PSYC 1030H Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Hermann Von Helmholtz, Experimental Psychology, Wilhelm Wundt
12 Jan 2017
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Didn"t think that psychology could be a science. Because the mind cannot be studied by the methods of science. Are too short in time to be observed. Took up the challenge to attempting to study the mind mathematically. Much of his career he conducted studies on the psychological of optics and acoustics. He was also a leading physicists (the law of conservation of energy) He trained subjects to press a button when different parts of their bodies were touched. Subjects took slightly longer to respond when the toe was stimulated as opposed to the finger. He used the discrepancy between stimulating different parts of the body to calculate the speed of nervous impulse. Thus, able to show that the mind operates by lawful and mathematical principals. One of the most important contributions was the measurement of the speed of the. Min 1800"s it was believed that the speed of nervous conduction was probably faster.
