Psychology , what i understand by it — 1

Whenever you start something new , I believe first question should be asked why you want to do this.

Why I am starting to read about psychology

During Lockdowns, Everyone with little bit of curiosity is delving into one thing or another.

I came across few of articles which tells how important in modern times is Emotional Quotient, and the first fundamental step to improve this is understanding human mind, as much as you can

This branch of science is so subjective that everyones is a psychologist if you primarily have to interact with people at some point or another, unless you have settled in Mars for time being :P

But there are few things which are objective in psychology too, this article is about those things:

Environment

Mostly if you put same two things in different environment, their behaviour changes, that’s because everything in science depends on external factors. If two children having similar traits are raised , one raised in poor society and other raised in rich society , when their behaviours are compared it is different primarily because of environments such as upbringing, schooling, friends and so on

Attention (Lack of it!, it’s normal)

Every person has a finite span of attention , if a video is shown to person and asked to observe one particular thing, it is normal that other minute or major things in that video is missed by a person. That’s normal because sometimes people think that how did i miss that, while other person has observed that obvious thing. It is likely that other person might also had missed few observation that you noticed.

Jist

As a human if we read an article, a book, any movie we tend to remember the jist of it. That’s normal since everyone cannot be mike ross of suits with photographic memory. When we read anything new and want to grasp it fast we tend to understand heavy words in conversation or text and skim through basic words. For example : “Paris is the the most beautiful city in the word”, most people don’t realize 2 “the” because this information is not important and won’t contribute to the jist.

However another major set of people do give “attention to detail” but as it happens, these 2 things are supposed to balance each other.

If a person has high attention to detail he will be relatively slow in reading the article faster as compared to person who can read fast and give you faster response.

It depends on the time in hand in most cases.

Mind Automation

When you do something repeatedly mind automates that action. For instance , when a cricketer bats in nets he is trying to develop the muscle memory for that skill.

Upside of it is over a period of time you will do that task faster and with much more ease because you are moving that action from conscious mind to sub conscious mind

Downside of it is automated actions are hard to correct if required. Continuing our cricketer example and let’s say initially he learnt bad technique to defend the ball but he had done it so many times that if this correction is needed to made sometime later in his career it will be very hard to develop new muscle mind correction.

Values and situation

By values, we mean the principles you want to live your life upon example: punctuality, honesty, loyalty etc. They might not be always positive , there can be negative values too such as “i can do anything for money”.

Essentially when a person is forecaster, if a hypothetical situation is given to him and asked how would you react , his answer might be different when he is actually in that situation “experiencer” .

This is because our mind has not seen this situation before and maybe few environment factors in that situation influence our actions and behaviour and we might not take actions based on our values.

This develops the concept of “mentally strong” people, who adapts to situations but don’t let environment influence their actions most of the time.

Jist is their answers in “forecaster” mode will most of the time be same as when they are in “experiencer” mode.