Before Freud

There are two distinct approaches within the field of psychology so I want to highlight that, the
sort of clinical approach and then the more traditional, basic research scientific approach.

And I want to use the history to do that, and specifically I'm going to want to use Sigmund Freud
because I really see Sigmund Freud as critical in terms of creating this multiple personality as it
was. So, the next 3 lectures are therefore, split into the history of psychology before Freud, then
a discussion of Freud himself and the impact he had and then finally a discussion of psychology
after Freud that will bring us in a good position to talk about current psychological findings.

Alright psychology before Freud, I want to begin here by just giving you the context in which
psychology was born, because I think, you know, that's an interesting part of the story as well.

Psychology was born in Germany, and a lot of the names we're going to be talking about today
are German names. The first psychologists were German and the reason for that is because
we're going to be talking about a period in the late 1800s. And this is a period when Germany
was economically a very, very strong country. Okay, they were, they were the strongest country
in Europe. And in fact, in a sense, in the world and like many countries who are experiencing a
really strong economic time, they decided to reinvest some of their money into research to kind
of stay at the leading edge. To give their people the best quality of life, but also to be leading the
world in issues like health care, of course military design. Anything that they thought would keep
Germany was at the forefront and so they were really willing to consider other approaches to
research, and new topics, and new subjects, and that was really, really important.

Adding to this were a couple of players at the time who didn't call themselves psychologists.
So the first one for example, Hermann von Helmholtz was actually a physicist. He called himself
an empirical philosopher, which is coming pretty close to psychology. but he was also an
ophthalmologist and he had major contributions in all of these fields.

Hermann von Helmholtz 1821 - 1894

What he did for psychology was to really show that some of the issues related to the machinery
of the mind were issues that previously people thought you could not study scientifically. He
showed that if you're clever, you actually can do this and I want to, I want to demonstrate his
approach with a more general example of 1 of the issues Helmholtz was very interested in.

And, and that's the speed with which neural tissue transmits information,Neural transmission
rates. Now, previous to Helmholtz, people assumed that neural transmission happens so fast
that it's immeasurable. You just could not scientifically study it. But Helmholtz came up with a
bunch of different techniques. So, he did a bunch of animal research and other things, but I want
to highlight a logical approach that he took and I'm going to highlight it with this example.

So, imagine we had Helmholtz's problem. We wanted to know how fast a nerve signal could
move from this lady's left hand up to her brain and then to her right hand. So specifically,
imagine we said, okay we're going to squeeze your left hand and when we squeeze your left
hand we want you, as quickly as possible, to squeeze your right hand once you feel that.
So the signal has to go to her brain, she feels it, and then she has to send the signal down to
her other hand to squeeze. How fast can that happen? Well If you try to do this with a single
individual, the measurement that the timing apparatuses had in Heimholtz's day simply couldn't
record speeds that fast. But imagine the following, imagine you're on a set of roller skates, and
we find 1000 people and we line them up. And we just give them this simple task. We say, okay,
here's what's going to happen, I'm going to squeeze this gentleman's left hand. And when I
squeeze his left hand, I will start my stopwatch. And then, off I'm going to go on my roller skates
down this hill. And we've, we've cleverly positioned ourselves on a hill so we can go really fast.
So we go scooting around this hill round to the other side, pass a thousand people and then we
go to the last person in line and we hold their right hand, and we wait for them to squeeze our
hand, and they squeeze our hand we stop the stop watch, okay? Now what we've done is taking
this really fast thing but by multiplying it by 1000,having it have to go across 100 people, we
made it much slower, we made it measurable. And what Helmholtz found is if you just took the
total time, and then you figure out okay what's the average distance of neural tissue, in the
average human being which you can measure, easily enough. So if we now divide that total
time by the average amount of neural tissue multiplied by a 1000 because we had a 1000
humans. We can derive a time and Helmholtz did this. His time was about 25 to 38 meters per
second. Again, a little rough, but hey, he could measure it.

