Intro Psych - JHU Chaz Firestone FA 2025

What is Psychology?

the scientific study of mind and behavior

Who is Phineas Gage?

A person who was impaled through the brain and survived.

Why is Phineas Gage significant?

His accident demonstrates that:

• The mind can survive and adapt to violent damage

• The brain is organized. This conclusion can be made because he was able to perform some tasks perfectly while other tasks were severely impacted.

How did Phineas Gage change after his accident?

He became bad at planning and more prone to conflict. He used to be a shrewd businessman.

What is the astonishing hypothesis?

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You", your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules...you're nothing but a pack of neurons. This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can be truly called astonishing

What is dualism?

Belief that while bodies and brains are material, minds are immaterial - Rene Descartes

Why is dualism intuitive?

It appears in our language and thinking. We have a mind-centric vocabulary where our minds are our "self".

Is dualism correct or incorrect? Why?

Dualism is incorrect because our mind is not separated from our brain - physical effectors on the brain have a marked effect on the performance of the mind.

Is the mind closer to a sponge or a bicycle?

Stupid question

What is phrenology?

A theory that you could tell a person's character and mental ability by the bumps and traits of their cranium

What was phrenology right about?

Right about localization and specialization of certain parts of the brain

What was phrenology wrong about?

Wrong that bumps and traits of the cranium can actually tell what a person is like.

What is modularity?

The localization and specialization of the brain.

Frontal Lobe responsibilities

Reasoning, planning, motivation, reward...front of brain

Parietal Lobe responsibilities

Language, movement, bodily awareness, sensation...Top of brain

Temporal Lobe responsibilities

memory, meaning...Bottom of brain

occipital lobe responsibilities

mostly vision. Back of brain.

Sagittal View

front to back vertical cut

horizontal view

left to right flat cut

coronal view

left to right vertical cut

hypothalamus

homeostasis

amygdala

emotion, especially fear

basal ganglia

habitual action

thalamus

sensory gateway

hippocampus

long-term memory

cerebellum

fine motor skills

dendrites

Branchlike parts of a neuron that are specialized to receive information.

axon

the extension of a neuron, ending in branching terminal fibers, through which messages pass to other neurons or to muscles or glands

axon terminals

branches at the end of the axon

myelin sheath

A layer of fatty tissue segmentally encasing the fibers of many neurons; enables vastly greater transmission speed of neural impulses as the impulse hops from one node to the next.

action potential

a neural impulse; a brief electrical charge that travels down an axon

Synapse

the junction between the axon tip of the sending neuron and the dendrite or cell body of the receiving neuron

Nodes of Ranvier

Gaps in the myelin sheath to which voltage-gated sodium channels are confined.

How is a nerve cell similar to a computer?

The nerve fires signals rapidly in an on or off state, kind of like a computer's binary code

How did Wilder Penfield treat epilepsy?

Destroyed brain tissue where seizures originated. Stimulated the brain under local anesthesia and asked patients what they felt.

Why was Wilder Penfield important?

Demonstrated that clinical observations could contribute to the study of the brain and that using an electrode could perform that stimulation.

Equipotentiality

One part of the brain can carry out functions lost by destruction of other parts

fMRI

functional magnetic resonance imaging

what does an fMRI do?

fMRI is NOT a direct measure of neural activity.

Instead, it is a measure of the consequences, several seconds later, of many neurons firing.

What do the results of an fMRI demonstrate?

fMRI is NOT a what your brain is doing

fMRI is a measure of where and how much your brain is doing something.

Fusiform Face Area

Area of the brain specialized for face perception

Prosopagnosia

inability to recognize faces especially of those familiar to onesself; face blindness

Plasticity

the brain's ability to change, especially during childhood, by reorganizing or by building new pathways based on experience

Consciousness

our awareness of ourselves and our environment

Persistent vegetative state

a type of long-term coma in which the patient exhibits alternating sleep and wake cycles

Unresponsive wakefulness

- appears awake but remains motionless w/ out awareness of surroundings

- no evidence of purposeful movement

- typically follows coma or sleep cycle of a coma

Ink blot test/Rorschach test

Test of ink blots that have ambiguous shape. What a person sees most naturally supposedly reveals certain character traits they have, such as trouble relating to people if you don't see two human figures in a particular ink blot test.

