In respose to a request I am posting this a tad bit early. This is for week 5 and is not due until NEXT week - week #5.
Please read chapter 4. After reading chapter 4, please respond to the following questions:
What were three (3) things from the chapter that you found interesting? Why were they interesting to you? What one (1) thing did you find the least interesting? Why?
What did you read in the chapter that you think will be most useful to in understanding the history of psychology?
How does this chapter relate to the chapters we have already read?
What topic would you like to learn more about? Why?
The first section that interested me most in chapter four was on Ernst Weber and the two-point threshold. Science has always been very interesting to me and I have even completed this experiment myself in a biology lab. It involves the use of a two-pointed tool, much like a mathematical compass, and it is poked against the skin. When you can feel the two points rather than one, which is said to be the size of what Weber called, sensory circles. Why it is so interesting to me is that it is a very simple way to somewhat map out the nerves and discover the most “sensitive” areas of the body. What Weber found was that the fingertips had the smallest threshold, which makes sense because typically that is where you feel or touch something that may stand out to you.
Another section which was incredibly interesting to me was on Ebbinghaus and his studies on memory. What I found to be incredible was that he was so dedicated to the science that he participated in the study himself, and that does not seem by any means to be an enjoyable task. He created approximately 2300 syllables that were meant to have no meaning to him or any other person and would randomly assign them to different lists, memorizing each and figuring out how many repetitions it took. He would perform this over and over again, altering the variable of interest once he was satisfied with the amount of data collected. A few of his many findings were that it took a greater number of repetitions the longer the lists, obviously, and also that it was easier and took fewer repetitions to learn each list if you were to spread the memorizing out rather than cramming.
Finally, the “phenomenon” of imageless thought, a theory by Kulpe, caught my attention. This is not necessarily because of the theory itself, rather the idea behind testing this theory. Marbe conducted a study using weightlifters as his subject, and the conclusion I came to after reading the passage several times was that there was no image in the person’s mind as they were passing judgment to lift the weights. To me there is no way to definitively say that they saw nothing, or that they would even recognize it if they had, it is an automatic uncontrollable response that has no way of measuring. This theory has never been resolved and in my opinion, with the tools we have at this point in time, there is no way we will ever truly know.
The section I found very difficult to read and uninteresting was that on Wilhelm Wundt. I honestly skipped the majority of it due to the subject matter initially written in the book. First it talks about his education and the places he studied, and that to me has no relevancy to the study of the history of psychology. Next I read about the laboratory he was given while performing research and demonstrations at Leipzig; this is where the book lost me.
What I think will be most relevant in understanding the history of psychology was Ebbinghaus and his research on memory. This was most important to me because, first of all it takes some sort of memorization when studying psychology and understanding where that came from and how we can improve our study habits is imperative. Not only that, but memory is an important function of the brain and where would psychology be without the brain?
The most interesting part of the chapter for me was Ernst Weber and his experiment on two-point threshold. I found this interesting because in high school we replicated this experiment on out lab partners. I was able to make connections from my past experience with this experiment to what Weber studied about perception. I was able to better understand his work with the weights because I understood the two-point threshold.
I also found Gustav Fechner’s early and midlife to be interesting. I think it was interesting that he went a little crazy, even before staring at the sun for long periods of time. But he was able to snap out of it and complete his research. He related his experience to the mind-body experience and devoted his career to this cause. During his “crazy” time he had periods of blindness and when he was well again he had normal sight. I think this lead him to refer to materialism as “Night View” and create his opposing “Day View,” in which he believed the universe had a type of consciousness and the mind was the dominate component of the mind-body relationship.
Finally, I found Wundt’s immediate conscious experience interesting. I enjoyed this section because I liked the analogy with the temperature and self-observation and internal perception. I also got thinking about how every person perceives temperature in a different way: I tend to feel cold at higher temperatures than my roommates, who complain that it’s too hot when I am still cold.
One part of the chapter I didn’t find interesting was the amount of space the book devoted to Wundt; I know and understand he had many important contributions to the history of psychology, but I got bored reading about him and how he move around and couldn’t settle until he got his one perfect job he was waiting for.
This chapter will be useful to understanding the history of psychology because it explains how history can distort the truth. For example it talks about how until the 1970s the view of Wundt was seriously mistaken. One way information was lost was done through losing or omitting sections of his work during translation. This shows us how studying the history of anything means being observant of the sources used and their biases or weaknesses.
This chapter relates to other chapter because it goes back on some issues we have been slightly introduced to, but know we are learning more in depth. For example Ebbinghaus was first introduced in chapter 2, but we learn more about him in this chapter. Also, the concept of “New Psychology” was also introduced earlier, but is now described more fully.
I would like to learn more about Fechner’s afterimage studies. Why is it that the brain sees afterimages? Does seeing afterimages a function of the eye, brain or both? Why are the colors different in an afterimage? What were Fechner’s conclusions about afterimages?
Gustav Fechner was the first interesting person I came across. The first reason why I liked him was because he went back to thinking about the mind and body. The other part that I liked was his research on visual aftermath. In the visual part he would look at the sun. He would glance at it quick then look away. Over the time the glances would get longer and longer. Looking at the sun, even with protected eye wear, damaged his eyes and had to resign. He also suffered from headaches and he couldn’t control his thoughts. The darkness seemed to help, and due to that he would spend much of his time in pure darkness. Finally he came out of the dark and was able to get back to normal life. I find this interesting because he went to great lengths for his research which resulted in eye damage and what seems like a mental breakdown/depression stage.
The other part is the mind and body. What I liked the most about this was Fechner just woke up one morning, October 22, 1850, and he had the answer like it just came to him in his sleep. He said that the mind and body “could be united harmoniously and with mathematical precision by measuring psychological sensations and the physical stimuli that produced the sensations” (page 105). He must have dreamed a great dream to wake up and figure that out!
The next thing I liked in this chapter was Ebbinghaus study on memory. He states that it would be hard to memorize poems because they already have some much meaning to them that it can affect the way we learn it. Wish I had known this back in high school… He came up with 2300 nonsense syllables and I wish the book would have listed some just so I could see them so I had an idea of what he was getting at. He came up with a list of syllables to memorize, which would get longer, and he would keep tract of the amount of errors. He learned that it was easier to remember the list when it had seven syllables. He also learned that if he spread out what he was studying than to do it all at once, he would learn the material better. This is something that I’m definitely going to have to start doing. The last thing about the memory that I thought was good information was that at first you forget things faster, then after a while go remember longer and forget slower.
The last is imageless thoughts. It starts off with the mental state, meaning that your mind is already prepared to act a certain way. Then it goes into the imageless thoughts. The example they use here is of weights. They say that when it comes down to the judgment there are not sensations or images. Therefore, the judgment of the weights is an imageless thought. Weird to think about judgment being imageless, you would think that that would be the time to look back and really think about it before you judged something.
