Psychology 103d Fall 2005

 

Before we get started today, I’d like to conduct a little thought experiment with the class.

 

Let’s imagine a time far into the future, when medical surgical procedures are so advanced as to have become routine.  Medical breakthroughs are advancing at such a rapid pace—transplant surgery has become so simple, infections are rare, organ rejection is not a concern, and donation has become a routine part of the culture.

 

So, under these circumstances, how many of you would be willing to undergo a transplant surgery to replace a diseased brain? 


Why/why not?

 

The point of this thought experiment is to illustrate that the brain is not just any other body organ…it houses your personality, your thoughts, your self.  Plus it carries out some pretty remarkable calculations and computations, billions of times a second.  So, as machines go, it’s the most impressive thing in the universe, and remarkably, it even comes with a capacity to contemplate the universe, and to study itself.  No other 3 pound mass of cells comes close.

 

So…that’s just a taste of the perspective that we take in this course.

 

Introduction to the course...

 

This is the first module of the introduction to psychology series.  Those of you that decide to be psychology majors will take an entire year of this course, understanding several different disciplines within psychology.  Those of you that are just taking this semester will leave this course with an interesting new perspective on the mind.   I want to take some time today to give you an idea of what to expect in this course, and what I expect of you.

 

Syllabus for the course:  www.haverford.edu/psych/courses/p103.  Please consult this website for details on the course.  We will go over it in detail on Wed.

 

what is it that you can expect a course called the Biological Foundations of Behavior to cover???  What is it that you expect to learn about in a psychology course?

 

The word “psychology” literally means “the study of the mind”....that is the focus of what psychologists study.  Although philosophers have been posing questions about the mind for millennia, psychology is relatively new as a science.  We’ll talk more about the scientific approach to psychology in Wednesday’s lecture, but for now, you can take my word for it that academic psychology—the psychology that is taught in college courses, is a scientific discipline.

 

OK...now, how does something as subjective and unique to all of us as the mind lend itself to scientific study?  Well, the simple answer to this question is that it doesn’t.  We can never absolutely know what is going on in another individual’s mind...it’s as simple as that...the mind is absolutely private. 

 

But that doesn’t sound like the basis for a science…so, how do we know what is going on in other people’s minds?  We can get clues about the minds of others by observing their behavior.  Thus, the discipline of psychology literally is the study of behavior.  From the behavior of others, we can infer what is going on in their minds.  We use the term behavior rather loosely in psychology...anything observable, other’s overt behaviors or even more subtle behaviors, are suitable for scientific study. 

 

So the primary questions of psychology can be posed as such:  “Why do people do the things they do?”  Probably the most interesting questions humans can ask of themselves, and of other creatures (because we are also interested in animal behavior).  Now, all psychologists are interested in behavior, but psychology is a rather diverse discipline.  The specific questions about behavior, and the methods used to answer those questions are unique to each discipline. 

 

I am a  biological psychologist, so for the first seven weeks of the semester, you will gain an understanding and an appreciation of the way biological psychologists view behavior.   It is my goal this quarter to get you to appreciate the nature of behavior as a function of the brain—what Woody Allen once described as his 2nd favorite organ!

 

Interestingly, it wasn’t always the brain that was believed to house the “self”—there was a time in intellectual history when it was believed that the heart was the most important organ for the survival of the individual—clearly, an injury that pierces the chest will cause almost certain death.  The ancient Greeks believed that the liver was the site where emotions originated, and that the brain was really a radiator, designed to cool the blood.  

 

So how did we get here---how did the brain come to be recognized as the “seat of the soul”?  Let’s start by considering the case of Phineas Gage, the 19th C. railroad worker who had the remarkable fortune of surviving a severe head injury.   

 

http://science-education.nih.gov/nihHTML/ose/snapshots/multimedia/ritn/Gage/Broken_brain1.html

 

I think that Phineas’ story is fascinating because it gives us insight into how the brain gives rise to fundamental aspects of personality (and how behavior is the observable measure of one’s mental state), and also gives us an opportunity to discuss how to think critically about claims about behavior and how scientific psychology works.  

 

From the information presented, it seems that Phineas’ change in behavior and personality was due to the brain damage he suffered.  But what is another possible explanation for the change in Phineas’ behavior?  How would we test this scientifically?