Grand theory of the mind

a comprehensive framework aiming to explain the totality of mental phenomena, encompassing broad concepts like consciousness, thought, and behavior, rather than focusing on narrow aspects. E.G. psychoanalysis, behaviorism

Psychoanalysis

a set of theories and techniques of research to discover unconscious processes and their influence on conscious thought, emotion and behaviour. Established by Sigmund Freud

Penis envy

1. Discover that you don't have a penis

2. Infer you must have been castrated

3. Become attracted to father, then to men, because they have what was taken from you.

What are some key ideas of psycho analysis?

• Unconscious processing

explains much of our behavior

• We are often wrong about the reasons for our actions

• Can study the unconscious

mind through subtle behaviors,

errors of speech, etc.

Id

unconscioius unsophisticated

instinctual drives

ego

conscious sophisticated

planner that decides how/whether to get what the Id wants

superego

internalized societal rules that tell you what (not) to do

5 Stages of development

Oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital

How do the 5 stages of development work according to Freud?

The stage of development is associated with what part of your body is associated with pleasure at the moment.

Oral development stage

Birth - 1 year; mouth is associated with pleasure

Orality, neediness, addictive personality

Anal development stage

1 - 3 years; anus is associated with pleasure

"anal retentive", compulsive, stingy

Phallic development stage

3 - 5 years; genitals associated with pleasure

Need for domination

Oedipus complex

psychoanalytical theory of a young boy's unconscious desire for his mom and rivalry with father, associated with the phallic development stage

Latency development stage

5 years - Puberty; sexuality is repressed Less goes on here, can't really get stuck here

Genital development stage

Puberty onward; conscious version of phallic stage Attraction to mother generalizes to women (unless you were attracted to Dad; Freud's theory of homosexuality) Focus on love and work if not stuck in earlier stages

Projection

attributing your own unacceptable impulses to others

Repression

moving unacceptable feelings into unconsciousness

Regression

falling back on an "easier" early stage

Criticisms of Freud

1) No evidence

2) unfalsifiable - cannot be disproven (too broad and wide-covering?)

3) Perfect Circularity - everything proves Freud right no matter how a patient answers

4) Favors complicated explanations for simple phenomena

How is Behaviorism different from Psychoanalysis?

First developed by BF Skinner, anti-mentalistic and ultra-scientific. Focuses on the observable, unlike psychoanalysis

How does behaviorism reject internal mental states from consideration?

Focuses on the observable, unlike psychoanalysis

How does behaviorism view learning?

Has a strong emphasis on learning

How is behaviorism tested?

Behaviorism assumes minimal interspecies differences; so a mouse could be a good model for a human.

Habituation

decline in response due to repeated exposure

Classical conditioning

learning associations between one stimulus and another

Little Albert Experiments

An example of classical conditioning; a child could be made to fear a rat if a loud sound was used to scare the baby whenever the baby saw the rat, associating the rat with the loud sound

operant conditioning

learning associations between actions and consequences

Shaping

An example of operant conditioning. A complex behavior taught by successively approximating the original behavior until it is indistinguishable from the original.

Positive reinforcement

Increase likelihood of behavior thru rewarding positive stimulus

Negative reinforcement

increase likelihood of behavior thru removal of negative stimulus

Punishment

decrease likelihood of behavior by applying a negative stimulus

Fixed Schedule of reinforcement

reinforcement every time or at the same time every time

Variable schedules of reinforcement

reinforcement at a certain rate on average. Builds better habits

How does behaviorism view the unobservable parts of our brain?

It views any unobservable variables as unscientific.

Criticism of behaviorism

1) Not everything is learned

2) Behaviorism is not a good explanation of all human behavior

Properties of Language

rules, arbitrariness, displacement, creativity, infinity

Rules (language property)

Not everything goes, established set of rules

arbitrariness

no inherent connection between the units (sounds, words) used in a language and their meanings

displacement

can refer to things that aren't there

creativity

produce and understand new sentences

infinity

no limit to number and length of possible sentences

phonology

rules governing which sounds are permissible/meaningful

phoneme

in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

Ex: "cat" has 3 phenomes. K - ah - t

phonetics

how speech sounds are physically produced

word boundaries

beginning and end of each word

What are the problems in phonology?

Speech sounds are variable and ambiguous

What is a way to account for the variability and ambiguity within phonology?

top-down processing

What is top-down processing?

Prior context, clues, and knowledge influence how you perceive speech sounds.

Ex: movement of the mouth, sine-wave speech, telling you what will be said and then listening to a muffled recording

Morphology

structure and form of words

morpheme

in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix)

Ex: unreachable as 3 morphemes:

Un-reach-able

Syntax

how words are combined into phrases and sentences

What about language is innate at birth?

The capacity and inclination to learn languages is present at birth

Every culture has _______

language (with no exceptions)