My 1st post from the Southern Hemisphere

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The Story of Psychology notes I

+ 1st psychological experiment, 700BC
- Psamtik I, King of Egypt
- hypothesis: If children had no opportunity to learn a language from older people, they would spontaneously speak the primal, inborn language of humankind.
- result: success

+ ancient people believed that their thoughts, visions and dreams were messages from the gods. (e.g., Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire)

+ lawgiver Solon and philosopher Thales (two of the seven sages of Greece) proposed rational mind, saying a man's nous (soul/mind) is trained in all things at age forty.

+ Democritus

- first man guess that all matter is composed of invisible particles (atoms) of different shapes linked together in different combinations

- knowledge is from perception, perception is the interaction of atoms

+ Socrates

- teaching technique, known as dialectic, first used by Zeno, "to educate" comes from Latin meaning "to lead out"

+ Plato

- Theory of Ideas: we bring eternal ideas with us when we are born. When we see objects in material world, we remember our ideas (abstract, generalized rules)

+ Aristotle

- differ with Plato (saying soul is born with knowledge), sensation brings us perceptions of the world, memory permits us to store those perceptions, imagination enables us to re-create from memory mental images corresponding to perceptions, and from accumulated images we derive general ideas.

+ After Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC), not much has been developed till 17th century.

- During this long period, St. Augustine (Plato-like) and St. Aquinas (Aristotle-like) tried to adapt old philosophy into Christianity.

- 14th century, people believed their thoughts and dreams following Christian doctrine are messages from God/Angels, while the "evil" thoughts and dreams are from the Devil. (This is what ancient people did as well)

+ Descartes, French, rationalist

- physically weak, lots of time remained in bed when young

- "I think, therefore I am" proves my existence

- ideas are from perceptions, but some of them are innate since they cannot be experienced, "perfection", "substance", "quality", "unity", "infinity". These innate ideas need to be discovered through experience, that's why we need examples to understand abstract ideas.

+ Spinoza, Dutch, rationalist

- God = universe and all the mind and matter in it

- most basic of human motives is self-preservation

+ debate between nativists (Plato-like, innate ideas) and empiricists (Aristotle-like, no innate ideas) again happened in 17th century. Most English philosophers are empiricists.

+ Hobbes, English, empiricists

- "Myself and fear were born twins"

- tall, handsome, lively, friendly, and exceptionally healthy

- all men are by nature enemy of all other men, can live in peace only through autocratic government, preferably a monarchy. Without such ruling power, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".

- visited Galileo, impressed by his physics. Hobbes reasoned that all mental activities must be motions of atoms in the nervous system and brain reacting to motions of atoms in the external world.

- materialist, nothing is incorporeal, complex thoughts are derived from simple thoughts, simple thoughts are from sensations

+ Locke, English, empiricists
- two sources of ideas: sensation and reflection (mind's own operations on whatever it acquired, such as comparison)

+ not much development in 18th century, either rationalist-nativists in Cartesian tradition or empiricist-associationists in Hobbist-Lockean tradition.

+ Hume, Scottish, empiricist
- main purpose writing the Treatise was to develop a moral philosophy based on the science of man, meaning psychology
- association: how to get complex/abstract ideas from simple perceptions? 3 forms: resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and cause/effect.
- assault on the concept of causality: we cannot experience causality directly and therefore cannot know what it is or even prove that it exists. We know only that certain events seem always, or almost always, to be followed by certain others, and we therefore infer that the first causes the second.

+ Empiricist-Associationists reducing the major mental processes to perception and association, was not able to explain high-level mental phenomena as consciousness, reasoning, speech, unconscious thought, problem solving and creativity, and was not able to explain abstract ideas with no perceptual basis, such as virtue, soul, non-being, possibility, necessity, or the non-dimensionality of a point in geometry.

+ Kant, German

- we make judgments about sensations by means of other innate ideas (Kant's "categories"): unity, totality, reality, cause and effect, reciprocity, existence, and necessity. Without them we have no way of making sense of the chaotic mass of our perceptions. (Noam Chomsky's theory of the innate capacity of the child's mind to comprehend the syntax of spoken language)

+ The Physicalists are the ancestors of cognitive neuroscientists, such as the Skull Reader: Gall, Specific Nerve Energy: Muller, and the ones below.

