A report on Psychology and Consciousness

Wilhelm Wundt (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind.

Representation of consciousness from the seventeenth century by Robert Fludd, an English Paracelsian physician

One of the dogs used in Pavlov's experiment with a surgically implanted cannula to measure salivation, preserved in the Pavlov Museum in Ryazan, Russia

John Locke, British Enlightenment philosopher from the 17th century

False-color representations of cerebral fiber pathways affected, per Van Horn et al.

Illustration of dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Skinner's teaching machine, a mechanical invention to automate the task of programmed instruction

Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking "the bat's point of view", it would still be impossible "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat." (Townsend's big-eared bat pictured).

The Müller–Lyer illusion. Psychologists make inferences about mental processes from shared phenomena such as optical illusions.

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 posited that humans have a hierarchy of needs, and it makes sense to fulfill the basic needs first (food, water etc.) before higher-order needs can be met.

Developmental psychologists would engage a child with a book and then make observations based on how the child interacts with the object.

Neon color spreading effect. The apparent bluish tinge of the white areas inside the circle is an illusion.

An example of an item from a cognitive abilities test used in educational psychology.

Square version of the neon spread illusion

Flowchart of four phases (enrollment, intervention allocation, follow-up, and data analysis) of a parallel randomized trial of two groups, modified from the CONSORT 2010 Statement

The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level etc.

Artificial neural network with two layers, an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain.

A rat undergoing a Morris water navigation test used in behavioral neuroscience to study the role of the hippocampus in spatial learning and memory.

Phineas P. Gage survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and is remembered for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior.

Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts.

- Psychology

Recently, consciousness has also become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, involving fields such as psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroscience.

- Consciousness

8 related topics with Alpha

A phrenological mapping of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain

Mind

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Set of faculties responsible for mental phenomena.

René Descartes' illustration of mind–body dualism.
Descartes believed inputs are passed on by the Sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Simplified diagram of Spaun, a 2.5-million-neuron computational model of the brain. (A) The corresponding physical regions and connections of the human brain. (B) The mental architecture of Spaun.

Computer simulation of the branching architecture of the dendrites of pyramidal neurons.

One problem for all epistemic approaches to the mark of the mental is that they focus mainly on conscious states but exclude unconscious states.

The term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception.

The Thinker by Rodin (1840–1917), in the garden of the Musée Rodin

Thought

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In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation.

Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language; all of which are used in thinking.

Drawing by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1899) of neurons in the pigeon cerebellum

Neuroscience

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Scientific study of the nervous system and its functions.

Illustration from Gray's Anatomy (1918) of a lateral view of the human brain, featuring the hippocampus among other neuroanatomical features

The Golgi stain first allowed for the visualization of individual neurons.

Photograph of a stained neuron in a chicken embryo

Proposed organization of motor-semantic neural circuits for action language comprehension. Adapted from Shebani et al. (2013)

Parasagittal MRI of the head of a patient with benign familial macrocephaly

It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits.

The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.

Introspection

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Introspection is the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings.

In psychology, the process of introspection relies on the observation of one's mental state, while in a spiritual context it may refer to the examination of one's soul.

Attention

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Behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information.

William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence."

Attention remains a crucial area of investigation within education, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology.

The Necker cube and Rubin vase can be perceived in more than one way.

Perception

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Organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.

Humans are able to have a very good guess on the underlying 3D shape category/identity/geometry given a silhouette of that shape. Computer vision researchers have been able to build computational models for perception that exhibit a similar behavior and are capable of generating and reconstructing 3D shapes from single or multi-view depth maps or silhouettes

Anatomy of the human ear. (The length of the auditory canal is exaggerated in this image).

Though the phrase "I owe you" can be heard as three distinct words, a spectrogram reveals no clear boundaries.

Law of Closure. The human brain tends to perceive complete shapes even if those forms are incomplete.

Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness.

The principles of grouping (or Gestalt laws of grouping) are a set of principles in psychology, first proposed by Gestalt psychologists, to explain how humans naturally perceive objects as organized patterns and objects.

Free will

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Capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.

A domino's movement is determined completely by laws of physics.

A simplified taxonomy of philosophical positions regarding free will and determinism.

Various definitions of free will that have been proposed for Metaphysical Libertarianism (agent/substance causal, centered accounts, and efforts of will theory ), along with examples of other common free will positions (Compatibilism, Hard Determinism, and Hard Incompatibilism ). Red circles represent mental states; blue circles represent physical states; arrows describe causal interaction.

A simplified taxonomy of philosophical positions regarding free will and theological determinism.

Thomas Hobbes was a classical compatibilist.

Spinoza thought that there is no free will.

Arthur Schopenhauer claimed that phenomena do not have freedom of the will, but the will as noumenon is not subordinate to the laws of necessity (causality) and is thus free.

Augustine's view of free will and predestination would go on to have a profound impact on Christian theology

Bas relief of Maimonides in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Others however argue that "consciousness plays a far smaller role in human life than Western culture has tended to believe."

Likewise, some modern compatibilists in psychology have tried to revive traditionally accepted struggles of free will with the formation of character.

Natural selection

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Differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype.

Aristotle considered whether different forms could have appeared, only the useful ones surviving.

Part of Thomas Malthus's table of population growth in England 1780–1810, from his Essay on the Principle of Population, 6th edition, 1826

Charles Darwin noted that pigeon fanciers had created many kinds of pigeon, such as Tumblers (1, 12), Fantails (13), and Pouters (14) by selective breeding.

Evolutionary developmental biology relates the evolution of form to the precise pattern of gene activity, here gap genes in the fruit fly, during embryonic development.

During the industrial revolution, pollution killed many lichens, leaving tree trunks dark. A dark (melanic) morph of the peppered moth largely replaced the formerly usual light morph (both shown here). Since the moths are subject to predation by birds hunting by sight, the colour change offers better camouflage against the changed background, suggesting natural selection at work.

1: directional selection: a single extreme phenotype favoured. 2, stabilizing selection: intermediate favoured over extremes. 3: disruptive selection: extremes favoured over intermediate. X-axis: phenotypic trait Y-axis: number of organisms Group A: original population Group B: after selection

Different types of selection act at each life cycle stage of a sexually reproducing organism.

The peacock's elaborate plumage is mentioned by Darwin as an example of sexual selection, and is a classic example of Fisherian runaway, driven to its conspicuous size and coloration through mate choice by females over many generations.

Selection in action: resistance to antibiotics grows though the survival of individuals less affected by the antibiotic. Their offspring inherit the resistance.

More recently, work among anthropologists and psychologists has led to the development of sociobiology and later of evolutionary psychology, a field that attempts to explain features of human psychology in terms of adaptation to the ancestral environment.

By analogy to the action of natural selection on genes, the concept of memes—"units of cultural transmission," or culture's equivalents of genes undergoing selection and recombination—has arisen, first described in this form by Richard Dawkins in 1976 and subsequently expanded upon by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett as explanations for complex cultural activities, including human consciousness.