Widner Penfield - Brain Stimulation

Penfield was a very important person in the history of psychology. He worked with electrical stimulation of the brain on humans. He learned that he could cure seizures by finding out which part of the brain caused it. He would stimulate certain areas of the brain and see how it effected the person, which is why they needed to be awake during the procedure. They would do such things as move a body part, feel something that was not there, or hear different things that were not being played, as in the case of the actual woman who he did the surgery on. He was from Canada and is apparently quite a hero there for the contributions he made to psychology. I thought the commercial was funny, a little bit corny and dramatic. But he is an important man as can be seen from the last video. The way he was able to do surgery on the brain was a big step, and now people are able to have surgery done to remove life threatening things such as tumors. He is related to phrenology because he talks of localization of the brain, instead of it all being one big system. Different parts effect different areas of the body, which is essentially what phrenology was about. People who did phrenology believed that a person could look at the bumps and indentations on the head and being able to tell the different characteristics of that person. They also thought that character could be changed and grown. A bad person could be put in a good environment and the bump associated with them would get smaller and bumps associated with good would grow larger. Later on this was discovered to not be true at all, but it did have a good contribution in the fact that phrenology was about brain localization, just like Penfield studied and did surgery with.