COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: the magic of the mind
Have you ever been so convinced of something in an argument with someone to then discover you were wrong the entire time?
This is one of the multiple areas of study of cognitive psychology: memory.
With the passing of time we forget details about information and memories and remember only main concepts. Our brain reconstructs and recreates our memory creatively, using things that make sense to us, but are not necessarily true.
I am sure everyone has experienced this: imagine you lose something and start arguing with your mom about its whereabouts. You’re sure you left it on the table but your mum denies it. After some searching you find out that your mom was right, you didn’t actually put it on the table as you thought.
Cognitive psychology is now considered a science and is the study of the ways people acquire knowledge, store it and use it. Cognition derives from the Latin “cognĭtus” which means “study of the conscience”.
It’s a particularly broad subject as it studies our complex minds that work like a network: a neural network and, just like our brain, psychology subjects are all interconnected. The study of the cognitive functions of humans is also used in social and developmental psychology.
Isn’t it fascinating to understand how we work and what makes us different from all the other living organisms on the planet?
Besides that, this relatively new area of study in psychology (born in the 60s of the last century) was an absolute revolution.
Before the 60s, psychologists were studying the behaviour of people, which is the consequence, but never thought of finding the cause. At the time the theories were simple compared to what we know now, just like computers. If before, psychologists were doing the equivalent of a simple operation like “A+B=C”, now they arrived to the point of studying the equivalent of a cloud computing system.
It’s thanks to cognitive psychology that we know that our memory has three levels of learning: the first one is when we react to stimuli, the sensory memory, then if we give more attention to it it transfers to the short term-memory and finally with rehearsal we can transfer the information again to the long-term memory, but, attention, just because you knew something in a particular moment of your life, without rehearsal the information will go back to the short-term memory.
In my opinion, it’s important to continue giving more importance to psychology, to understand ourselves better, and not repeat the mistakes of the past, i.e. not giving mental disorders enough importance. Cognitive psychology is that particular science that studies them and thanks to it and the internet, people started giving them more attention, contrary to the past when people with mental disorders were just considered crazy and sent to an asylum where they were treated like they weren’t human.
Never take slightly a mental disorder, be it depression or schizophrenia, or even simple anxiety. The mind is the most powerful tool humans have, and every single one of us should be protecting ours.