I did find Fechner interesting, but the section of Fechner’s elements was the complete opposite. The one and only reason why is the math. Reading this part of the chapter had a lot of numbers and even an equation. I am horrible at math and I try to stay away from it as much as I can, so reading about it does not interesting me one bit. Sorry Fechner. This is also why I didn’t like the section of mental chronometry. The chapter as a whole I found to be very boring and uninteresting. It was hard to get into and it was hard to find three interesting things, luckily though I did. I guess I’m just not a big fan of Wundt.
I think the most useful would be the memory section. There are a lot of things to remember in psychology along with other majors. I think learning about how to better one’s memory would be very useful and helpful for the future.
I would like to learn more about imageless thoughts. It would be nice to have other options of the topic from other top psychologist and philologist, like Freud for example. More about memory would be interesting as well.
The first thing I found interesting in this chapter was Gustav Fechner's elements of psychophysics. I have heard of the absolute thresholds and difference thresholds in nearly all of my psychology courses; however, I never heard much about who discovered and named them. So it was interesting to learn a little more about Fechner. I also found it interesting that he studied what he called "afterimages" and wanted to defeat materialism.
I also found it interesting that there were all sorts of distortions about Wilhelm Wundt and his work. I don't really understand why we were so uninformed about him in the past, especially when he is now known to be the first true psychologist of the modern era. It's fascinating that we had to completely re-examine Wundt in order to truly understand him and his research. The final thing I found interesting here was that Oswald Kulpe, Wundt's former student, basically went against Wundt's wishes by studying complex thought processes. Wundt formerly did not want Kulpe to do any research on complex thought processes, but he went ahead and did it anyway. Kulpe, by defying his teacher, found out some pretty fascinating stuff about conscious attitudes and mental sets.
I can't say just one thing which I found uninteresting, because I thought the entire chapter as a whole was horrifyingly dull. It seemed like there was waaay too much information on Wundt and Weber that was completely unnecessary. It was just quite the chore to try and sort through this chapter.
I think the most useful stuff in studying history would be the section on memory. This section seemed as though it would be very beneficial to us in furthering research on memory. This chapter relates to the physiological chapter in that psychophysics are a natural extension of the physiological research that was discussed in chapter 3.
I would like to learn a little more about Kulpe's work. They talked a lot about what he discovered, but didn't give a lot of detail on each theory, such as imageless thought and fractionation.
This chapter started out pretty mundane for me, not boring but just not that interesting. However i was mildly interested in Gustav Fechner's ideas of visual afterimages. When I first heard this word I thought it was referring to the last thing that people see before they die and how it is remembered. However, his concepts dealt more with flashing a light on then off quickly. After he discovered a relationship between the strength of the image and how bright the light was. I thought this experiment was a good supplement to the books article on the man himself, but was also interesting to read about his headaches, and inability to control his thoughts.
Introspection and Internal Perception caught my interest as well, first on their definitions but secondly on what they rely on. The book says that both of these take place after the stimuli and events have occurred and therefore rely on faulty memory. I am really interested in how memory works and how it can be distorted so I enjoyed reading about this because it shows the difference there can be between two people. The book uses the example of how "cold" the temperature was and explained that my definition of cold can be very different than what someone else in the same situation would find. I would like to learn more about this topic because i think it can have much bigger implications on differences between 2 peoples perceptions on what has happened. This is also one of the topics that deals the most with this history of psychology because it connects back to what we read in the previous chapters and talked about in class last week.
The Mental Chronometry article on page 113 was both interesting to me and somewhat difficult to read. I enjoyed the idea behind trying to find out how long a certain reaction can take and measuring it by the telegraphic key and light method. However one thing that I don't really appreciate when mathematic equations or formulas are brought into psychology because i feel like psychology is the study of the mind and is more abstract than the cold sharpness of math.
This entire chapter to me was very boring and dull. I had a hard time coming up with three interesting things. The first thing that I caught my attention was Wundt's conception of the new psychology and the 2 programs. Immediate conscious experience was using experiments and higher mental processes were more observational techniques such as cross-cultural comparisons, hisotrical analysis and case studies. This was interesting to me because every pschyologist has learned about ways to do experiments and it was nice to get a little more info about how they started.
I also found Ebbinghaus and his study of the memory to be interesting and slightly confusing with his nonsense syllables. I though the savings method which enabled him to measure memory after the passage of time when it couldnt be recalled after the interval. I think its interesting that we can relearn things just as quickly as we lost it.
I think Willhelm Wundt is overall an intersting character. Most know him as one of the founders of psychology and a very important man, but thats about all I knew about him. It was kind of fascinating to read about how he rewrote history to the new psychology. He has added many concepts and such to psychology. I think it was a good idea that in the 70's Wundts ideas were reexamined to help the history of psychology grow.
As I announced at the beginning I found a lot of this chapter dull and really hard to get through because it all jumbled in my head. I especially did not like the thresholds. I have never been able to fully grasp the idea of thresholds because I have never wanted to sit down and try to understand it.
I think Wundts contributions is incredibly useful to the history of psychology because he added so much and many psychologists have reexamined him and his ideas. However I do think learning about memory will be very useful as well.
This chapter relates to the other chapters because its taking psychology and starting to help piece all of the information to understanding the information. It integrates how psychology starts to go from philosophy to more science.
I would like to learn more about imageless thoughts and how the exactly work with more details.
One of the topics I looked at that I found to be interesting was the research done to discover how sensitive our nerves are through two point sensitivity. This is interesting to me just based on what they found from their research in terms of distance that is needed to feel two points of pressure. It makes a lot of sense that there would be more sensitivity to two points on a more sensitive part on the body. I also found that chart that displayed the thresholds on the arm very interesting and useful in understanding the topic.
Another topic from the chapter that I found interesting was Hermann Ebbinghaus’s studies on memory. It was interesting to me that he came up with a memorization curve based on his studies. Although I’m not sure how his curve might apply to humans as a whole since he was the only test subject. However, his research does provide a good base for any future study of memory. His research could easily be used as a control in an experiment when studying someone with above or below average memory.
I found the sections on thresholds particularly interesting as well. I wasn’t so much interested in the reading so much as I was interested in the application of the findings. Such as could you use this research to test pain tolerance with absolute thresholds and to see where something goes from uncomfortable to painful based on difference thresholds? Could you even use these thresholds in terms of higher mental processes such as learning? Is there a way to apply difference thresholds to learning in a way that any person might be able to learn anything no matter the intelligence? Based on the difference threshold if learning a difficult subject was increased in the correct increments the material could be learned by someone who struggles in the subject.
Something I lost interest in due to my difficulty in understanding it was the section on Mental Chronometry. I lost interest due to how complex the concept of the method was. If we could go over this in greater detail in class it would be very useful to me. Especially because I found that the information would be important to understanding the history of psychology.
Understanding the sections on sensations in the brain and the processes of learning are critical to the understanding of psychology. Also this chapter covers what was actually realized as the beginning of psychology in terms of research as well as the science itself. This chapter builds on the others by adding the next part of the history of the science. It also builds on the processes of the brain and sensory perception. The topic I would really like to learn more about is the memory curve of learning. I would also like to learn more in depth about the higher mental processes and how they work.
