Through the readings this week, we saw an evolution of ideas in the history of psychology, driven mainly by neurological and sensational research, and the dawn of the Enlightenment. We moved from Descartes and an emphasis on rationalism to John Locke and his emphasis on empiricism. I agree with Locke that we are probably "blank slates" when we are born and that our environment and the people around us fill in the blank spaces in our minds. He argued that we have no original ideas, that all our knowledge comes from experience, from sensation and reflection. But Locke believed that we have innate faculties, such as our senses and our brain, that allow us to learn about the world, and these faculties are "provided by God in ensuring that man would have the ability to gain knowledge about His good works," (Petryszak, 37). In this way, I don't think that Locke and Descartes are all that different. Descartes, in his meditations, wanted to find a foundation for our entire body of knowledge. He claimed that our senses can be deceived, and therefore we cannot trust them, and if we cannot trust the information of our senses, what can't know anything, not even that we exist. But we think and being aware of this thinking mind is how we know that we must exist, and this mind and existence are from God. Descartes and Locke both emphasize our thinking capacities as a way to gain knowledge about the world, and both acknowledged God as the root of this. So I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that Locke was denying the Church or religion because he wasn't. And I think it's easy to share Descartes' suspicion of our sensations and our knowledge of the physical world. We read about psychophysics and Fechner's insight that the physical world and the psychological world are not the same, but that the relationship can be measured. We do not necessarily experience the world as it is. As with a JND, and difference in the physical world does not exactly translate as a psychological experience. While we have the same senses, our specific sensation sensitivities and physical make-up differ such that our experience of the world is not quite the same. Although we all live in the same world, we do not experience it in the same way. In this way, we cannot trust our senses to give us an objective, or common, view of the world. This makes me wonder if there truly an objective reality. I mean, I know in my head that there is, but how different is it from the one that we experience?

Cortical Localization

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/29/60minutes/main2053537_page2.shtml

This kind of goes along with our readings and discussions on Broca and cortical localization. It's a CBS report on "Area 25", a spot in the brain where, if the proper surgery is conducted, clinical depression can be temporarily treated for those who have had very little luck with regular treatments. Patients of this surgery are said to have "treatment resistant depression". These are people who have tried anti-depressant medication and talk therapy but do not respond to them singularly or as combined treatments. When looking at fMRI scans, Area 25 seems to be overactive when a person is seriously depressed. Neurosurgeons use electric shock from a pacemaker to stimulate this area to "jolt" it back into proper functioning. Looks like we might have a depression faculty in our brains. Very interesting stuff.



Check out the video if you don't care to read the whole thing. Enjoy!

More on Locke

I want to take the time this week to reflect on Locke and his grand questions and assumptions. We have read and discussed how Locke believes that we are born as a blank slate, "tabula rasa" and how we have the tools to form and understand experiences, but we basically do not have anything before that. I guess that I learned more about the general time period of the "spirit of Enlightenment" while reading about Locke. People were ready to ask questions and speak out against traditional views and many different forms. Locke's form, basically made an argument for nature versus nurture very early on. In the readings some say that we have misinterpreted Locke's ideas and that he really had his own agenda of pushing liberal ideas rather than making particular arguments about man's relationship with God and free will. I think we should respect him for his arguments and bringing some issues into the forefront.

Spiritualism

Here is a link to the wikipedia article on Spiritualism. We didn't really cover it in class, so I thought it would be a good thing to learn more about, especially since belief in spirits and communicating with the dead is still strong to today and is present in pop culture (the movie The Others with Nicole Kidman, anyone?). It also briefly mentions Mesmer and how sometimes during magnetism-induced trances, some people reported communication with the dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritualism#Swedenborg_and_Mesmer

Here is a link giving a little bit more history about Kate and Margaretta Fox, the two sisters who communicated with the spirit of a murdered peddlar in their New York farmhouse. The article includes qoutes from people who used to live in the house. It is connected to a larger website on modern spiritualism, if anyone is interested on the the form it takes today.

http://www.spiritualist.tv/news/mar08/160-spiritualism.html

This Week in the History of Psychology podcasts

This is an interesting page I found while searching about the history of Psychology. This site includes podcasts of interviews about certain historical happenings related to psychology. They are all conducted by a professor of Psychology at York University, Toronto and are around 25 minutes long.

Examples include: Malcolm Macmillan on the life and myth of Phineas Gage, David Baker on the psychograph: the 1930s’ automatic phrenologist, Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. on Nobel prizes won and lost by psychologists and "near-psychologists."

Week 2: Link & Reflection

The link below is a biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, mentioned in the text we read this week on mental versus physical healing and medicine-free healing techniques. It's long, but interesting - especially the dispute over her plagiarism of Quimby (also in our text!)'s original ideas. This also ties in to our class discussion about research in that a great deal of information we have about Eddy is from letters she wrote and received, and can be found in museums and the like.

http://marybakereddy.wwwhubs.com/

Christian Science, not to be confused with Scientology, is explained by our dear old friend Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science. In essence, Christian Science believes that the reality of being, as well as everything God creates is spiritual and not material. Spiritual reality is the only reality - all else is illusion. Christian Science and traditional medicine are not used together under the belief that they contradict one another. Interesting!

This article made me reflect upon the topic of free will that Bill explained in class today. While reading about the Christian Science, I came upon the legal/medical issue of children being raised under the guidelines of this belief system (some choose to call it a religion; others a medical science). Studies from the CDC and other groups have reported discrepancies of death rates due to cancer and other illnesses between followers of the Christian Science versus traditional medicine. In addition, the US Constitution has been utilized by those arguing for their right to practice Christian Science, even in cases of exemption from legal prosecution due to apparent child abuse or neglect. They cite the constitutional guarantee of protection of religious practice from intrusion of government in their cases, with varying degrees of success across different states. It is interesting to think about what John Locke might have to say about this, and to conceive of different explanations of free will. Sure, children growing up under the Christian Science still have options and are able to make decisions. However, can we assign levels of free will? It is an all or nothing, or does the fact that we might be able to make predictions about their outcomes based on the limited choices available not at all affect their having free will?

Traumatic Brain Injury

Check out http://www.lcmedia.com/mind181.htm

Back in August of 2001, a public radio station did a broadcast of "The Infinite Mind: Traumatic Brain Injury"....

Did you know that at least 230,000 people in the U.S. each year are hospitalized for traumatic brain injury and SURVIVE?

You can also learn more about Richard Roe, a man who damaged his frontal lobe and temporal cortex when he fell 30ft. off of some scaffolding while working in New York. He ended up having some serious problems similar to the story of Phineas Gage. Nowadays, he works as a counselor and professional astrologer. I don't know if his email still works, but if you have questions for him... you can email him at alphaastrologer@aol.com.

But this review of the public address is kind of interesting... I suggest you check it out.