And that was the really important point. These nerve cells are the machinery that the brain is
using to communicate with the body. And Helmholtz showed you could measure and study them
scientifically, very important. In the same vein, but perhaps even more important is the
contribution of Ernst Weber.

Ernst Weber 1795 - 1878

Again, mid 1800s is probably when Ernst Weber was doing his best work. Weber likes the
following kind of procedure. He would present stimuli, he would present two participants two
different stimuli at a time. Imagine two lines and give them very simple tasks, which line is
longer? It could also be which sound is louder? Which light is brighter? It could be which touch
feels like it has a little more pressure to it. He studied all sorts of sensory stimuli, and he found
this really fascinating truth, or law, I guess you would call it. Which went as follows, he was
interested in how different you had to make, for example, the lengths of a line before people
could see the difference.

The first thing he found out is that our sensory stimuli have limits. Okay, we can't take one line
and just add a little tiny bit to it, and people go, oh, there it is. You have to add a fair amount
before they notice that the two lines are different. How much do you have to add? Well, Weber
called that amount something he called the Just Noticeable Difference, or JND. That was how
much extra length you had to add before people could tell a difference. Or how much extra
sound, you know, loudness, how much extra brightness, etc. And what he found is that, that
amount, how big that amount was, depended on the original length of the line. Or the original,
more general terms, the intensity of the stimulus.

Let's look at this formula.

He said, if you had some original intensity and you ask, how much of a change do you have to
make before people notice it. There seems to be this constant ratio, let me explain that. Let's
say this was a 10mm line, and we kept making this one bigger until people suddenly said, okay,
I can now perceive in my mind, I can see those are different.

And let's say we had to add two millimeters to do that, so they could tell the difference between
a 10 milliliter line and a 12 milliliter line, okay? So we found 2 or 20% extra then they could see
it. What if this was now a 100 millimeter line? Well if you're presented 100 millimeters and 102
millimeters, they still couldn't see the difference. so it's not a question that we can detect
a 2 millimeter difference. Rather, you had to keep increasing this until you got to 120 millimeters,
that is 20% more than the original size. So when you got to 120, now people could see them.

So he found these what we now call Weber fractions, these ratios that hold true for our different
sensory systems. And the really important point of all this for psychology, is that he was actually
studying people's mental perceptions. He called what he was doing psychophysics, studying the
physics of the mind. And what he showed is that, hey you know what? Math seems to work, we
can apply math. There are things like constants to perception. And again, that suddenly, in this
environment where people were willing to explore new research methods, these sorts of
findings suggested, you know what? The mind is open for study. We can have a science of the
mind, so they really opened the door. Now, who walked through the door? Well that's Wilhelm
Wundt.

Wilhelm Wundt 1832 - 1920

Wilhelm Wundt is credited as being the first psychologist. That's on two bases, really. He
established the first experimental lab devoted to psychology in 1874. And he wrote the first
textbook, over here, the Principles of Physiological Psychology, in 1879. so those two things
give him the title, the first person to, to really call himself a psychologist and the father of
modern psychology. Now from it's birthday, psychology started to have this battle in terms of
science. So specifically, Wundt really favored a procedure that he called introspection.

Introspection literally means you know, inspection to inspection, something to inspect inward, to
kind of inspect the contents of your consciousness. This is what Wundt did and this is what he
trained people to, he has so-called trained observers that he would teach. The proper way to
kind of both look into their mind and to report what was going on in there. and so he would train
these observers quite heavily and then he would present various stimulants. They could be just
colors or sounds or, you know, anything really and these people would have to tell Wundt what
they were seeing in their mind or what they were hearing or, you know, anything that was going
on in their conscious mind. And what Wundt was really after, it's now what we call structuralism
was that idea of what conscience experience looks like.