This chapter was kind of like an upside down mountain. The beginning and ending were very interesting. As for the middle of the chapter I wasn't really focused or interested in the material these gentleman were studying. The first thing that I found to be interesting was Weber's Law. This caught my attention right away because I saw the words lifting. I am a guy who enjoys spending time in the gym. When I was reading about how observers cannot distinguish lifting a 30 gram weight and a 31 gram weight, but can distinguish lifting a 30 gram weight and a 33 gram weight became very cool. I notice this sometimes when I am lifting weights in the gym. After squatting a certain weight, I will go up a couple pounds. Sometimes it feels exactly the same as before. I can relate to this when I am doing different exercises as well. When I curl a 40 pound dumbbell it feels the same as a 42.5 pound dumbbell. However when I curl a 45 pound dumbbell I notice a huge difference. The difference is only five pounds. If I were to relate this to a squat then 5 pounds seems about the same as the previous weight because the more weight there is the more room for unnoticeable difference. I think this is the most useful thing in my opinion to learn about. I think this would make for a good discussion as well. I want to learn if there is any way we can increase our absolute threshold.
The second thing that I found interesting was Gustav Fechner's research on elements of psychophysics. I had the same feelings for this section of the chapter as I did for Weber's Law. I was interested in how he was able to figure out the science of Weber's Law and take it to the next level. I thought absolute thresholds were a neat topic within this section as well. I think it would be neat to have a very sensitive absolute threshold. It would be easy to distinguish all kinds of weight.
Something else that I found to be very interesting was George Miller's magic number seven. I remember performing an exercise in a class that had us remember as much information bit by bit as we could. It was weird how I got to the number seven and things started to slip away from my mind. Some of my other classmates could remember about five to six pieces of information and others could remember up to twelve pieces of information. I always wondered why phone numbers come in lists of seven not including the area code.
There were a couple things that I did not have an interest for in this chapter. One of them was the sections where it had a lot to talk about regarding the famous Wilhelm Wundt. I just had a hard time apprehending his purpose of talking about apperception. I think we humans have a very unique skill to look at something and apprehend it. I just was not interested in learning how that works, we just do it.
This chapter relates to the others we have read because it has brought up some different subjects that are important to understand in the study of psychology. We have learned about some new people and their contributions to the study of psychology.
Wundt’s system of voluntarism interested me because it was the first idea to explain how we perceive things. He explains this through images being apperceive and apprehended. Apperceive is “perceiving it with full clarity and having it in the focus of one’ attention” (119) for example reading a book. When you apprehend an image you don’t directly focus on it, “other information is in the periphery of your attention” (119). We are doing both of these things all the time. Another example given in the book was that if John and Mary are seen together using apperception we make specific ideas about the couple such as should or shouldn’t be together and so forth; “going beyond the information given and perceiving them clearly, distinctly, and meaningfully” (120). As humans we make judgments about people every day, I thought it was interesting to have a more scientific evidence supporting that we are not just a heartless and judgmental race.
Another thing that caught my attention was Ebbinghaus’ dedication to his study of memory. He studied nonsense syllables for four years alone; his may make him crazy but to me that seems like sheer dedication. What he found through this research was very beneficial to our study of memory now. Through the years of his research he found the “exact relationship between the length of material to be learned and the amount of effort required to learn it” (123). He also found that with just seven syllables it was very easy for him to remember it. This idea we will see in the future work of George Miller’s (seen in many into textbooks)‘magic number seven’ in which we can remember around 7 items. I remember doing this in my into class and it’s extraordinary how it actually still is relevant today. I’d like to learn more about this topic because it would be interesting to test people of all ages, races and cultures and see if or how it differs around the world.
How were images shown to participants before computers and TVs were invented? The memory drum created by G.E. Muller. I found this to be really significant in this developing science. The memory drum was a rotating drum that would determine how long a participant would be exposed to an item or image. This was used until the 1990’s. The drum brought about the idea for using computers as the new memory drum. Screens now had images for lengths of time which could be recorded and controlled just like the drum. Today this process is used to test babies on many different developmental tasks for example colors seen at different ages. I’m starting to realize more and more how our history really does affect our present and we are always building on the ideas from the past. Really everything in this chapter was build on further by future psychologist to help improve what we currently knew.
Unfortunately there are some boring parts to history. I thought the section about Wundt’s experimental methods was very dull. It was uninteresting to read and I found it very hard to pay attention. It is important that he made these discoveries, because he helped further the research in psychology as experimental and not just theories, but it was really boring. I’m not very good at reading math equations in words; it’s just not my thing. I lost in translation during this part.
One thing that stuck out to me about chapter 4 was Weer's law and the importance of threshold. The book introduces this topic by talking about the two-point threshold. The two-point threshold describes the point where one's perception of touch changes from feeling one point to feeling two points. The book uses the thumb as an example. Since the thumb is an area of high sensitivity, Weber found that the two points of touch did not have to be very far apart in order for one to notice a distinct difference in two rather than one point of touch. Thus, the threshold is small. At a less sensitive part of the body, such as the upper arm, the two points of touch would have to be much further apart for one to perceive two seperate points. To me, this explanantion seems a little wordy, as did the threshold example of the weighted cylinders. Although it was important for the book to describe how Weber's law was observed physically, I am more interested in how this law plays out in a mental sense. This is a concept that I have thought about often throughout my life, but never had a phrase to put with the thought. Going back to good old Webster, my dictionary describes threshold as the point at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced, as that degree of stimulation of a nerve or nerve center which just produces a response. Again, its not so much the physiological, but the psychological part of this concept that really gets my mind going. The threshold reminds me of topics discussed in my Violence in Intimate Relationships class. We talk a lot about abusive relationships, including emotional, verbal, and physical abuse. If the victim decides to leave her abuser, a threshold is reached. That is, a turning point where the victim has had enough. Its interesting to think that thresholds come into play in almost all important decisions that I, personally, make. Another example that comes to mind is the reason behind writing this blog. I went to college right after high school, but while living alone and supporting myself, I found that working and making money had to be my number one priority at that time. I worked some fun jobs and met some great people. It was only after I had a really shitty job that my threshold was crossed. I realized I didn't want to be doing that job for the rest of my life and knew I had to go back to school if I wanted to move ahead. I didn't know it at the time, but that one place of employment brought me to my threshold. That's the thing that sticks out most to me about thresholds. You sometimes don't recognize a turning point until its just that, a turning point.
The first thing I found interesting was the first topic talking about the education on Germany. It is really interesting to me how much Europe has influenced our lives here in America. To this day we as American's study abroad to broaden our educational experiences, for obvious reasons. Our whole psychology field originated in Europe!
