ƒ  Hermann Ebbinghaus: 

ƒ  proposed the “science of the mind,” and said it was the “mind’s operations, and a method for studying its contents.” This is something that Wilhelm Wundt adopted while taking the position that Mill brought to light.

ƒ  founded the first psychological research laboratory in 1879. Wilhelm Wundt actually established a science of psychology and developed methods for the classic questions for epistemologists. 

1.      In the regards to the relation of philosophy and psychology causing a problematic solution to finding a way to decipher the relationship between the mind (brain) and the body; while finding a model of their relationship. Are they separate and distinct, parallel, interacting, or inseparably linked?

ƒ  This concerns nature and the “locus of mind,” bringing curious feedback on the “seat of the mind” especially from ancient Greek philosophy such as Aristotle.

ƒ  Aristotle: thought the mind was in the heart, but we know obviously today that it is in the (brain). The brain operations are ran through the mental functioning and is seen as the “central” part of behavior; through research that developed with neuroscience. Aristotle favored the environmentalist position, with Nurture; he founded the “mind at birth” is a “tabula rasa,” which is a blank tablet to be filled in by experience.

ƒ  Brain: 120 billion nerve cells and estimated 1 quadrillion potential connections between them; the brain is the most complex structure ever studied.

ƒ  Holistic models view the brain and the mind as one.

ƒ  Nature (the genetic constitution) and Nurture (the environment) in relation to the development and to individual differences has always been a major debate amongst researchers and scientists.

ƒ  Empiricism: John Locke, James and John Stuart Mill

ƒ  Edwin G. Boring (1957): Leading historian of psychology; Zeitgeist (spirit of the times)

ƒ  Pierre-Paul Broca: Studied “localization of the speech in the human brain,” he thought that women’s brains were smaller then men’s but increased in size through evolution of generations. This was an error.

ƒ  Goddard and Terman: made “culture fair” tests that were supposed to measure intelligence over different culture backgrounds. But, late was found to not have cross-cultural validity.

ƒ  Descartes: Described the body as a machine as the ones he saw in the gardens of France. à This was a positive influence on the description of the behavior and consciousness.

ƒ  Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Tichener: Found a distinction between the behaviorist and the non-behaviorist by developing a switchboard model of behavior. This accounted for stimuli connections to the behavioral responses.

ƒ  John Locke: described a clinical procedure for overcoming excessive fears

ƒ  Sidney Pressey: invented teaching machines and conducted research on their effectiveness compared with more traditional teaching methods.

ƒ  B.F Skinner: Developed his own teaching machine leading to fame.

ƒ  Gustav Fechner: father of psychophysics, knew in the 19^th century that 2 cerebral hemispheres linked by a band of fibers, the corpus callosum. If they were cut, 2 separate steams of consciousness would result the mind in effect would be split into 2. So, this helped people by preventing who have epileptic seizures on one side of the brain from reaching the other. 

Z  Early on psychological ideas and thoughts were in a series of Assyrian "dream books" composed on clay tablets in the 5^th and 6^th millennia B.C.; fire only hardened them so they survived when libraries burned down.

Z  Ancient physicians and philosophers speculated about the nature and locus of the mind, sensation and perception, memory and learning. 

Z  Medicine was held in the hands of the priests in temples, they were thought to be able to cure illness, infertility, blindness and deafness. Someone who wanted to be treated would be held in the temple to be "incubated" and was held there so that they can have rituals of healing performed on them.

Z  Alcmaeon, attempted to find ways of curing illness in non-mythical way by doing research on brains, skeletons, bones, muscles on animals. He taught, these finding to students at a medical school in Croton that he established and then this was thought to be a holistic approach in nature, he saw it as the balances and imbalances in the body systems.

