So, life is giving me a lesson again of how quickly time can fly. It is truly amazing that it took me 2 weeks to come back to my blog and write about what’s happening with my studies. Feels as if I only wrote tha last entry yesterday, but it’s long ago.
What has happened?
During the last 2 weeks I grabbed the chance to get started on DD303. As I had been lucky to receive my materials end of last year I could now fully dive into them. So far I have read, the introductory chapter and all chapters which belong to “part 1″ of the course. Part 1 is about “perceptual processes” and consist of chapter 2 “attention”, chapter 3 “attention” and chapter 4 “recognition”. Of these three, “attention” was definitely the worst and I came out of its intensive studying only to ask myself “so, what is attention then really? is it at all possible to express attention in words?”. my gut feeling suggests that maybe “attention” is one of these abstract concepts in psychology where researchers try to pin something down which simply isn’t to be summed up in a single idea? I really don’t know. I can only hope that our first TMA won’t (!) be about research on “attention”, that would be a challenge I am very happy to miss out on! 
Anyway, “perception” and “recognition” came as a much better read and I learned lots from it. Some of it was repetition from DSE212 “Exploring PSychology’s” cognitive chapter, but in that way it felt a bit like “home”. Greatest challenge in those two chapters is a theory by soemone called Marr, which tries to analyse how exactly we end up with a 3D representation of things that we perceive. It’s a tricky story, but I think possible to get the hang of eventually.
Bottom line after reading Part 1 chapters: DD303 is definitely going to be a challenge. It’s by no means an easy course but interesting and full of knowledge to be gained.