The second section I found interesting was the topic on Weber's Two-point Threshold. Thinking about what other people of his time were thinking when he came up with this study. I can imagine they were thinking, "who is this loon?". The study of our senses isn't the most interesting topic, but I found it really interesting just that this man thought it would be a good, and well worth subject to study and research. This also goes for his other studies. Like the "JND". What a funny way of putting something. It seems like if we put our studies in such "non-professional" language, it almost wouldn't be considered good science. At least it seems this way. Most all scientific studies these days are filled with big, confusing words, that only the people of that field would understand. So, "just noticeable difference" seems pretty silly, to me. But it was great science!
The third thing I found most interesting about chapter 4 was when he talked about Fechner's studies on visual afterimages. I found it really interesting to know that back story behind it. The fact that he was doing the experiments on himself (like a lot of researches did back then, which is amusing in itself), and actually went blind because he looked at the sun too long! It made me giggle because we grow up knowing today that looking at the sun is bad for your eyes, when back then, it was all or nothing. One didn't really know it was bad for your eyes, until one crazy scientist comes along and goes blind because of it. This puts the phrase "live and learn" to a whole new level. Kind of humorous.
One topic I did not find interesting was Wundt's studies on reaction time. I don't see the exact tie in with psychology with it. I understand that it is the brain, and psychology is the study of the brain, but I am more interested in behaviorism type-stuff, and personality.
I think this whole chapter illustrates a turning point in the history of psychology. It is the first chapter that has even mentioned psychology. This is the beginning of psychology and is obviously very much tied into everything.
This chapter is just adding to the story of the history of psychology, which ties it very well to previous chapters. We are now talking about the first psychologists! Everything before this chapter was what they knew before they made it an official science, if you will.
I think I would be interested in learning more about psychophysics, or even memory. It interests me because I don't know a lot about it, and would love to see more early research on these topics, and how they went about doing it.
Firstly, I was intrigued by Ernst Weber and is two-point threshold studies. I think it's really interesting to see the factor perception plays in people's viewings of certain events, and in this case, reaction to stimuli. When I was reading the sections on Weber it made me actually get a toothpick and start going up and down my arm and hand poking different spots to see how I reacted to it. I thought it was also interesting because it's something we don't really think about when picking up objects or being poked in the arm, and it made me think more about the difference between the physical world and our pyschological experience that goes along with it mainly in the form of optical illusions.
Another item from the chapter I found to be interesting was how the scientists began to use mathematics to back their experimentation. Weber showed it was possible to relate mental and physical events mathematically, and Fechner attempted to do the same, although his equation only held up under limited circumstances. In Wundt's experiments on reaction times he also used math to compare people and collect data. Ebbinghaus also collected numerical data for his experiments in order to fully test many different outcomes. I thought it was interesting how as the beginning of psychology comes closer and closer the scientists make sure to record all their numerical data in the attempt to make their work a legitimate science. Not all of them attempted to use equations to relate mental and physical events, but the data compiled with their experiments helped to prove their results.
The last thing I found particularly interesting in the chapter was Ebbinghaus study of memory although it was the rate of forgetting information that one had already learned. I found it interesting because sometimes I amaze myself with how fast my short-term memory will just leave my mind so I was rather curious about it. However, I think that Ebbinghaus research would have been on long-term memory since it was on information that was already learned. Either way I found his chart with the curve demonstrating the time between learning and relearning to be very interesting.
I found the beginning section on Wilhelm Wundt in which the textbook basically gave a short biography of his life up to setting up his laboratory at Leipzig to be the least interesting piece of the chapter. It seemed rather pointless to devote two full pages to his life before talking about anything he really accomplished related to psychology that he and his students researched. A lot of the information on Wundt I found to be very dull, but it there was at least a point to it unlike the first two pages of his background and education.
I think learning about Wundt will be the most useful in understanding psychology because his work gave many junior psychologists of the day motivation as well as a blueprint to start their own laboratories. While a lot of his research students and underlings didn't follow in the same manner as Wundt, but he helped get modern psychology on it's feet.
This chapter relates to the previous ones in that it continues to build on the foundations of psychology. In this chapter we see Wundt and his recognition as being the first modern day psychologist. The chapters have slowly built on the importance of experimentation and the importance of taking detailed notes and data from the experimentation. The chapters slowly progress as they continually come closer and closer to studying actual brain functions such as memory and perception.
I would like to learn more about Wundt's experiments on reaction time, reaction with perception time, and choice RT (reaction with perception and will time) because I felt I didn't completely understand it.
Three things I found interesting were the introduction of psychophysics, Fechner's eye incident, and his establishment of sensory thresholds.
Psychophysics is interesting because it was essentially a precursor to sensation and perception, which is still studied today. To me, Fechner represents the spirit of science. He's so dedicated to his work that he ends up frying his corneas. Today I tried to look at the sun for just an instant (to get the afterimage effect Fechner was studying), and that fraction of a second was all I could stand. Fechner was either really crazy or really dedicated (or possibly really uninformed about the consequences of staring at the sun). I think Fechner's work on thresholds is really interesting, because it endures even today in the field of psychology, although not to the same extent as sensation and perception.
I was not very interested in the reaction time experiments. I realize that they play an important role in the formation of psychology from philosophy and physiology, it's just that they aren't as interesting as Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve or the perception side of S&P.
I think understanding the historical biases in accounts of Wundt's work will be important in understanding the history of psychology. The knowledge that Boring got his history from Titchener, who had reasons to reframe Wundt as a structuralist, provides a useful insight into the fallibility of history as a discipline.
This chapter is where the philosophers and the physiologists come together. Locke and Descartes meet Helmholtz and Muller (they're even debating some of the same issues!). This represents the emergence of psychology as something that is neither philosophy nor physiology, but a study born out of both. I would like to learn more about sensation and perception (maybe I'll take the class next semester).
One point of this chapter that I found interesting was the section on Ernest Weber . I have heard about Weber’s Law, but I did not know exactly what it was until I read this section. I found his use of two point thresholds interesting. I really enjoyed learning about the sensory circles. It was interesting to learn that if the compass would touch a person in two points on the same nerve, the person would assume that there was only one point of contact.
Fechner was really interesting to me because of the way his own physical condition deteriorated after using himself for an experiment. I really enjoy learning about the ways experimenters would use themselves for experiments. It was incredible to me that he would make glances at the sun to see how strong afterimages would be. He then dealt with blindness and in the end regained control of himself! To me this shows that he was a very strong person.
I also enjoyed reading about Hermann Ebbinghaus. I like looking at research on memory, so I enjoyed reading that he related Fechner’s work to his own studies of memory. It was interesting that he was creative with his approach and created nonsense syllables. Again, because I enjoy learning about how experimenters use themselves in their studies, it was interesting to me that he was his own subject in learning his nonsense syllables.
I did not find the section on Wundt to be very interesting because I felt that the section was dull and very long, I think that had the section been shortened I would have found more interest in the material.
I think the chapter’s use of experiments is important in understanding the history of psychology. Each section dealt with a scientist and the experiments they conducted. This is important because much of what we know today is based on experiments that were conducted in the past. For instance, we are able to expand on depression treatments because we know what past experimenters have tried.