What's the structure of conscious experience? Now, a lot of scientists didn't like introspection.
they thought this was problematic, because Wundt was no longer directly studying the thing he
was interested in, the structure of conscious experience. He required his trained observers to
look for him and accurately report what was going on in their mind. And a lot of people
questioned whether anybody could really do that. and whether things like, you know, making
It verbally changed the whole experience. And so suddenly, there was this little controversy over
the techniques Wundt was using and how scientific they were and that was kind of going on,
and yet Wundt still continued on and found a lot of interesting things. However, then something
happen. One of these transformational figures, Darwin.
 Charles Darwin 1809-1882

Of course, Charles Darwin transformed all of science; what he did to psychology parallels and
what he did to biology. Here's what I mean by that, when Darwin was on the beagle, he was
collecting specimens from exotic places.This is what a lot of biologists did during Darwin's time.
He was collecting all these specimens and then he was behaving in the typical biological way. In
that, he was bringing the specimens back, and then he was trying to put them into taxonomic
categories.
So you know, we think of things like birds versus reptiles, that kind of thing. How did those
categories come to exist? Well biologists would look at the features that some specimen had.
Then they would group different specimens according to their features, and ultimately create
some class around that. Now that's all well and good, but Darwin made another mental leap. He
said, you know what, we're focusing too much on what the features are and classifying that in
that way, but there's a whole other interesting, more interesting story to this. And that is we
should be asking why the features are the way they are? So of course in his famous work he
focused on finches that he found in the Galapagos and he made a big deal out of things like
their beak shape. So he noticed that, for example, some finches like this one, had sort of short
stout strong beaks. Other finches had much longer, thinner beaks. The longer, thinner beaked
finches tended to live in places where there were insects, within wooden logs, or other places
where the bird had to get in to get those insects. So the long beak helped them get the food.
Other finches like this one with the shorter beak tended to live in places where there were lots of
seeds or nuts. So these beaks helped them crack the seeds or nuts. So, the feature of what the
beak looks like is not just coincidental, it's not just random. It's very much tied into the context
that the animal lives, and it has a very distinct function. And so Darwin's essentially told the
biological community, don't worry so much about what things look like, worry about what they're
good for. What's the function?

That's the real interesting story, that mentality came into psychology. I told you that Vout was
very interested in the structure of conscious experience, while following Darwin and heavily
influenced by William James, now we're seeing psychology broaden out of Germany and come
into America here.
 William James 1842-1910

William James, was interested in the function of various psychological processes. So he

changed the whole dialogue away from what conscious experience looks like. And instead, you
know, he's, he's a fascinating guy, William James. He would essentially, this is my image of
him, you know, he would experience life, sit in a chair, reflect on things like,
“How does memory work, and what's it good for? And what about attention, you know, what
does that do for us? And conscious experience and will. you know, what is the human will?
Do we actually control our own behavior?”

So he would think about all these deep issues. And you would come to these theoretical
stances on them. The really creepy thing, I think it is creepy, is how accurate the guy was. In
fact, William James himself, did not do a lot of empirical research. He mostly generated ideas, in
some ways, he was more of a philosopher than a psychologist. But all of his psychology was
about cognitive things, so he came up with all these ideas. Years later, we're doing all of these
experiments, and it really is uncanny how much our experimental data seems to match a lot of
James' ideas.

So, he really changed the direction of psychology towards this functionalist mentality. Alright, so
that's where we are going to leave the story for now, except I really want to emphasize the
following. Up until now, psychology has been a very young science, trying hard to be scientific
and trying to really, you know promote, we can't scientifically study the mind. Keep that in mind
and bring that with you, into the next lecture on Freud, where you'll see Freud mess things up
totally.

Summary:

- Hermann Von Helmholtz: Neural Transmission

- Ernst Weber: Psychophysics (Just Noticeable Difference)

- Wilhem Wundt: Introspection & Structuralism

- Charles Darwin: Functionalism

- William James: changed the direction of psychology towards this functionalist mentality