were extremely different, which made remembering the right one easy, especially because it was in front of me. If I had to redraw the face or something it would've been much harder. The penny one was pretty easy too because most were right, had "in god we trust," bottom right with the number, and then I felt like something belonged on the left and it ended up being right. These tests were cool but I felt like they didn't tell me much or require any sort of hard memorizing.

Also, in case you were interested, I found some interesting research relating to the Pavlov dog experiment. Scientists have recently found that in the hippocampus, neuron synchronization is what occurs and the main reason why the Pavlovian learning shift occurs. If this synchronization could be controlled, some memories could be forcefully remembered.

Well, that's all there was for this week, thanks for reading!

Trace Hankins

Politics and Personality

I'm not proud to say that I don't follow politics that closely, even now that I'm about to be able to vote. I know what views I hold on hot topics like climate change, immigration, and what the government should prioritize its spending on, but I don't listen to what the candidates are actually saying, mainly cause I still can't vote. However, I'm also much too busy to spend time doing such things anyway, which is not good because I think its something important. I think these tests and my responses to them should give a fairly good idea on where I stand politically, and as additional information, I would not have voted for Trump last year and will not vote for him this year.

I'm happy to let everyone know that according to my political compass, I'm basically Gandhi. I wasn't aware this test existed and some of the questions either made me debate an answer for a little or google a term that I wasn't familiar with. I answered most questions with only an agree or disagree until it came to the religious and what people can do with their own body questions. All in all, I'm not surprised that my views are around the middle, a little towards the libertarian side. I'd say I've always had mostly democratic ideals, and I'm only a little surprised that I was that far-left economically as I'm not totally against our current economic system despite some of our countries glaring issues.

This quiz was a lot different as there was no in-between for answers, and the choice had to be made one way or the other. According to the quiz, I'm "Devout and Diverse," which seems to suit me fine as I'm a fairly centrist democrat. However, I don't really agree with the part that says I hold generally more conservative views towards things like homosexuality and immigrants because I think regarding those topics I'm about as liberal as you can get. It's not surprising though as the quiz has to find a summary to fit broad but fairly specific questions.

Well, as I implied earlier I haven't really been keeping up with the current elections going on, so I really only know big names like Bernie and Warren, but all the candidates I got were democratic. The candidate I got the highest percent with was Tom Steyer, and I had Bernie and Warren tied at 85% after that. Since, I haven't been listening to them and what they believe, I wouldn't know if this test works great or not. I liked that the system to take the quiz was very in-depth, and they are correct that I will be voting democratic in the final election.

Well, thanks for reading again, and the lie on the last post was that my second pet was a fish named blue. He was my first pet :)
-TH

Online Icebreaker

Hi everybody, my name is Trace Hankins! Welcome to the best AP Psychology blog on the web. This is my first blog post, and I'm currently a junior at Dulles Highschool. One thing you may not know about me is that I'm a nationally rated fencer. I've been fencing for less than a year, but I've improved really fast and placed at regional, state, and even a couple NAC's (North American Cups). The majority of my tournaments have taken place in the last few months, and below is me fencing at my first national tournament in Minnesota just a couple months ago.

Now, here are 4 truths and a lie about myself. Good luck guessing which one is the lie!
1. I've played soccer for more than a decade
2. I've visited more than 10 different countries
3. One of my brothers has Down Syndrome
4. My second pet was a fish named Blue
5. I've flown a plane

Thanks for reading!
-TH