Week  3 

April 28, 2014

It is amazing to me how much of our life’s development happened between conception and our first birthday.  It’s as though when we are born we come with all our parts and about 100 billion neurons just waiting to receive and transmit information.  I think of it as a scrapbook or memory album.  There is the pretty cover, usually a gender specific color, decorated first page with the name and date of our birth and a picture and announcement that was sent out to the world that a new little person now exists.  When I think about Piaget and his believe that children are naturally curious and they want to make sense of their experiences; and in the process, construct their understanding of the world, I feel we do this though out our life.  Regardless of our age, as we grow and learn new things and are exposed to new situations; a new job, moving to a new state or town, going to school to learn new skills or profession basically assimilating new information that is compatible with what one already knows.  Then there is the need to modify the information based on previous experiences.  I understand that this chapter was based on a specific age and stages of cognitive development but as I was reading this, this is a concept I feel we apply throughout our life while we fill the pages of our scrapbook or memory album. 

From the day we are born we are learning.  I don’t go through life saying to myself, I am learning today, but we are.  Everything we see, hear, taste, touch and smell is an experience and that experience affects the next experience and so on.  Language, we are born and then about age one we are using vocabulary.   Saying words, and then there is no silence.  Language becomes the communication.  Just think for a minute, we are saying words at about a year old our brains are able to put together names for persons, places and things.  In just one year of life we are talking.(and for the rest of our lives we are trying to figure out how to use and write this English language that we have learned to speak J)  As we get older into adult hood it seems like we always go back and use telegraphic speech (only words necessary to convey a message).  We use this to remind us of where we parked in a parking garage example: A- twenty three the spot I parked in, or to remember an answer for a test we put one or two words together.  Taking this class and Psychology one has reminded me that even as complicated as life can get, and as technology seems to be the now and the future the base fundamentals of how we first develop always seems to be the foundation for our future.