This chapter relates to chapters we have already read by taking another step forward from philosophy towards psychology. It also talks about some concepts that have already been discussed, such as in Fechner’s section when the mind-body issue reappears.
I would like to learn more about Wundt's work. I could not focus on the section enough to comprehend a lot of the points the book was trying to make. I would like to get another version of the information so that I may be able to understand it better.
I was not a huge fan of this chapter, so I struggled to find many things interesting with it. One thing I was able to enjoy was Weber’s just noticeable difference, or jnd. I thought the weight lifting experiments were a good way to see at what point someone could distinguish that there was indeed two different magnitudes of weight. Weber’s idea that the sensation of two different weights was determined directly by how much weight was being compared was a simple but cool concept. From his research, someone can predict almost precisely when a subject will claim to feel two weights. It makes me want to try it out on someone and see if he’s right.
I also liked Ebbinghaus’s research on serial learning. I am pretty good memorizer of information that can be associated with each other, but his work focused on the memory of nonsense syllables without the use of association, but merely repetition. It was an interesting approach to his studies. I thought it was intriguing that he was the only subject in his studies as well, which makes me question how valid all of his research is. I guess it could be more valid than using multiple subjects since he is the only one who knows what is going on in his mind, and he would be able to accurately control how he wants to memorize the information.
The section of the chapter that I thought was note-worthy when the author was talking about Wundt’s legacy. It is interesting that it is so easy to change this history of one individual by what one person thought was more interesting to them. The author had a good quote saying, “…histories can be strongly influenced by the context within which they are written.” In the case of Wundt, Tichener distorted his legacy by emphasizing parts of his research and downplaying others. Boring in turn shaped the accounts by Tichener, and the context of Wundt’s works was again changed. This made me wonder how much of what we learn in history textbooks or biographies on famous people is really true or if that information was what was really important. We now know more of Wundt’s legacy thanks to modern historians, but if there wasn’t, we wouldn’t have all the important contributions Wundt actually made, just the portion that Tichener found important.
I didn’t enjoy reading the part on mental chronometry, mostly because it confused me. I also do not like formulas, so I had a negative impression of this section before even reading it. I understand reaction time is an important beginning to understanding the psychological aspects of perception. I just did not like all the variables thrown at me about the complication method or the terms they used to explain the concept.
The most useful thing from this chapter to understanding psychology was Oswald Kulpe because he went against his authority Wundt in order to understand more about the world. I think this is important because this most likely occurs, although I can’t think of any off the top of my head, throughout the history of psychology. It is obviously a good thing because if no one defied his or her predecessor, nothing new would be discovered.
All of the chapters so far have been looking at people who are searching for the truth, whether it is through faith, assumptions, or empirical data. These all are starting to shape the beginnings of psychology, and many of the people in this chapter and in the previous chapters are considered the founders of some aspect of psychology.
I want to learn more about imageless thought because the concept challenged what the leading idea was at the time. I am not exactly sure how it works, but it seemed like an interesting idea. I would want to research it further to understand what this concept is all about, and its impact on the world of psychology.
Connections were made in relationship of myself and page 119 of our text in which the concepts of voluntarism, apperception and “creative synthesis” were discussed.
Voluntarism is described the manner in which the mind actively organizes its experiences through acts of will. Reflecting the active nature of the mind, Wundt published more than 53000 pages of thought in his professional career. I do not know if I could write anywhere close to that amount on completely random thought. I think that Wundt could have been writing down random thoughts, but they were originated in his interest. His interest drove him. He organized his thoughts in a creative way, and through integrating his interest with his professional career, Wundt contributed to his field and his followers. Voluntarism acknowledges free will. Free will is selective and focus flows from time to time and place to place, and I found it good to know that it can be collected into purposeful work.
At any given time, we are more focused on some things and less focused on others. This apperception process may be natural, but it is selected through free will. To make maximum use of these streams of focus is a challenge many will face in relationships and professions, such as educators. Although subject and curriculums may narrow the range of topics, finding a way to highlight the interest of individuals in a group collective is a daunting task. The concept of apperception inspires me to never sleep, as I do not want to waste any focus time. What great efficiency can come from accessing the interest of individuals!? Effortless and efficient….that is what I want to be when I grow up.
So how do we utilize individual free will in a group setting? We get creative….that’s how. Somehow integrate what is good for one person to better the group as a whole. “Creative Synthesis” inside on one’s own mind then becomes an analogy for educational, inspiration relationships among individuals in groups. We are up against time and place…but these are opportunities and not problems. Affirming children’s imagination and finding creative ways to integrate into specific topics is very difficult but I believe if we reward integration in classrooms as well as retaining information, the world would be a more creative place.
In my peripheral focus network lies the Psychologgishes Intitut that was destroyed in Allied air attack in 1943. I would like to study more about the unmentioned affects of war on the universe. It wasn’t that I was not interested, this just was not my focus. Thanks!
So far this chapter was the least favorite of mine. It seemed very dry and I don't have a taste for all the formulas and such involved. If I had two things that I had to choose three things that I found the most interesting it would be Ebbinghaus and his study of memory, Wundt and New Psychology, and Fechner's elements of psychophysics. I thought these were all interesting because they are all new things I have yet heard about and I can see why they are important to the study of psychology. The most interesting thing of the three for me however would be the development of New Psychology. It called for scientific research of human conscious experience and has help to further the ideas and theories that we know in psychology today. This new psychology includes two programs also that also have helped us better learn about the minds and humans way of thinking. They are the use of experimental methods in a lab to examine the immediate conscious experience and studying higher mental processes without nonlaboratory methods. This development of new psychology was the most important in understanding psychology further in my opinion in this chapter because it shows how it is developing in the past.
If I had to choose something to learn more about in this chapter it would be over mental sets and imageless thoughts. This subject seemed interesting but I found it hard for me to understand.
This chapter took me a little while to get through because I had to keep re-reading bits and pieces in order to understand them a little better. After struggling a little, I did manage to find a few interesting things...
The first thing that I thought was interesting was Weber’s conception of sensory circles. To provide a little bit of background information, Weber started out by explaining two-point threshold. This is the point where perception changes from feeling one point, to feeling point two. In order to examine this sensitivity, Weber touched the skin of a participant with a device resembling a two-point drawing compass. These distances between each point could easily be varied and it was the job of the participant to state whether or not one or two points were being felt. Weber thought that the threshold on fingers for example, was small, meaning that it was easier to distinguish the two different points easier when they were not very far apart. This is where Weber theorized about sensory circles. I found this interesting because it is so simple, yet I would never think break a certain sensory area on skin down into circles. Why are they not squares?
The second thing that I found interesting in chapter 4 is learning about the phenomenon of imageless thought. According to Titchener and Wundt, in easy terms, when someone is trying to complete a task, or is thinking of something, there is an image of some form. The book gives an example of weight-lifting. From the experiment done by the Wurzburg lab, the example states "an observer would lift one weight and form a kinesthetic image of it, then lift the second weight and compare the sensation of it with the image of the first one in order to decide if the weights were the same or different". Although this is just a theory and was tested to be not true, it will never be known if this phenomenon really occurs. I think it varies from person to person, and that's why the testing turned out differently. I found this interesting because tests how people think, even if it never proves to be right.