Z  Hippocrates taught his students that all disease results from natural causes and must be treated using natural methods, he believed in the healing power of nature allows the body to heal itself. He believed that a cure was more based on the emphasis of the person rather than disease, that is why he had people rest, exercise and eat a healthy diet. He concluded that the right side of the body was controlled by the left side of the brain and the left side of the body was controlled by the right side of the brain.

Z  Hippocrates was wrong about "hysteria" he thought it was only for women to get because of the "wandering uterus" but Freud proved him to be wrong in the 20^th century.

Z  Hippocrates ("The Father of Medicine") believed in the "four basic humors in the body:" 

1.      Black bile- is excreted from the body following a serious wound. Too much of the black bile, was for peevish, melancholic, ill-tempered people.

2.      Yellow Bile- is excreted from the body following a serious wound. People who were too, irascible, choleric, easily angered, and perhaps manic.

3.      Blood (Sanguine) - when the skin is broken blood is released; people with this would be overly cheerful, happy, and optimistic.

4.      Phlegm -collects in the nose and throat when body has a cold. People with too much of this, would be apathetic, dull, and sluggish.

Z  De morbu sacro (The Sacred Disease) - (epilepsy) - At this time in history epileptic seizures were considered a result of direct, divine intervention. They were thought to be suffering because the "gods had taken away their minds."

Z  Hippocrates is also known as “the father of psychology,” he first came up with holistic treatments presented as the first treatments with clear descriptions of behavioral problems, and formulated “long-lasting theories of temperament and motivation.”

Z  Galen had an influence on biological thought until the 16^th century and the beginnings of the modern era, he worked to keep Hippocrates’s theories alive even 600 years after Hippocrates had passed away.

Z  Galen discovered evidence of a divine design in the structure of the body.

Z  Galen believed that the hearts biological flame distilled from the blood the spiritual substance responsible for movement and sensation: the vital spirit. He did not recognize the heart as a “pump.”

Z  Galen felt that having a good and noble mentor therapist is essential.

Advances in mathematics: the search for order:

ƒ  Language for science started to shape the education for men and women of the western culture.

ƒ  Mathematical theory began to predict the future.

ƒ  Thales in Miletus played an important role in the development of this; he predicted the solar eclipse which gave him great fame and attention for his research.

ƒ  Pythagoras (pupil of Thales) - created the Pythagorean Theorem; he sought to figure out the mathematical relationship between the physical world and the psychological experience of harmony.

Z  Greeks become concerned with the cosmos, or cosmology.

Z  This turned into “materialism,” and that the universe can be understood in terms of the basic units of the material world.

Z  Thrace: A great philosopher; he developed atomism.

Z  Democritus thought that tiny atomic particles in ceaseless motion are the basis of all matter. He saw the world as a mass of such atoms that ran with itself without any outside forces. He felt that the minds contents were shown by an arrangement of atoms and to be the result of experience.

Z  Democritus believed that objects in the external world emit beams of atoms that impinge upon the mind of the perceiver to produce perceptions; icons in the brain represent perceived objects.

Z  Zeno (Zeno Paradoxes): showed that “motion” is impossible, and that only in the mind does it seem possible. It asserts that you will never leave the room you are in. “If you always move ½ a distance to reach the door then you will never really move, you will never really reach the door in the room; it is an infinite number of series of 1. àThis challenged the notion of the perpetuation of atomism and materialism that human thought processes and the soul can be understood in terms of laws of the physical world.

Z  Cary and Haarhoff stated, that “man is the measure of all things,” and that therefore “the proper study of mankind is man.” This “humanistic tendency” set the stage for advances in philosophy.

Z  3 major philosophers came out of the humanist tradition: Socrates, his pupil Plato, and Aristotle.

Z  The 3 of them established “epistemology,” this branch of philosophy investigates the origin, nature, methods, and the limits of human knowledge. They were also concerned with learning, memory, and conscious awareness.

Z  Socrates: He is portrayed as the “great observer,” the “skeptic” because for him the unexamined life is not worth living.

