¶ … Lifestyles
The 21st century is an interesting period to study in regards to humans, their environment, and their social interactions. This century has introduced new developments in the human lifestyle that had never before been imagined. Technology has served as a central driver to many of the changes. Not all changes are positive and many of the new lifestyles have many negative aspects to them. Health and health technology have greatly improved and lengthen the average lifespan yet obesity and cancer have reached epidemic proportions. There are more opportunities for education given that the access to information has become nearly instantaneous yet in many cases the quality of education has reduced. Technology has created a circumstance in which humans are again facing a new environment in which they must adapt to and the results of this pressing adaptation a largely mixed.
Bibliographic Review
Biological psychology begins with the brain and uses this as a foundation in which to study humans and their behaviors. There are several schools of thought and divisions within this field of investigation, however the study of how the mental processes and how they are rooted in biological processes serve as a uniting factor. Biological psychology borrows heavily from a variety of disciplines and is deeply multidisciplinary. The work done in biological psychology may include research from anatomy, biology, physiology, psychology, and statistics.
Much of the research in biological psychology is rooted in the brain leading an adaptation to the external environment. The interesting situation...
For hundreds of thousands of years humans had a relatively static response to their environment. For example, food and the constant quest for food has long been a primary driver for human behaviors. It is responsible for the hunter gather period as well as the agricultural revolution. Today however, in most advanced societies food is in abundance. Not only is food almost always readily available, it can also be delivered to nearly any location in a matter of minutes. Furthermore, the foods that are consumed today have been refined for certain characteristics that are not necessarily related to health or nutritional value.
Food serves as an interesting basis to apply a biological evolutionary perspective because the way people consume food has dramatically changed. People have evolved to have certain responses to food in order to sustain their bodies. In previous environments, many foods were sparse. Therefore, foods that contain nutritional value and energy developed a response in people that let them know that such foods were valuable and they taste good. Examples of this would be foods that contain sugar or fats that contain high levels of energy. However, in today's world where food is abundant, people still have the same responses to such foods. People naturally crave foods that are high in fats and sugars since they were once a very rare find even though they can now be found virtually everywhere.
As a response to the biological…
