Author Archives: nikola.vulicevic

nikola.vulicevic

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Revisiting Meditation

I. For this reflection, we ask you to find a way to meditate. To do so, you have two options:

I’ve decided to do option B for this particular project because I’ve done Yoga before during my high school senior year and it was actually fun. I haven’t done meditation and yoga in such a long time so I’ve decided to do the Yoga class again.

II. Before you begin your meditation, we ask you assess and take notes on your own state of mind during the 24 hour period leading up to the meditation.

A. First, take note of the moods you’ve experienced.

I felt very stressed and exhausted from the continues studies (on average 2 exams per week), internship interviews (every other week), volunteer work and the family responsibilities for this particular week and particularly the last 24 hours. This is very exhausting as my schedule involves attending classes Monday through Saturday. Although I did feel a sense of confidence because I did study a lot and actually understood the material for my exam and felt very secure about my results.

B. Assess your overall level of anxiety on a scale of 1 to 10.

My overall level of anxiety would have to be 5-6 (where 10 is the highest level of anxiety).

C. Assess the level of physical tension in your body- where do you notice the tension? Try rating your overall tension on a scale of 1 to 10.

The tension in my body has to deal with the level of tiredness and drowsiness experienced at particular moments of the day such as when I am reading for a long period of time. The tension on my body is on a scale of 4-5 (where 10 is the highest level of physical tension).

III. After you have finished your meditation, re-asses your state of mind and body.
A. Reassess your mood on the chart.

My mood did improve as I was able to deter the constant thought of “What do I have to do next? Am I missing something?” and I had a sense of calm and relax feelings. This helped lower my exhaustion as I was able to relax during the meditation and acquire focus. For some reason my confidence did not disappear but it was not on my mind or in my thought. I did not think about the exams that I just finished and I was not worried about my confidence but instead I was released of these thoughts. I did not have a huge improvement in the level of happiness but I can say that it was a slight improvement.
B. Reassess your level of anxiety from 1 to 10.

Surprisingly as I said in my previous comments, a lot of the constant thoughts and worries either disappeared or weakened and this lower my anxiety a dramatic level. I would categorize my anxiety after the yoga and meditation at a 3-4.

 

C. Reassess your level of physical tension and rate it from 1 to 10.

My physical tension improved much more than my anxiety because the yoga and meditation involved stretching and relaxation of the muscles and focusing on a particular task. I really enjoyed the particular tasks where you had to do a tree like pose and keep your balance with one foot and focus on your breathing. My level of physical tension after the yoga and meditation would be 1-2.

IV. Describe the experience– What type of meditation did you choose? Describe what was going on in your mind and your body, what kind of thoughts and sensations did you experience during the meditation? Were there any challenging or frustrating aspects of the experience, and if so, what were they? Would you try this again in the future? Why or why not?

I performed a yoga form of meditation where you would perform different forms of stretches and moves (positions) in an effort to release or gain back some of the energy within your body. The meditation actually involved staying in a particular position as still as possible and trying to relax your whole body as best as you can. Then as you did this, you would try to control your body, which involved moving nothing (no part of your body, including your eyes). Then you would breathe and relax and get everything off of your mind. Finally as we approached the end of the meditation, we would start moving one body part at a time and come back to “life” – first the toes, then the fingers, then our arms, etc. During this whole process I had a sense of calm and relaxation because the room was such a quiet place, there was nothing to distract us and it was comfortable. My mind was able to gain control over my thoughts and I began having less and less thoughts. I did not have any challenges as I actually did this form of Yoga/meditation in the past during my high school life. Although at first it is difficult to block the thoughts, it became easier as I acquired more focus on the task of meditation. I would try this again in the future since I’ve done this in the past before (right before my classes in high school, beginning of the day) and I felt a lot more awake and energized during the classes after when compared to the days that I did not perform this particular form of yoga and meditation. I just felt a sense of energy and relaxation that made me feel better and that is why I would like to do this again.

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Hello Everyone!

