Chapter Six

The most interesting part of this chapter to me was the study of depth perception. It is something that has affected me for my whole life. The first major impact it had on me was playing baseball. I was a good infielder, and I had good instincts and was fast. My coaches early on thought that it would be good to teach me to play the outfield as well in case someone got hurt. In theory this was a good idea, however in practice it failed miserably because of my lack of depth perception. When the ball was hit extremely high into the air I was incapable of telling if I was going to need to run back, forward, or not at all to get to it. This quickly got me out of the outfield.

The next important affect it had on me was driving, and specifically parallel parking. I was never able to get a good sense of how long my car was, and how big parking spaces were. I was forced to improve somewhat because at my high school we only had parallel parking. While I'm still not good at it by any means, I am more capable now. The interesting thing is that this carries over to other aspects of my life. When I play baseball just for fun now I am much better at judging where a ball will fall and getting to it easier.

Chapter Five

Chapter five strikes home for me, because I have a baby cousin who is just about a year and a half now. While I haven't gotten to see him grow up as much as I would like too, I can definitely see some of what this chapter is talking about. When I first saw my cousin he was this tiny little thing that couldn't do anything for himself really. The next time I saw him he was just beginning to crawl around, and he would go to every object and person he could find and just observe them. At this point he was beginning to recognize things. The next time I saw him he was taking wobbly steps and clutching to everything he could; but he definitely recognized things, and he was starting to learn the words for his favorites.

This last time that I have seen him he was running around as fast as his little legs could take him. He was still extremely curious, and would just stare captivated at things that interested him (door knobs, dogs, and smoke alarms being his favorite.) Throughout his short life I have seen many of the evolutions that the book talks about, and it is an even more amazing thing to see in real life.

Chapter Four

For most of my life people have told me that I looked like my mom. I don't find this to be a good or bad thing, but it has been consistent. This is due to genetics, and just the DNA that I've inherited. I know that I have her eyes, her facial features, and a lot of her personality. Because our personalities are so similar we either get along extremely well, or on the rare occasion we argue it will be very intense because we are both extremely stubborn.

I just recently started working for the company that my dad does in an internship, and it has been a bit of a shock for me. When I got there lots of people introduced themselves and asked if I was Calvin's son (my dad.) I assumed at first this was because most of them had worked for or with my dad at some point or another and I had met them a long time ago, or he had told them I was coming. I now work in a different building then him though, and continue to get people asking if I'm his son, or comment that I look a lot like him or act a lot like him. This was very surprising for me because I had never really considered myself to be much like him, and I'm still not sure I am. Obviously though, there is some resemblance since everyone else is able to tell.

Chapter 3

Two things that I found in chapter three that really related to my life were selective attention, and the ability to dual process. Dual processing is something that I use every day. The most recent instance of this would be driving home from work today. I was able to drive back from work while not really paying attention to the road because I know it so well. While I was driving I was able to review what happened at work today. But, when another car pulled out in front of me I was able to snap back to driving almost instantaneously.

Selective attention is something that I use quite a bit while I read. I'll always read with some type of white noise going on, be it the t.v. or music. However, I really don't hear it because I focus in on the book so much. Several of my friends will have to try quite hard to gain my attention if I'm reading the end of a book and really don't want to be interrupted because it is so good.

Chapter 2

The thing that I found most fascinating about chapter two would be the fact that the brain can actually be split into two different parts and it will still function at nearly full performance. This really shocked me, and is something that could lead to incredible surgeries being performed in the future. If somebody takes a really bad concussion to one side of the head, or even multiple concussions that are limited to one side of the head, it may be possible in the future to separate the two hemispheres and either limit the damage or to perform surgery on just one side.

In a more practical part of our lives would be the use of the cerebellum. I've seen many instances of people making excellent use of it in the sports I have played. I have played soccer with people who had such fine dribbling skills that it was incredible they could keep their feet moving at such a fast pace with such precise coordination. I have also seen people so drunk they couldn't walk anymore, an instance of it being impaired.

One particular instance I remember well is walking back from brunch on a Saturday and seeing a car pulled over by three state troopers on 81 by the bridge. We watched several sobriety tests being given to him, and him not being able to walk in a straight line or consistently touch his nose. The impressive part of this story is that it was 1 o'clock in the afternoon.