Friday, May 5. 2017

Today's schedule is C-D-AG-Flex

C Block Social Studies 11 - We'll finish episode 1 of "The Dark Years" a National Film Board cartoon about the Great Depression in Canada.You'll need to wrap up your questions and then we'll focus on the political parties that emerged in reaction to the harsh economic and political climate of the time. We will look at the Union Nationale (Maurice Duplessis), the Social Credit Party (William "Bible Bill" Aberhart) and the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation (J.S. Woodsworth). We'll even talk about the Canadian Nationalist Party (Joseph Farr) and the National Social Christian Party (Adrien Arcand) which were both unabashedly fascist (Arcand eventually became the leader of the National Unity Party). Lastly you'll need to work on questions 1 & 2 on page 89.

Remember when this "Blew up" the Internet? From XKCD

D Block Introduction to Psychology 11 - The eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin sense the world around us, but for the most part we do not experience sensation - we experience the outcome of perception. All perception is your brain's construction of past utility (or "empirical significance of information"). Our topic for today is Perception and we'll look at: sensory interaction; selective attention; sensory adaptation; perceptual constancy; and illusions. I'll have you look at some illusions and more illusions to try and understand our concepts today. From Psychology Today

The basic outline of how perception works is this. Through experience, the mind/brain builds perceptual categories of objects. These categories emerge from basic interaction with the object and, in humans, via conceptual knowledge and naming. These perceptual (and, to a lesser extent, conceptual) categories serve as schema or templates, and perception occurs via the process of matching sensory input patterns to perceptual templates. The matching process is what gives us the experience of figure/ground relationships. Cognitive and neuroscientists attempt to explore the rules by which bottom up sensory inputs are matched to top down perceptual templates to give rise to the experience of the object.

From WIRED magazine check out Reality is not what it seems: the science behind why optical illusions mess with our minds