Exercise 8.  Write an essay: I am future psychologist
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TEXTS FOR ANNOTATION

 

 

BIOGRAPHY OF SIGMUND FREUD

 

Sigmund Freud was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1856. His father was a small merchant, and Freud's mother was his second wife. Freud had two half-brothers some 20 years older than he was. His family moved to Vienna when he was four years old, and though he often said he hated the city, he lived there until it was occupied by Ger­many in 1938.

Freud was a good student, and very ambitious. In 1873 he entered the medical school of the University of Vienna. He hoped to go into neurophysiological research, but pure research was hard to manage in those days unless you were independently wealthy. Freud was en­gaged and needed to be able to support a family before he could marry, and so he determined to go into private practice with a specialty in neurology.

During his training he made friends with Josef Breuer, another phy­sician and physiologist. They often discussed medical cases together. Freud went to Paris for further study under Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist known all over Europe for his studies of hysterics and use of hypnosis. In 1886, Freud returned to Vienna, opened a private practice specializing in nervous and brain disorders, and married.

In 1900, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and intro­duced the public to the notion of the unconscious mind. In 1901, he published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he theorized that forgetfulness or slips of the tongue (now called "Freudian slips") were not accidental at all, but it was the "dynamic unconscious" telling us something meaningful.

In 1902, Freud was appointed professor at the University of Vienna and began to gather devoted disciples who by 1906 formed a Psychoan­alytic Society. Other such groups emerged in other cities. But such dis­ciples as Alfred Adler and Carl Jung split from the group.

Freud continued working, developing his theories, and writing large volumes of work.

In 1923, he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw, a result of years of cigar smoking. He was 67. Fie would have 30 operations over the next 16 years to treat the progressive disease. When Nazis took over Austria in 1938, Freud's passport was confiscated and his books burned. Freud left Austria and he and his family went to England. He died in London in September, 1939.

 

 

ATTENTION

 

Some students try to learn while listening to the radio, talking to friends, and thinking about a coming to-an-end-week. They believe that studying requires only a little attention. But when people divide their attention between several different tasks, performance usually suffers.

In one study that supports this idea, the psychologists compared what students could do under several conditions. Subjects in one group listened to a tape of an unfamiliar passage from a psychology text. At the same time, they pushed a button whenever a signal light brightened.

Another group of students confronted a more challenging situation. In addition to monitoring the light and attending to the unfamiliar material, they had to ignore a familiar passage presented simultaneously in the other ear by the same voice.

Subjects in the «easy» condition reacted more quickly to the signal light and comprehended the passage much more better than the students in the «difficult» condition. While attention can be divided (especially if one task is familiar and easy), concentration helps the processing of complex information. Even something as automatic as reading is not a simple task. You have to identify written words on a page. You must also combine words into phrases and sentences and comprehend the meaning. At the same time, you must think about the meaning of the material and associate new facts with old information and experiences.

In short, attention is very important in everyday life. The ability to attend and its opposite, distraction, have been widely studied by the psychologists. The number of outstanding people in psychology studying the phenomenon of attention is rather impressive, including such names as E.B. Titchener, W. James, R.S. Woodworth and G. Piaget.

LEARNING BY HEART

 

Some people have good memories, and can learn easily long poems by heart. But they often forget them as quickly as they learn them. There are other people who can only remember things when they repeat them many times, and then they don't forget them.

Charles Dickens, the famous English author, said he could walk down any long street in London and then tell you the name of every shop he had passed. Many of the great men of the world have had wonderful memories.

A good memory is a good help in learning a language. Everybody learns his own language by remembering what he hears when he is a small child, and some children — like boys and girls who live abroad with their parents — seem to learn two languages almost as easily as one. In school it is not so easy to learn a second language because the pupils have so little time for it, and they are busy with other subjects as well.

The best way for most of us to remember things is to join them in our mind with something which we know already, or which we easily remember because we have a picture of it in our mind. That is why it is better to learn words in sentences, not by themselves; or to see, or do, or feel what a word means when we first use it.

The human mind is rather like a camera, but it takes photographs not only of what we see but of what we feel, hear, smell and taste. And there is much work to be done before we can make a picture remain forever in the mind.

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

 

MUSIC AND MEMORY

 

Some people are able to listen to isolated musical notes and identify them correctly. This rare musical gift is known as «perfect pitch» or «absolute pitch». It is not something that can be learned. Either you have the ability or you haven't. But most people, given the necessary musical training, can acquire what is known as «relative pitch». This is the ability to compare two notes accurately, to name a note by reference to one which has already been played and named.

The interesting thing about the difference between these two abilities is that they make use of different brain functions. According to existing evidence, relative pitch is a feature of a highly-trained memory. But people with perfect pitch don't seem to be using memory at all. Instead they seem to have some set of internal «standards» that allows them to name a note without comparing it to anything previously heard.

Researchers at the University of Illinois in the USA used this difference to try and identify the parts of the brain used in updating short-term memory. They compared the brain waves of two groups of musicians as they tried to identify a series of computer-generated musical notes. One group had perfect pitch, the other used relative pitch.

Each person's brain waves were measured by electrodes placed near the front of the head. The really interesting finding was that what are known as «P300» waves were produced in abundance by the group of musicians without perfect pitch, but scarcely at all by those with perfect pitch. The «P300» wave, then, seems to be an indicator of how much use the brain is making of short-term memory. Scientists had suspected this, but if the only difference between the mental activities of the two groups was whether they were using short-term memory or not, the research appears to confirm it.

Psychiatrists now know more about which parts of the brain are associated with short-term memory, but the musical gift of perfect pitch is as much of a mystery as ever.

 

Дата: 2019-02-25, просмотров: 294.