Reflection on Schmidgen

The reading on Wundt as a chemist I didn't find very convincing. I mean there are many early psychologists who initially started out as chemists, physicists, or physiologists. The fact of the matter is other then Wundt's knowledge of scientific experiments Schmidgen really didn't bring any other proof of Wundt's connection to chemistry. The idea of Wundt being influenced in psychology by being overseen by a chemist was far-fetched. I just don't believe that Schmidgen supported his claims well enough. I will say this though, I found his retelling of Wundt's experiment on table salt and urine was quite interesting. As a young scientist Wundt really seemed to have a grasp on the proper way to conduct experiment, even on his own. He was able to bring in all his methods such as varied conditions, repetition and comparative measurements into psychology which proved quite useful in experimental psychology years later.

As a history minor I have written and researched plenty of historically significant events. As a historian I do not believe that Schmidgen provided a full or clear picture of his thesis. As a good historian one must present both sides of the story, providing enough evidence to support one's thesis. Referring back to Blumenthal's writing on Wundt, Blumenthal writes that although in his early years Wundt did refer to Mill's chemical analogy, Blumenthal continues saying that Wundt did not believe that this analogy went far enough and eventually he disclaimed the analogy all together. By referring back to Blumenthal's writing on Wundt it is evident that Schmidgen did not read far enough into Wundt's opinions and instead only read into his educational and professional background to prove his thesis.

Quotes

As I was searching for links for this week I came across Wundt and Ebbinghaus quotes. Although it seems a bit trivial, reading these quotes helped to make sense of Wundt's and Ebbinghaus' beliefs about psychology and memory. They're a good thing to go over along with the readings.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/hermann_ebbinghaus.html

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/wilhelm_wundt.html

Psych Museum in Akron

http://www3.uakron.edu/ahap/

Check out this sight! It shows all the manuscripts that the museum has along with aids to help you find sources available online. There is also a news page so you can read up on events happening at the museum, etc.

Reflection Week 1

This week I was particularly interested in were the ideas of John Locke about  'tabular rasa' (blank slate). It's interesting that the Nativist thought that everyone was born with innate ideas about God (believing that God was inside us. John Locke did not believe this, he believed that the mind becomes furnished (we gain knowledge through two sources): sensations- meaning our experience with the world and 2: reflection on all that we have experienced. Locke was a radical in his day and thankfully he was because his ideas are a huge factor in what we think of how humans process everything they experience. He got a lot of people thinking and doing research in this area of human cognition.

This week we also focused on a few areas of the brain-Broca's and Wernick's areas. Broca's area is where speech is produced while Wernick's area has to do with the comprehension of language. It is truly fascinating that we have learned the most of these areas by people being hurt (Phineas Gage and stroke patients) and then scientist do subsequent tests on animals to confirm their findings. I really just find how we figure out what the parts of the brain do fascinating.

The Outrageousness of Science?

After reading the first few chapters in our textbooks and the pieces about Fechner last week, I have been left wondering: what makes a quack? What makes someone's ideas about psychology, or any science for that matter, more ridiculous than the next? Or more valuable than the next? In the first couple chapters of our book (and I'm assuming through most of our readings on the history of psychology), we encounter many individuals who contributed greatly to the field. Yet during their time, many were often thought of as outrageous with unfounded beliefs. Those who were denied these claims by crying "uncle" in the form of: "It's science!" Even more scientists of the time had ideas that were greatly admired yet seem common sense to us now.

Here's an example of a scientific idea that was respected during its time (and afterwards). Maybe I am missing something, or maybe it's good that I am in the field of social science and not natural science, but Fechner's research on psychophysics is difficult to understand. HOW specifically did he measure sensation? HOW specifically did he measure stimulation? If, in fact, according to Wozniak, "mental processes are internal, private, subjective, and cannot be measured directly," how did Fechner come across a way to measure these things? Fechner measured his findings "in terms of the relative increase in physical energy required to bring [mental intensity] about." I'm struggling to see the way in which Fechner could substantiate this data. In fact, if he found a way to measure mental processes - the private, subjective, inner workings of our minds - I think a lot of psychological researchers would be out of a job!

Back to my first point, I've started to wonder... what psychological ideas, methods, processes, and theories do we have now that will look outrageous fifty years down the line?

reflection week 1

This week we discussed histography, or the "science of history". Histography refers to the philosophy and methods of doing history (Benjamin, 2009). We also discussed the various types research used to examine history. The three types of history that we discussed were archival, oral, and quantitative methods. Each type of history has its own advantages and disadvantages and we must examine all three in order understand history as completely as possible. It seems to me that it must be very hard for historians to gain a clear picture of history because each of these forms of research have a lot of loose ends. With archival data it can be hard to obtain and translate if necessary. Even if the works are complete and legible, it is impossible to debate or question the creator of the works. This leaves a lot up to the interpretation of the reader. With oral history it can be hard to obtain a uniform story because perception and time can change peoples memory and their story. Finally qualitative methods are not exact and only provide a general idea about relationships.
After discussing these types of research I really have a lot more respect for historians. They clearly have a very difficult and time consuming job. Another hard aspect of this type of work is there is no measure to ensure that you are right, so much is left up to interpretation that two historians could potentially have a completely different analysis of the same set of data.
We also did an interesting experiment to demonstrate the just noticeable difference. JND is very important in psychology because it was the first comparable unit that could be determined experimentally. The experiment demonstrated that the amount of change necessary increases as the compared stimulus becomes stronger/more intense. When we originally started the experiment I thought that it would be harder to detect the chasnge in weight for the lightest and heavesist weights, but that the same change in weight would be easy to identify among the middle weights. After the experiement I applied the same idea to lifting weights and it made perfect sense. As the weight increases it takes a greater increase in order to detect that a change as occured.

Random Snippets of Psychology Knowledge

Browsing the internet, I found a very primitive psychology forum that seems to have a lot of interesting posts about the history and theory of psychology (hence the name). I didn't read through all of them but these posts could supplement our readings in class, our projects, etc. If you have time, I suggest exploring this site (from the 1990's?!). Of course, keep in mind how scholarly the site actually is...