ƒ  He questioned every assumption, doubted the obvious, ridiculed cant and pretension.

ƒ  His approach was thought of as an “rationalist”

ƒ  His belief that truth cannot be defined by an absolute authority but rather lies hidden in every mind.

ƒ  He felt a teacher should assist in the emergence of a pupils mind not implant truths; he felt that teaching someone was more of a partnership.

ƒ  Antiphon used Socrates dialogue to treat those who suffered from grief and melancholy. This coined him to be known as the first psychotherapist.

ƒ  At age 70, he was charged with undermining religion and corrupting youth and was sentenced to death when found guilty. He died by drinking “hemlock poison.”

Z  Plato: he sought to seek the enteral reality beneath everything.

1.      Founded the academy of Athens

2.      He acknowledged the unreliability of sensory information, “knowledge does not derive from sensations, which are sometimes misleading, but from the processes of reasoning about sensations.” He called them “forms,” the eternal structures that order the world and are revealed to us through rational thought.

3.      He thought the only way to increase accuracy of our knowledge of the world is through measurement and deductive reasoning; he sought to describe the world in mathematical principle.

4.      Geometry he said is the “knowledge of that which always is” knowledge

 Of the “forms” which is created by God.

5.      His position was “nativist” it assumed a basis for human characteristics and intelligence.

Z  He was a devoted student of Plato’s for twenty years about.

Z  He traveled a bunch after getting forced to leave Athens because of his “politics;” then he tutored a boy who later became, “alexander the great.”

Z  Later, when he returned to Athens he opened a school of phil. And that is where he wrote his greatest work biologically and also psychologically….

Z  Plato pointed out that our “sensations are but imperfect representations of reality, not to be trusted.”

Z  Aristotle saw the value in mathematics not as providing knowledge of external forms, but rather as making logical deductions from self-evident assumptions and clear definitions.

Z  Hence his “posterior analytics,” advocating the reduction of all scientific discourse to syllogisms- logically deduced explanations from first principles.

Z  Law of the lever: “equal weights balance at equal distances.”

Z  He really recognized the importance of “careful observation,” which led him to his own cognitive processes to developing basic principles of human memoryà

Z  De memoria et reminiscentia (concerning memory and reminiscence): Aristotle outlined his theory that memory results from 3 associative processes:

1.      Objects

2.      Events

3.      People

ƒ  Things are associated if they occur together in time and space; but have 2 other important influences on the strength of a particular association:

1.      Frequency: the more something is repeated the more likely it will be remembered. The more a habit is reinforced and its strength and retention is a central tenet of remembering.

2.      Ease: Some associations form more easily than others, and some events are more easily remembered than of others.

Z  Memories reflect our experiences of the world; our experiences are responsible for the contents of the mind; without experience, our minds would be blank.

Z  Aristotle is thought to be in the position of a “empiricist” positing that all ides we have, including those sometimes considered innate or inborn, are the result of experience.

Z  The “mind at birth as a blank tablet” is first of many of the metaphors of mind in the history of psychology.

Z  Aristotle’s view of the mind using the statue of Michelangelo’s David:

1.      Material cause: The marble statue; carved from a huge block of white unflawed Carrara marble.

2.      Formal cause: The statue is not just a marble block but it is the essence or form.

3.      Efficient cause: How did the statue come to have this form? Through the sculptors art of strokes and blows with hammer and chisel.

4.      Final cause: The statue is attributed to the product of Michelangelo’s genius and supreme talent. This is related to the “teleological aspect of Aristotle’s analysis, gives an appearance of certainty, “purposive explanations.”

Z  Ladder of Creation: a continuous series of gradations from the lowest to highest forms of complexity. 3 levels of life:

1.      Nutritive (plants)

2.      Sensitive (animals)

3.      Rational (humans)

Z  The lively heart if the seat of thought; Aristotle chose the heart as the locus of the mind

Z  He has been thought to be the “ancient father of psychology”