PSYA01H3 Lecture Notes - Wilhelm Wundt, Evolutionism, Psychophysics
Document Summary
Germany was very powerful at the time that psychology was starting to get started: Economic power: meant lots of money for: a strong military and research into science. State funded research: more chances for research into psychology to be carried out. He studied measuring the speed of neural impulses. People thought this was difficult and even impossible at the time. His experiment involved measuring the nerves from hand-spine-brain. This was tested by a chain of hand squeezes, timed. Von helmholtz knew the average nerve span, time to complete the chain, amount of people this led to being able to calculate the speed of neural impulses. Humans have very slow neural impulses, generally, when compared to machines. How the mind works with conscious experiences". His experiment involved getting a blindfolded person with two different weights (one per hand) and asking the person to identify when they felt a weight distance.
