PSYA01H3 Lecture : PSYA01
September 7
Chapter 1 - lecture 1: Psychology without soul
The relevance of Soul:
- When it comes to science, the basic premise of science is that things in our world obey certain
laws (ex. Something falls down)
- To pursue something scientifically one must first assume that the behaviour of that thing
conforms to some sort of natural laws, laws that can eventually be understood, specified, and
used to predict future behaviour
- “Souls” are spiritual entities and, as such, they DO NOT conform to natural laws … given this,
trying to understand them via a scientific process is pure folly
Back in the day:
- Magic, falling rocks, volcano bound virgins, and a concept called animism
Dualism: A foot in the door
- Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
- Had problems within life, constant breakdowns, socially awkward, etc
- Palace of versailles statue park made him realize that not everything has a soul
- The birth of invasive animal research
- Vivisection: cut a living thing into parts to further understand
- Back then, if something moved with apparent intelligence the only logic is that it had
souls
- Cartesian dualism
- A machine, controlled by a soul
- Rene believed that our behavior is a function of two distinct influences
- 1. Just like the animal, there is a big part of us that is a big complex machine that
does follow physical laws and part of our behavior is just a reaction from our
biological machine
- 2. There is a soul, the soul interacts interfaces with the body, hilean gland was
believed to be the “intersection” where the biological machine and the soul meet,
the soul is capable of controlling the machine *puppeteer analogy*
Allowing others to barge through:
- John and James believed that we are physical beings and that there was no soul within us
(materialist view)
- John Locke (1632-1704)
- Mind is a machine
- La table rassa (the blank slate)
- (JOHN LOCKE) Believed that you, the person you are now, were able to be
anything, your body could have had a whole different level of skills, what made
you who you were has everything to do with the experiences that happen to you
through life, you were born a blank slate and everything you do as you go
through life everything that happens gets written onto the (invisible) slate, it
makes you who you are, it’s our interactions with the world that makes us who
we are *core of the nature vs nurture debate*
- Empiricism
- The hallmark of science
- Knowledge is based on perception
- He believed in testing ideas and gathering data
- James Mill (177-1836)
- Materialism
- Luigi Galvani (1737-1798)
- Worked with frog legs to prove a soul comes from static electricity
- Proves that our muscles react to electrical activity
It didn’t stop there:
- Johannes Muller (1801-1858)
- Book “Doctrine of specific nerve energies”
- Showed a notion that bodies can be thought of as machines (complex biological
machines)
- Tried to understand how nerves worked
- Pierre Florens (1774-1867) Can we think of brains as machines?
- Ablation studies: ablation = destroy
- He would take rat brains and destroy parts of the brain
- First he would take a perfectly healthy rat and have it engage in as many
activities as it possibly could
- Then he would damage part of that rat’s brain and when that part of the brain
recovered he would make them do activities again
- If you remove specific parts of the brain what do you see happen to the
rat that was originally perfectly healthy
- The question he was trying to get at is “what broke?”
- What he was trying to do is now considered as brain mapping which meant trying to
understand what different parts of the brain did
- His work suggested that the human body is a biological machine even up to the brain
- Paul Broca (1824-1880)
- **He was a medical doctor**
- Localization of language
- He began to observe that his patients were able to understand speech well but they could
not produce speech well
- Patients were able to make sense out of speech, unable to actually produce language well
- He waited for people to die so he could crack open their brain and what he found was
damage to the left side of the brain now called the “broca's area”
- People began to believe more and more that people are partially biological machines and
can begin to study themselves
The stage is set for Act II
- If human behavior i at least partly, if not totally, determined by natural laws, then it should be
possible to study it scientifically
- By the mid 1800s, nobody was doing that yet
September 10
Chapter 1 - lecture 2: Birth early years
Why Germany, Why Then?
- In the mid to late 1800’s
- Began to invest in new innovation and research
Scientific Study the Mind?
- Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894)
- Measuring speed of neural impulses
- Famous for clever ways to measure stuff
- He found out that we as humans are relatively slow compared to electronic based
- Ernst Weber (1795-1878)
- Psychophysics
- Important for a number of reasons:
1. It’s not psychology; they did not call themselves psychologists, they
called themselves psychophysicists because they it be clear that they are
scientists (psyche + physicasist)
- He found that the way we interact with the world seems to follow mathematical
principles
- Weber and Fechner important people
Happy birthday psychology
- Wilhelm Wundt was the first to refer to himself as a psychologist
- He wrote the first psychology textbook “The Principles of Physiological Psychology”
- Loved introspection (introspection means looking inwards) founded what is termed the
structuralist approach..not generally accepted
- Wundt was a structuralist meaning he mainly cared about what the internal things looked like
-Subjective measure
- Objective measure
Once born, psychology evolved
- Structuralism largely gave way to functionalism...a focus on the purpose of the mental world,
not what it “looks” like
- Darwin (1809-1882)
- Suggested your parents make you who you are (made people think about how genetics
make you who you)
- William James (1842-1910)
- He was more of a philosopher than a psychologist
