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  The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others by Tali Sharot The book dives into how our brains shape the way we are influenced and persuaded by others. Sharot, the author of the book, is a neuroscientist. She explains that many of our common methods to change minds don’t often work. Instead, the book reveals that by influencing others, it is about connecting with their emotions, giving them choices, or even understanding about connecting with them. Each chapter shows different ways and reasons on why it is difficult to change people’s minds. The main theme includes that the power of prior beliefs, the role of emotions in the decisions we make, and the importance of giving people control, can shape behavior. The author makes these concepts easy for us to understand, by using these stories from our daily lives. I feel as the book offers good advice for anyone who wants to be more persuasive. My favorite part of this book was, “ how positive incentiv...

There has been many times where I have promised myself that I would start my homework, but I somehow ended up scrolling on my phone or playing a game. This describes a moment that shows impulsivity and self control, things that we deal with everyday. Impulsivity happens when we do something for pleasure, even if it might end up hurting us. For example, like when we choose to sleep late, even if it means you will be tired the next day. We tend to over think impulses and then we think about "will power". In our everyday lives, we continue to balance short term wants with long term goals. and it is important to understand the science behind impulsivity and self control, which can help us design different strategies that can set ourselves up for success and not just relying on "willpower."

 I feel like many times throughout my week, I wonder why I do certain things, like for instance scroll through social media. Most of our daily actions that we do are driven by "rewards" or known in psychology as "reinforcers." These are the things that make us want to keep doing a behavior. Rewards are not always given every time we do something good, they can be given randomly. Getting a treat every single time is called continuous reinforcement, but we see more often that rewards come some times (partial reinforcement). We all make choices based on where we expect the best rewards- which is a principle called the Matching Law. The Matching Law says we tend to distribute our efforts based on where we get the most rewards.  I think that these ideas about motivation help explain why we build goo habits, struggle with bad ones, and why some days are easier than others. 

 After reviewing the lecture slides on Performance, it made me wonder why some days we feel really focused and you get things done, but then other days it is hard to sometimes even start it. This comes down to motivation, it is what pushes us to do something. We we want something, it desires us to be motivated. I learned that the more motivated that we are, the more effort and time we put into reaching our goal. Arousal is like the energy or excitement in our body and mind. We can think of it like a volume knob for how alert we are at sometimes. While according to the Yerkes-Dodson Law, there is. a perfect middle amount of arousal. When there is too little arousal, that means we don't focus well. When we have too much arousal it can make us mess up.