Juliana H 2023 Psychology Blog

       Have you ever noticed that the sketch you hastily drew on the back of your math homework or the barely shaded result from procrastinating at 2 am somehow manages to look better than the line art you spent hours perfecting? Well, there may be a psychological reason behind this quality disparity.      When you are sketching, you're not aiming for perfect lines. You'll draw over a line or make multiple lines as a guide for your line art, where your perfect lines will shine. However, your  brain when seeing a sketch will generalize your messy chicken scratch and interpret it as one beautiful line.                                                  Here is a messy sketch vs what your brain really sees:     Basically, it's hard to make a perfect line when tracing the sketch, and if you're n...

     As the daughter of an optometrist and a wearer of contact lenses, I diligently clean my contacts every morning. Now, this constant cleaning may seem somewhat unnecessary; after all, my contacts are actually hard lenses that never leave the controlled environment of the inside of my house because I wear them during the night. However, for those of you who don't have the time to routinely undergo the grueling ordeal of cleaning your lenses - be they hard or soft - every morning, it may benefit you and your vision to know about a certain microbial corneal infection called acanthamoeba keratitis - or, more simply put, a brain-eating amoeba with the potential to infect your eye. According to Mike McKnight and Jordan Gartner of KKTV , a young woman infected with the amoeba administered about 60 eye drops a day while waiting on the possibility of getting a corneal transplant. She suspects the infection originated from a lake she visited in the summer or yard work she perfor...

Anesthetic Giles had always been an empathetic child. His parents, noticing his helpfulness, were proud beyond belief. Whenever people were in trouble, their little boy would rush to them and resolve it. They had been unsure about exactly how to properly parent, as Giles was their first child, but they knew they had done something right with him. Well, until the fish. "Mommy, he's hurting!" whined Giles, pulling at her sweater in the direction of the small tank. She wanted to dissuade his silly ideas about the fish without sounding too dismissive or discouraging his helpful attitude, but playing along became harder the more he got worked up about the stupid fish. "For the fifth time, Giles, he's a fish. He'll be okay." "But you said feeding him would help but it didn't! Timmy needs a pet doctor." As she imagined a good parent would, she funneled all her confusion and frustration at his nonsense into one heavy sigh. "Okay Giles. We'...

 The Past     Thanks to my mom's startlingly thorough documentation of my early childhood, I have no excuse to not share a few milestones from when I was a baby. My first social smile occurred when I was about 6 months old, and although I don't find kids at such a young age cute, it was apparently adorable. Adorable enough, much to my chagrin, that I modeled in a baby calendar when I was about a year old. Don't bother searching for it. Don't. Anyway, I continued to grow and do general baby things until I was old enough to go to Highlands Elementary School. Enjoy a picture of my first day there. The Future     Unfortunately, now that I'm too old to contentedly color with crayons, I'm expected to plan my future. Currently, I'm most worried about jumping though the hoop called high school. I never knew a single jump could take as long as it has, and I've not even touched the ground yet. I'll finally graduate in May of 2024. Afterwards, I'll attend w...