Chapter 1
This chapter was about B.F Skinner's experiments and what the author thought about them. The author also conveys Skinner as a crazy guy that raised his children in boxes. She then explained Skinner's experiments from different points of view and explained that overall his contribution to science was actually a really good thing. I personally did not like the way the author wrote this chapter and the information in it. She was kind of all over the place in her writing and although the content was interesting it was sometimes hard to follow what she was saying because of how she wrote it.
Chapter 2
In this chapter the author educates the reader on Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience which was the main topic of the book we read right before this. He had people "electrocute" people and saw how many people would not obey under different circumstances. The author finds people that participated in the study and asked questions about their lives so far since the study. It was interesting to see how the participants lived since the experiment
Chapter 3
In this chapter a psychologist by the name of Rosenhan decided to see what would happen if completely sane people got into a mental hospital and said they were fine after getting admitted. This chapter was actually pretty interesting to me, the results fascinated me. The fact that completely sane people would not be allowed to leave was eye opening to the way hospitals like that work. Also it was funny to see how the hospitals responded, they told Rosenhan to send more people and they would be able to find them easily now that they new he was sending people. The funny part was that they found a number of people over the allotted time period and Rosenhan had actually sent no one to the hospitals.
Chapter 4
It is crazy to hear about the murder that occurred in the first part of this chapter, people not lending aid to a woman who was crying for help. The author explains the 5 stages of lending help. They are: notice an event is occurring, interpret the event as one that needs help, assume responsibility, decide what action to take, and then take that action.
Chapter 5
This chapter was all about Cognitive Dissonance which is something along the lines of someone would change ones behavior to fit their beliefs rather than the other way around which is what people thought. The author starts of by describing an event that happened where people formed a cult surrounding the supposed end of the world. She explains how the cult came about and how someone sent people in to study the cult and their behaviors when they found that the world was in fact not ending.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6 was all about Harry Harlow and his experiments with monkeys and how they formed relationships with mothers. He had surrogate mothers that were made of different materials, the purpose of this was to see how the young monkeys would react to a different mother than a regular monkey. It was interesting to see how the monkeys would react to the different surrogate mothers and what they would do in response.
Chapter 7
The main focus of this chapter was addiction, the author goes over several different studies on addiction that were administered on both humans and rats. Overall the author comes to no definitive conclusion about addiction but has some insight on it from the studies.
Chapter 8
This was one of the two chapters about memories, in this one Loftus the main mention of this chapter thought that memories were actually a bad representation of what actually happened, she even thinks that memories can be implanted in people. This theory was pretty interesting as I always thought that my memories were pretty accurate in what happened to me.
Chapter 9
The other chapter about memories, this one starts of with the author telling a story about a guy who had his hippocampus sucked out to cure his epilepsy but ultimately losing his short term memory. She goes on to talk about a scientist who discovered the chemical responsible for connections between neurons.
Chapter 10
This chapter is all about psychosurgery, which is the different surgeries that deal with the brain and things like that. It goes over lobotomies and other common surgeries performed. The author states that although these are dangerous procedures that are very reliable when it comes down to it. This chapter was pretty interesting since I didn't know how the idea of a lobotomy came about and how it was discovered.