The third thing that I found interesting was reading about Ebbinghaus' memory project and his investigation of remote associations. Ebbinghaus took a sequence of syllables which were A, B and C, and taught them in order. It was known that associations are formed between A and B and B and C. The main purpose of this experiment was to see if an individual can form a relation between A and C. Could they fill in the gap with B? It was found that people can typically quickly find a relation and fill the gap through remote associations. I thought this was neat because it reminds me of taking an image such as a 5 point star and taking certain lines out of it. Our mind can still recognize that it is supposed to be a star. I feel that it is the same for numbers. Is this just what our mind does systematically? Or is this just common sense and useless to study?
What I found the least interesting was learning about the just noticeable difference. Discriminating between two weights based on muscle sense and among factors besides just the weights in general was known as Weber’s Law. Basically, Weber’s law is a more complicated relationship in determining difference of weight. I didn't think that this was very interesting because it is common sense in knowing that a person has a threshold as to when they can sense when something is different weights. Even though this may not be interesting to me, I do however recognize that this is history and it is important to know where any idea comes from in any field of science. This also confused me when Weber threw in a formula for Weber's Law.
I really felt like chapter 4 was starting to finally introduce psychology into what we are starting to read. We now see physiology and philosophy turn into psychology. This is starting to make reading more interesting. This is how all of the chapters tie in with eachother. Now we can relate psychology with history by learning where it derived from.
What I read about in the chapter that will be the most useful to understanding psychology is Wundt. Wundt was the first modern day psychologist, therefore learning more about his experiments will lead us to psychology.
I do want to learn more about Hermann Ebbinghaus. I think the study of memory is fascinating along with his experiments of strings of syllables and numbers.
I think that memory has a lot to do with psychology, hence why I am so eager to learn about it.
Although I did not like this chapter as much as I liked the last one, it did have some research and information in it that I appreciated. The three most interesting parts of the chapter to me were Cattell’s letters home, the rediscovery of Wundt, and Weber and his studies with weights. Besides the things that I found to be interesting I found the section that discussed G.E. Muller to be less interesting than the rest.
First of all the letters Cattell wrote home were pretty intriguing for me to read. I think what really makes them stand out to me is how his view on the work that he was doing in Wundt’s laboratory. In early letters Cattel’s seemed very excited about what he was doing. In the last letter that I read he basically said that Wundt’s laboratory was not as good as people believe that it was, and that the work being done there was amateurish. I would enjoy knowing the types of things Cattell believed should have been done in the lab. I also think that the feelings he had about the work that was done probably fueled his own interest, so it would be interesting to see what the rest of his research was like.
Secondly, I thought the section on rewriting the history of Wundt was an interesting section. In one of my earlier blogs I was interested in learning more about things in history that have been rewritten because of further findings. It was cool to me that the author decided to insert this here. The rewriting of the history of Wundt was also interesting because I found the excuses for why he was misrepresented to be funny. In essence it was because people were too lazy to learn about him for themselves so they took other peoples takes on him as the truth. I just find this funny because all of the people spend so much time searching for truth but none of them really took the time to try and find out who the real Wundt was for such a long time.
The third thing that I found to be interesting was the work that Weber did with weights. I found it interesting to me because of athletics and lifting weight. He rational made so much sense to me because when I lift heavy weights I can always throw a little bit more on the bar and not feel much of a difference if any.
I thought that the section on G.E. Muller was the most uninteresting. In the early parts of this section that say that most of his work has not been translated into English, and also he did not break much new ground. Finding those things while reading caused me to look at him as unimportant and I did not look to learn much from his section.
The way that this chapter is useful in understanding psychology is that it shows how the efforts of one man could shape and inspire an entire field. In relation to the previous chapters in the book this chapter is another clear representation of the progress and evolution that psychology made. As more questions are answered through research, more and more questions are asked leading to endless possibilities for psychology. What I would like to learn more about is American who studied in Germany and some of the breakthroughs they had in their research over time.
Ernst Weber, what a terrible name. This isn’t the point at all to my blog. But don’t you think that’s one of the worst names ever: Ernst. Who names there this kid this?! (I apologize greatly if any of you know anyone named Ernst) Weber, despite his name, contributed greatly to the world of science and psychology. One of the things Ernst discovered was the two-point threshold. This is the point where the perception changes from feeling “one” point to feeling “two” points. To be honest, I can’t really see the point in defining this threshold. However, I do find it very interesting. Weber says this is due to the different sensory circles we have on our skin. It interests me that some places on our body are more sensitive than others. Our textbook gives us the example of the difference between our thumb and our hand. I tried finding my own two-point threshold and failed. Haha, I believe I would need some help to actually find it.
Next, as I’m sure most do, I found it very interesting reading all about Wilhelm Wundt. Clearly, this was the bulk of the chapter four. Wilhelm worked his way up the ladder of psychology just like a business. He started being an assistant to multiple “greats” of the science world, yet it sounds like through the reading he went about and beyond any normal assistant. Just like the book said, before reading the text, I only had heard that Wundt was associated with Leipzig. Through his years of being an assistant, Wilhelm gained experience, knowledge, and really became a scientist way before he joined Leipzig. Through this, he realized experiments could be integrated with psychology. This became known as the New Psychology. I find this so interesting, because I feel like this makes psychology fall under the term “science” even better. I like classifying psychology as a science. Obviously, this is the most useful thing we can apply to the history of psychology for this chapter. I can’t imagine psychology being any different from the experimental science it is now.
Finally, my favorite part of the whole chapter was the “Key Date – 1879” section. I know this isn’t really the point of the chapter, however I did find it the most interesting. It’s nice to relate other historic events with one another. It creates a time line in a clear light. Also found it interesting that Thomas Edison patented the electric light at this time.
Oddly enough, one of my least favorite parts of this chapter was the “Close-Up” section. I usually really enjoy this section. I like case study sections better then the broad sections the text usually covers, but for some reason Cattell did not capture my attention. At first, I barely read it. So I guess this part of the assignment did its job so I would read it more in depth. But I wasn’t big on the “letter to his parents” format. It was somewhat confusing to read at first, but I caught on soon after that. I found the letters dull and very boring. I don’t think they had enough detail for me.
Questions:
Wundt worked with many famous scientists before Leipzig – why isn’t he more well known for his work here?
You might find "The Importance of Being Earnest," a play by Oscar Wilde, slightly amusing. :o)
I didn't really like this chapter and was hard to find anything I found interesting in this chapter.
I found education in Germany to be very interesting because it is way different than what our education is like in the United States back in the 1800's. A lot of German Universities have majors of psychology, and many Americans went there.
I found Ebbinghaus on memory very interesting. ebbinghaus created the nonsense syllables for three-letter units with two consonatnts with a vowel in the middle, and used serial learning as a memory task to build up more syllables. We will always need memory, and to sound out words we need syllables.
