Chapter 1: Origins of A Science of Mind

René Descartes

philosopher who contributed to the idea of human nature with his theory of mind-body dualism

cogito ergo sum (Descartes)

i am thinking, therefore i exist

mind-body dualism

Descartes’ idea that the functions of the body—which act as mechanical movements from animal spirits—are separate from the functions of the mind (soul)—which are province of God.

John Locke

philosopher who made human experience central to knowledge with essay An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

written by John Locke in which he argued that humans have an innate power to reflect on their experiences, all ideas come through experience, and that at birth our minds are tabula rasa (blank slate) on which sensory experiences are inscribed

associationism

the suggestion of Locke’s model of mental life that states that complex idea form from combinations of simple ideas

Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason

the time period during the 18th century in which debates about intellectual and practical issues were conducted among educated people and were central to changes in governance and the ways humans in Europe related to one another

William Harvey (1578-1657)

empirically demonstrated the circulation of the blood in 1628 in naturalistic terms, leading to physicians describing the action of the mind in physiological terms and opening the door to experimentation to demonstrate this

David Hartley

author of Observations of Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749) in which he employed Newton’s suggestion that vibrations in nervous tissue could be responsible for some visual effects to develop a physiology of the nervous system predicated on association of ideas that could account for relations between mind and body, to inspire people to pursue God’s design for humans

Robert Whytt (1714-1766) and William Cullen (1794-1878)

facilitated the public’s understanding that mind and body were intimately connected

volition (Whytt)

the idea that an organism’s response to stimulu involved the action of a function of the higher mental power that want necessarily conscious

principle of sentience (Whytt)

the preservation of life and the unity of the organism

Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828)

argued that the brain was the organ of the mind and that its faculties were empirically demonstrable.

organology (phrenology) (Gall)

a method of discerning mental abilities by reading the bumps on someone’s skull, and that stated the brain was composed of distinct parts that each had a function and that their size reflected the strength of the assigned function

Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796-1881)

collected more than 100 clinical cases that he suggested supported localization of function

localization of function

the theory that—especially—language and other functions most be localized somewhere in the frontal lobes of the brain

Gustav Fritsch (1837-1927) and Eduard Hitzig (1839-1907)

used recent improvements in the control of electricity to stimulate what’s now called the motor cortex of a dog, and found five sites that resulted in distinctive movements on opposite sides of the body

David Ferrier (1843-1928)

built on the work of Gall and neurologist John Hughlings Jackson to demonstrate experimentally the wide extend of cerebral localization, and found 15 areas of motor control

Charles Bell (1774-1842) and François Magendie (1783-1855)

helped create the conditions for the exploration of the psychological implications of nervous system function after their discoveries of the distinction between sensory and motor nerves, and pointed out that each type of sensory nerve was specific to a sensory modality

Georg Prochaska

physiologist who employed the concept of reflexive action as part of his vis nervosa and sensorium commune to link sensory input to motor responses, without reliance on consciousness

vis nervosa (Prochaska)

the latent energy of the nerves that found expression in reflexes

sensorium commune (Prochaska)

the medulla, basal ganglia, and spinal cord

Marshall Hall

physiologist who offered a specific connection between local nerve action and behavior; behavior could be described in terms of nerve action, that consciousness doesn’t have to be involved in behavior

Johannes Müller (1801-1858)

author of a handbook of physiology that fostered a critical, experimental approach to investigations of bodily processes that became the norm for other scientists.

doctrine of specific nerve energies (Müller)

states each sensory modality is specialized to respond in ways that are unique to it. what determines our sensory experiences are the structure and function of our nervous system

Herman von Helmholtz

showed that the law of conservation of energy applied to living organisms, humans, and the inorganic world and developed a trichromatic theory of color vision, which suggested that color vision resulted from the stimulation of specific receptors in the retina

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

naturalist who provided convincing evidence that humans are part of nature; called attention to the importance of considering the function of attributes and behaviors; created a space for the study of comparative psychology and developmental psychology; and facilitated thinking about individual differences with his emphasis on the role of natural selection of human variability

argument from design

the idea that all species had been designed by a Divine Creator for their specific place in nature

inheritance of acquired characteristics

proposed that changes in the adult organism can be passed directly to the offspring

uniformitarian hypothesis

suggests that they physical geology of the earth was formed as a result of long, gradual process

ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

argues that the development of a human, beginning with conception, displays all stages of human evolution

anthropomorphizing animals

attributing human characteristics to animals