Hello fellow classmates, my name is Nikola Vulicevic and I am currently a Junior at Baruch College and I am majoring in Accounting (150 cr.) and minoring in Mathematics. I am looking forward to gaining my CPA and I enjoy following almost anything that can come to your mind.

I grew up in Serbia (Eastern Europe); to give you a better sense of the location, Serbia is north of Greece and East of Italy BUT not directly on the border with both Greece and Italy. I came to New York City in 1999 and there on after I spent most of my life in New York City (taking vacations occasionally over the summers to Serbia). My hobbies involve a huge variance, from playing volleyball, enjoying chocolates, watching tennis, to following the stock markets, and international affairs. Psychology is not my intended major but it is a subject of interest to me as are almost all the areas of possible exploration and studies. I am planning on actually joining a multitude of student clubs and organizations this following Thursday.

Rather than showing a website or a poem or a song that best describes me, I would like to show a quote that best describes my personality of being outgoing and looking forward to new challenges.

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” -Sylvia Plath

SO HELLO EVERYONE! – Nikola V.

Posted in Say Hello | 1 Comment
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Comments Across the Site

"1. What is your reaction to the choices made by the author of this Reflection in terms of which memories they chose to keep and which memories they are discarding. I like it that you choose to keep or re-learn the positive and fun memories but if you really wanted to develop or know who you truly were and to learn how to become better and/or to become someone else then you will need to remember the bad memories as well. I don’t think you should cut out the bad memories but I agree that you should not continue your whole life hunting for the memories. But you should still get some sense of the bad memories and why you had them so you can develop yourself back to the individual you were and maybe even realize some flaw or positives from the bad memories that you decided to remove. You do learn sometimes from your bad memories so they should not always be forgotten. 2. How would you feel if this friend did not remember you (imagining that you are their longtime friend)? If you were not able to remember me then I would be very disappointed because we were best friends at school and would always talk about everything that we did that particular day and just enjoy the bad and good aspects of life. This would be a very personal experience for both me and Saleh as we both will need to work together to reconstruct the memories through various methods that I will mention later. 3. What role might you play in helping them reconstruct their memory? I can show Saleh all the pictures, videos, and conversations (text, e-mail, instant messages, etc.) that he and I created so he can obtain some sense of his own personality and past. Then after he analyzes this, if he has any questions, I’ll try my best to answer them or at least go through the process together with him to research for the answers to his questions. If Saleh had a blog, youtube account, or a facebook/twitter then that will help us tremendous as they would contain various amounts of information and conversations and interactions with people of importance to him so those resources will become of a huge benefit to the both of us. Ultimately, my role will be to just be by Saleh’s side and answer any questions that he has and just be a part of his life (in an effort to emphasis the strong longtime friendship that we had). 4. Based on what you’ve learned in class and through your readings, what memory encoding, consolidation, and retrieval techniques might you use or teach to help this person recover and reintegrate their memories? One of the techniques that I would emphasis is to try to associate the feelings that Saleh felt during particular memories so those feelings can be again associated with that memory and ultimately better remember. This may be a difficult task as the emotions may not be as severe as they were when the actual event or memory happened but emotions are good ways to move memory from a short-term memory to a long-term memory (encoding). Another technique that was learned in class was the fact that we remember photo/picture objects or events better than events heard through our ears. So I can use this to my advantage by having as many of the events that I want to remind Saleh about associated with a photo or picture that he kept, his family kept or that I myself can find either in my belongs or other sources (facebook, twitter, photobucket, etc.). These were all the techniques that will help Saleh encode the memory but if I want to help retrieve certain memories then this will be much more difficult unless the memory was implicit memory that was not lost and was always remember unconsciously. This means if I knew that Saleh knew to ride a bike then I will tell him that he did know how to ride a bike and I’ll give him a bike and see if he can really still do it (I believe he still should be able to do this as his ability to ride a bike should have not been lost as a result of the accident, etc.). Taking Saleh back to the places of certain events can help encoded the memory as I tell him what happened in that particular place and it can help me retrieve the memory from him as well. I can also tell Saleh repeatedly certain memories to help his brain rehearse it multiple times, allowing it to move from a short term memory to a long term memory (I can just write a memory book that contains major events in his life, that he can use and read multiple times in an effort to remember the memory and rehearse it). And throughout this whole learning process and re-learning process I would ask Saleh to give as much attention and focus as possible in an effort to store all the information and memory better rather than have the information disappear and misunderstood and distorted."
posted on Oct 26, 2011, on the post Who are you? Who am i? What was i?!

