The Brain and Behavior

This chapter i played the four games The three door, Ambiquous figures, Ant colonies, and Prisoners dilemma. The one i found exceptionally interesting was the Prisoners Dilemma. It asked you to pick between cooperating or competing against another prisoner. You could choose to work together and get 3 coins or possibly compete against him to get 5 coins. Although it is everyones instinct to want to have a one up on the other person and compete i found i won more coins by cooperating. That really made me think that that could apply to everyday life for many cases.

I was in many cases surprised by alot of things in this chapter. I thought there was only one system to control what happened in your body to send messages and what not but here there are multiple that all have a specific function. That was really cool to learn how they all did their own thing, but linked together for one main goal of helping out our body.

As far as applying things to my everyday life i think i would refer to the game more than i would the book. The book was very factual this chapter, but that game really made me think. The majority of us are greedy and will do all the competing we can to get a leg up, but if you do choose to cooperate it can benefit the both of you rather than just one of you. That was really neat to me when i thought about this world and how everyone is all about themselves.

I really think after that i have a new outlook on it. It really was a wake up to see that instead of being greedy and selfish you should want to cooperate as best as you possibly can. I think i'm going to give it a good try. This chapter had alot of really interesting things to think about, i really enjoyed it.

In this chapter i really enjoyed reading about the amygdala, the part of the brain that triggers aggression. I always wondered what part of the brain it was or what triggered such an emotion and it comes from two tiny bean-sized clusters. I think it would be more interesting to learn why some people have more aggression that others however, something for me to research into. The second thing i really enjoyed was learning the structure of the brain in itself. When you witness something on your left side it goes to your brains right side. That was very interesting. I also really enojyed learning about the brain and how it can manage to fix itself. Say a person is blind or deaf, it allows the unused areas of the brain to adapt or learn other helpful information. For examlple, if someone is blind their other senses really kick in such as touch, smell, and so on. That was very enlightening and empowering.