+ Weber, German

- just noticeable difference, delta(R)/R = k, vision is the most sensitive, k=1/60; pain, k=1/30; pitch perception, 1/10; smell, 1/4; taste, 1/3.

+ Helmholtz, German, 19th

- shy, serious, major interest was physics, goal was to explain perception in terms of the physics of the sense organs and nervous system, admire Newton, but unlike him, courteous, generous, remarkably normal middle-class

- "The conservation of Force"

- some time taken by responses involving cognitive activity was spent by the activity.

- human vision can detect primary colors and hypothesize that retina must have three different kinds of receptor cells

- "our ideas of things cannot be anything but symbols, natural signs for things that we learn how to use in order to regulate our movements and actions" (similar to Aristotle)

- sensation and perception: sensation (the excitation of the retina's rods by light of whatever color, and the resultant impulses of the optic nerves), perception (the meaningful interpretations the mind makes of the arriving impulses).

- Disagree with Kant that the mind innately possesses "categories", the "categories" are learnt through trial and error. We learn about space by means of unconscious inference (every parent who has watched a baby trying to grasp object knows this). Used glasses to do experiments.

- Agree with Kant we innately possess the ability to interpret cause-and-effect relationships.

- Influenced the mainstream of psychology to experimental direction.

+ William James, American

- dress in what was informal garb for a professor, friendly, charming, outgoing, so vivacious& humorous that student interrupted and asked him to be serious for a moment

- complex personality: strong yet intermittently frail, hardworking yet sociable, joyous but given to spells of melancholy, frivolous but profoundly serious, kind to students and loving to his family but easily bored and exasperated.

- born in NYC in 1842, child of privilege and by all odds should have become a playboy. But his father, Henry James, broadened William's education and experience.

- at age 28, he had an emotional crisis, a horrible fear of my own existence. He was particularly troubled by the German physiologists' mechanistic vision of the world, the scientific equivalent of the Calvinistic determinism him own father had rebelled against. If mechanism gave a true picture of the mind, then all his thoughts, desires, and volitions were no more than the predetermined interactions of physical particles. Finally, he was freed from his depression by reading an essay on free will by Charles Renouvier. "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power". (when you are in doubt of something and you cannot find an answer, you have to choose to believe to live on)
- Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will
- the mind is a cause of behaviour, not an automaton responding passively to outside influences. Voluntary action implies freedom of the will.
- To believe in total determinism would make us passive and impotent; to believe in free will allows us to consider alternatives, to plan and to act on our plans. It is thus practical and realistic.
- Emotion: the emotion we feel is not the cause of bodily symptoms as a racing heart or sweaty palms; rather, the nervous system, reacting to an external stimulus, produces those physical symptoms, and our perception of them is what we call an emotion. (later showed to be faulty though, but it has practical applications, we exercising to get rid of depression, count 1-10 to control rage)

To be continued from Sigmund Freud.. -_-||

The fearless kind

What makes people fearless?

Is the one who wants nothing fearless? like the ascetic monks who deliberately extinguish their natural fire.

Is the one who wants something but believe his wants will never be lost fearless? like the martyrs who believe their faith party will never betray them.

Is the one who is so innocent that he believes the world turns around him fearless? like the 3 year old boy whose goal is to conquer the whole world.

Is the one who is so optimistic (or perhaps dumb) that he believes nothing he cannot acquire fearless? like the hardworking guy who tried again and again and again.

Berkeley Book List - Psychology and Cognitive Science

http://books.berkeley.edu/2003/psychology.shtml

John F. Kihlstrom, professor, Psychology

The Story of Psychology, Morton Hunt, Doubleday, 1993

The Mind's New Science, A History of the Cognitive Revolution, H. Gardner, Basic Books, 1985

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language,Steven Pinker, Morrow, 1994

The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Judith Rich Harris, Touchstone, 1999

House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth, Robyn M. Dawes, Free Press, 1994

The Oxford Companion to the Mind, ed. by Richard J. Gregory, Oxford University Press, 1987