"What would be your hypothesis of the study’s outcome? I've actual done research in this area of study for various other courses and professors and my area of focus was the effects and benefits of chocolate (specifically high flavonol chocolates -- these chocolates can be bought online or ordered specially but the closest substitute that you can get to high flavonol chocolates is dark chocolates if you do not want to order these special chocolates). In this study that I researched (and I will be happy to provide the research studies and sources if anyone is interested), it was discovered that flavonol had a significant (statistically) influence and benefit on the individuals' cardiovascular system and helped decrease the probability of coronary heart disease. But, you may be wondering why am I rumbling about chocolate and flavonol; the reason behind this is in my research, I've discovered that tea, specifically black tea contains flavonol. This observation would lead me to conclude with a hypothesis that states that a significant amount of black tea may help improve an individual's cardiovascular system and decrease the chances of coronary heart disease for your study. What suggestions do you have for the researcher on how to improve or adjust the proposed study? I would recommend instead of having two groups where you have one drink tea and the other not drink tea, I would advise that you have 3 groups. A control group that does not drink tea and two different experimentally groups, one that drinks specifically black tea on a daily basis and another group that thinks they are drinking black tea but in reality they are drinking a liquid that tastes like black tea but does not have the chemical make-up of black tea. This third group also acts as a secondary control group because they are drinking a "placebo" which can help you figure out if it is really the black tea that is helping the individuals or if it is the psychology thought of them drinking the black tea that is helping. If you want to go furthermore into the studies, you can go on and study the effects of drinking different quantities of tea per day or week (whichever you prefer) and compare the different groups there too. Another issues that needs to be controlled is the way the teas are made for each group, this needs to be controlled so no confounding variables are produced. Also the best possible way to divide the participates is through a random assignment approach which can be accomplished through a random digit table and also I would recommend a double-blind experiment at best rather than a single-blind (this is always a benefit and not a drawback). ALSO, pay close attention to the dietary intake of all your subjects and participates. Are there any drawbacks or potential harmful impacts of this research design (or results?) There should be no drawbacks or potential harmful impacts of this research design since no side-effects have been proven to be dangerous with regard to black tea, other then the level of caffeine contained in certain black teas. This research study should in my opinion create benefits but this is a subjective opinion and contains some fixed scientific explanations that I do not have the time to go into yet and that involve vast research. What would be the NEXT STEP after this hypothetical research study were conducted and presented to the public? Can you propose a replication with a good twist? That’s often how research works and how the field is able to advance. Maybe you can think up a great Follow Up study! The follow up study that I recommend is to have the groups divided up not by "drinking tea" and "not drinking tea" but instead by the amount of tea being drank as I stated before in my comment above. Also if you want, you can compare the effects of different teas and not just teas but also to other drinks such as caffeine, RedBull, Coco-Cola, and anything of that sort. Furthermore, you can compare the effects of black tea or other teas with respect to the location of your subjects. For example, you can see if black tea has a more significant impact on individuals of western origin and background or does tea have a more significant impact on individuals of eastern origin and background (or amongst countries, nationality, race, gender, age, and other variables). This will help eliminate or explain some confounding variables that you may have discovered or not yet discovered in your first experimental take or research take. I hope my comments were of help and I was very fascinated by your study. Best Regards, Nikola Vulicevic"
posted on Oct 4, 2011, on the post Research: Should we drink tea for our health sake?

"Hi Anthony! Are there any archery tournaments through the Archery Club? And your tumblr is awesome."
posted on Sep 20, 2011, on the post Hello