Introduction to Psychology: Lecture 1 TranscriptJanuary 17, 2007 backProfessor Paul Bloom: Id like to welcome people to this course, Introduction to Psychology. My name is Dr. Paul Bloom. Im professor of this course. And what this is going to be is a comprehensive introduction to the study of the human mind. So, we are going to cover a very, very wide range of topics including brains, children, language, sex, memory, madness, disgust, racism and love, and many others. Were going to talk about things like the proper explanation for differences between men and women; the question of whether animals can learn language; the puzzle of what grosses us out; the problem of why some of us eat too much and what we could do to stop; the question of why people go crazy in groups; research into whether you could trust your childhood memories; research into why some of us get depressed and others dont.The style of this is therell be two lectures a week, as well as course readings. Now, to do well in the course, you have to attend both the lectures and do the readings. There will be some overlap. In some cases, the lectures will be quite linked to the readings. But there will be some parts of the readings that will not find their way into the lectures, and some lectures-some entire lectures that will not connect at all to the readings. So, to pursue this course properly you have to do both. What this means is that if you miss a class you need to get notes, and so you should get them from a friend or from the person sitting next to you. The slides are going to be made available online. So, one of the things you dont have to do is you dont have to write this down. You take notes any way you choose, but if you dont get anything on there itll be available online. Im going to post it in a format which will be black and white and easy to print out so you dont have to worry about this. But again, attending to the slides is not a substitute for attending class.Theres a textbook, Peter Grays Psychology, 5th edition, and theres also a collection of short readings, The Norton Reader edited by Gary Marcus. Its an excellent textbook; its an excellent collection, and you should get them both. Theyre available at Labyrinth bookstore on York Street or you get them online. I should note that last time I taught the course I used the Marcus Reader, and when Professor Marvin Chun taught his course last semester he used Peter Grays 5th edition textbook. So, there may be a lot of used copies floating around. You should feel free to try to get one of those.The evaluation goes like this. There is a Midterm and there is a Final. The Final will not be held in the exam period, because I like to take long vacations. It will be held the last day of class. The exams will be multiple choice and short answer, fill in the blank, that sort of thing. Prior to the exams I will post previous exams online, so you have a feeling for how these exams work and so on. There will also be review sessions.Starting at the beginning of the third week of class that is not next week but the week after on each Monday Im going to put up a brief question or set of questions, which you have to answer and your answers need to be sent to your teaching fellow. And youll be given a teaching fellow, assigned one, by Friday. This is not meant to be difficult. Its not meant to be more than five, ten minutes of work, but the point of the question-15, 20 minutes of work, but the point of the question is to motivate people to keep up with the material and do the readings. These questions will be marked pass, fail. I expect most everybody could pass all of the questions but its just to keep you on track and keep you going.There is a book review, a short book review, to be written towards near the end of the class. Ill give details about that later on in the semester. And theres also an experimental participation requirement, and next week Ill hand out a piece of paper describing the requirement. The point of the requirement is to give you all experience actually seeing what psychological research is about as well as to give us hundreds of subjects to do our experiments on.The issue sometimes comes up as to how to do well in the course. Heres how to do well. Attend all the classes. Keep up with the readings. Ideally, keep up with the readings before you come to class. And one thing I would strongly suggest is to form some sort of study groups, either formally or informally. Have people you could talk to when the-prior to the exams or-shes patting somebody next to her. I hope you know him. And in fact, what Im going to do, not this class because its shopping period. I dont know whos coming next class, or what but Ill set up a few minutes prior, at the beginning of the class, for people just to introduce themselves to the person next to them so they have some sort of resource in the class.Now, this is a large class, and if you dont do anythi