The last topic I found interesting was Imageless Thoughts. I found imageless thoughts interesting because all of thinking is an image of some sort in our minds. Wurzburg found that by weighing different objects one could presume to be a different image than the other.
The least interesting topic I found was mental chronometry. I have no idea what chronometry is and it seems very complicated to me. Chronometry has a lot of equations in it, and I have no idea what half of these equations are. I felt like this section was more like a chemistry class then history of psychology.
The most useful thing out of this chapter is memory. Without memory, we wouldn't be able to remember anything we learn, or all of the new syllables and consants make it easier for us to sound out words.
All of the chapters so far have been about founders finding psychology, and this one just is getting into more details of different founders of the field of psychology.
I want to learn more about G.E. Muller's Jost's law. I thought it was confusing about the evidence part about the law, and how it would be over a massed practice?
I might be partial because half of my family is from Germany/Austria, but I think the German aspects of psychology are fascinating. I love how the author described the “autonomous German principalities” and how their political structure bore a system of universities (even though some were hardly what we’d call a “university” in today’s world). I’d never heard of Wissenschaft before (the educational philosophy in which professors have incredible liberties in researching what they’d like without fear that they’ll be punished). That was definitely a memorable moment of this chapter. I have to wonder if that freedom is precisely why Germany had so much success in the sciences…
Wundt was obviously a genius in the field of psychology, but I especially liked how he VIEWED psychology – the "science of experience" (that might not have been in the Chapter but elsewhere). His experiments on immediate consciousness were eye-opening in regards to the difference between introspection and internal perception. I probably wouldn't have guessed a difference until it was explained in this reading.
Ernst Weber’s “two-point threshold” experiments were inspiring in the way that I immediately wanted to stab my husband’s fingers and arms with pins just to see how true his findings were. Surprisingly, I was less interested in the similar weight experiments (possibly because it seemed less of a punishment to reenact on my husband).
In the tiny print lining one of the pages, it was explained how Fechner’s father was a Lutheran minister who subscribed to Benjamin Franklin’s theories of lightning and electrical conductivity. He bought Franklin’s invention and hooked it up to the steeple of his church to prevent “God’s wrath” in the form of a lightning bolt, even though his parishioners told him he lacked faith in God's protection. Fechner (the elder) told them that you couldn’t ignore physics!
Ebbinghaus’s work with memory was especially interesting. I’ve actually seen tests using nonsense syllables for memory before in the real world, and it was neat to see where that most likely originated. It made sense that the nonsense syllables (as opposed to actual words) wouldn’t conjure up images and memories and “tricks” in the mind to help remember them.
Probably the least interesting – for me – was when absolute and difference thresholds were discussed, as well as the method of constant stimuli and method of adjustment. I still learned from that section, but it didn't keep my attention very well.
Through this chapter, I enjoyed seeing how these brilliant scientists were so interconnected.
I feel the entire chapter was helpful in its overall theme: psychology was either undefined or poorly defined during this era which led to a plethora of unusual and seemingly random experiments and theories. They sometimes didn’t seem cohesive, but they make sense to us now that the field of psychology is well-established.
Again, I believe this chapter was a continuation of the foundation-building in Psychology. It lays the context to help us understand how big and powerful these studies were, as well as how unusual these people must have seemed in their day.
I think I'd like to learn more about the destruction of materialistic psychological theory. Or perhaps, the idea of afterimages. Hmmm... I'd better narrow it down by Thursday!
I thought the section about Fechner because he showed a lot of dedication to his work, so much that he went blind and went into neurosis. He caused himself physical and mental damage, all so that he could do research. The research that he did staring at the sun or a bright light seems obvious that the brighter the light the brighter the after image, but for this time it may not have been obvious and this was the first time that an after image was discussed and the general public would know that everyone experiences this. This is similar to what we discussed in class with synesthesia because I have the number form of synesthesia where I see numbers (particularly days in a year) in a visual map. I thought this was entirely normal until I learned about synesthesia in AP Psychology my senior year and discovered that most people do not experience this.
I also liked the section about Ebbinghaus and the forgetting curve. I think memory and how we store information is so fascinating, and what we remember and what we don’t. Ebbinghaus’s work is still studied today and is still very useful. Memory is difficult to fathom since it is not a tangible thing, and even today there are a lot of unanswered questions. I think it was bold of Ebbinghaus to study memory/forgetting, because there was so much less knowledge about the brain back in his time, and memory is a very complex topic. This information is also interesting to look at to see how much most people forget, and how important studying after classes can be, because so much is forgotten right away.
The third thing I liked is more general, but the fact that we are actually getting into psychologists and the beginning of psychology. I think briefly discussing the precursors to psychology are definitely important and they deserve credit, but I think too much detail was put in to the book about people who weren’t psychologists. I am looking forward to actually reading about psychologists and studies that were done in the field of psychology. This will be much more interesting to me, because I am a psychology major.
I did not like the extensive detail about Wilhelm Wundt. I think it is great to learn about him and he is very important to psychology, and every psychology major should know about him. The book just went into a lot of detail and it seemed dry to me. I think less detail should have been included about him, but I do think he should be in this book and is deserving of credit for his contribution to psychology.
This chapter relates to what we read in previous chapters because those people lead up to the creation of psychology, so their founding research was important to these individuals. This chapter also talked about individuals who pursued their curiosity and researched their interests. I would like to learn more about memory because it is so fascinating and complex.
The first part of chapter four that I found interesting was Weber’s Law. I found this interesting because many of us do things without thinking about the difference it can make just by how we do it. This meaning that, by picking something up off the table or by having something put in your hand, the feeling is different even if we do not think about it. The fact that he found (3/30=6/60) was a difference that many of us may not have paid attention to. Finally, Weber’s Law showed that mental and physical events could be related mathematically. His law was able to bring all of his ideas and discoveries together in the end that helped to understand how the mind organizes and perceives physical stimuli.
The second part of this chapter I found fascinating was Fechner and his interest in afterimage, “the kind that occur after a bright light is flashed on and off. I found this interesting because his dedication to this study severely damages his eyesight. During the class discussion, I agreed with the idea that this section also proves that these people were just people. They had a passion to discover something and did what they could to devote themselves in every way possible, even if it led to negative effects. I also found the video we viewed for the BMW commercial to be a really good idea. The fact that they were able to take these ideas and use them to promote a product was very smart and the only thing I would like to know is what is successful? I just want to know if BMW found an increase in sales or if the commercial just made people talk about it more. This is something I would like to look into just for more information.
The third part of this chapter that grabbed my attention was Ebbinghaus and his experimental study of memory. Just the word memory strikes my interest because it is needed and used in many aspects of life. When considering memory, Ebbinghaus was aware that there was little known about memory. I thought his creation of nonsense syllables was interesting because I was able to relate it to some material discussed in my psychology and law class. Ebbinghaus was able to build off of this nonsense syllabus by providing more ways to store things in our memory. One thing he found and documented was “the exact relationship between the length of material to be learned and the amount of effort required to learn it.” This alone has contributed to education in a big way. That is another reason why it was extremely important for me to understand these ideas and where they came from. We are constantly told to study and if we put it off and put it off we find that we cannot remember the information as well as we could have if we would have just repeatedly studied. This is just one example of how Ebbinghaus has contributed to psychology and our understandings.
I felt this chapter was crammed with a lot of information. For some reason this chapter seemed harder for me to understand. I found myself looking back at previous information for the simple fact that I really didn’t understand the outcome. There was a lot of new information presented that really made me think of the relevance and why it was important. Although I found some parts interesting throughout this chapter there were some that left me stumped.
This chapter is important in understanding the history of psychology because it continues to bring past information into new practices and discoveries. Not only is it continuing to build off of others ideas, it is making psychology what it is today. Without many of these discoveries we would still be unaware of psychology and its’ meaning. This chapter also made it very clear that Wundt is a very important person in the psychology field. Although I feel there was too much information on him and not enough on others, I can see why his discoveries have made a difference in psychology.
I would like to learn more about Ebbinghaus and his study of memory. We have been discussing memory in my psychology and law class as well and I find the subject to be so broad and fascinating that I don’t think it will ever get old to me. This also goes back to how we perceive things differently and how it can affect our memory. There are many things that can affect memory and I would just like to look into these ideas in more depth.
The three things I found very interesting in chapter four was how the study of psychology originated in Germany, the study of higher mental processes, and I also liked the sections of the chapter that dealt with psychophysics
I found the section about education in Germany on psychology to be very interesting. I had read in previous classes about the new development and progress of science in psychology in the area of what is known as Germany in other classes. I had not realized that there were so many Universities. It was really interesting that this area of Europe was on the forefront of creating a new science such as psychology when in times to come there would be a lack of open-mindedness that seems to be a major theme in psychology. I found it interesting that so many Americans came to Germany to study psychology.
The second thing that I found interesting in the chapter was the study of higher mental processes. I found this section to be one of the most interesting. It was interesting on how the approach was made in measuring the language, culture, ideas and process of thinking. I had never really considered how involved these things are, and can imagine how difficult it would be to separate some of these concepts and observe them in a laboratory setting without bias or conflicting thoughts and ideas. I think this is a section in psychology that I would like to learn and read more about.
The third section of the chapter I found interesting was in psychophysics, how they study the physical stimuli and the psychological reaction to them. I found this sections to be a little difficult to understand because I do not have a strong or well read background in psychology as this is the second psychology class I have taken. This section became more interesting and relevant to me after watching videos in class on the magnetic stimulus that was used to trigger certain parts of the brain. I was fascinated by this video and I wondered how this could work beyond what was showed for depression. I instantly thought if this could work for something such as fibromyalgia. My sister was recently diagnosed with this at the age of 17 and she is a chronic pain sufferer, too young for medication, I wondered could this magnetic therapy help to change her psychological reaction to pain. Fibromyalgia as I understand it is pain throughout the body, when there is actually nothing wrong or detectable. I hope to find out more about this via the internet or any books I can find.
One section I did not find interesting was the two point threshold, I found this section difficult to read and rather boring. This could be due to my lack of understanding or background in psychology that would have provided me with previous knowledge from other classes to better understand this section. I may go back and reread this section, in hopes to understand it better.
The most important of this chapter that pertains to the history of psychology was the information provide on the universities and the extensive efforts that were made to discover and develop this science and new forms of psychology and psychology its self. Psychology has very German origins and within that there are ideas, customs, and terminology that could at the time only be understood, if one has prior knowledge of the background of this area at the time period. It is important to know that psychology originated in Germany, because that provides a context and insight in to what to expect or how to perceive psychology at its early stages.
This chapter relates to the other chapters in that it builds on what we have previously read. We have discussed the importance of study psychology, how psychology was created and built off other subjects and the combinations of subjects. This chapter is the next one after the foundation has been built where psychology as a discipline truly begins and how these pioneering psychologists paved the path with ideas for future building.
One thing I would like to learn about in class, is the psychophysics and the magnetic therapy , while it was already discussed in class on 9/20 it would be interesting to see how this magnetic therapy is developing if it’s becoming more widely accepted or will become a integral part of the healing process, as does medicine and surgeries.
This chapter was about the amalgamation of physics and psychology and how and when experimentation started in psychology also how it has contributed to studying various psychological concepts in psychology.
The three things that I liked about this chapter were firstly I liked reading about the work of Ernest Weber and the technique of Two pot threshold. I found it interesting as it relates to psychology because this technique aimed at studying the perceptions.It was interesting to read about the Webers Law which stated that there was a mental Just noticabke difference which is a subjective mental phenomena which
Secondly the concept of internal perception was also interesting because I really liked how Wundt separated the concept of self observation from internal perception. I liked the fact that wunst defined internal perception as the immindiate respeonse to the stimuli and was an unbiased response whereas self observation is not the same.The third thing about this chapter that I liked was reading about Ebbinghaus and his experiments on mermory I really found the various ways and means he used to experiment on memory as memory is one of the most important psychological processes.
The thing that I did not find interesting about this chapter was the stress on physics rather than psychology in this chapter.I did not like to read about the mathematicasl formulas and various principles of physics as I think they are not necessarily an important part of psychology and I personalyy do not have intersest in theses aspects.
The part of the chapter that is extremely important and relevant when studying the history of psychology is the experiments conducted on memory by Ebbinghaus as they were very significant contribution to psychology and are still popular and studied in psychology.
I did think that the guy staring into the sun until he went blind (and then crazy) was interesting, but more in the sense that the Darwin Awards are 'interesting'. (I don't expect to win a Nobel Prize for figuring out the threshold of hitting myself in the head with a hammer, so it really wasn’t clear to me what kind of contribution he was supposed to be making.)
But Tuesday’s impromptu lecture really helped to clear up some questions for me and put these guys in context. Still, I am left wondering why they are considered the first to be doing ‘psychology’? There were people in the 1500s (such as Johann Weyer, 1515-1588) who recognized that there were diseases of the mind just as there were diseases of the body. Didn’t they do any kind of research or descriptive writing on the pathology of these mental illnesses? Wasn’t anyone else working on psychology - why we do things, why we believe things, why we react in certain ways to certain stimuli - before this? It just seems odd to me that, while philosophers and physiologists had addressed some of these questions in the past, no one had ever attempted any kind of scientific research into the subject.
(I wasn’t very interested in the experiments as presented in the text, and I think the reason for that is that Goodwin doesn’t really explain the context or his reasons for presenting this particular material in this particular way. He is clearly picking and choosing the material that he presents, but seems to want the reader to come to a particular conclusion without actually presenting an overt argument. Maybe this is his idea of ‘historiography’, and maybe college students are supposed to be able to pick up on that sort of thing - but if I write a paper and I don’t clearly present the points I want to make and then go on to support those points, no one is going to call it a 'good' paper.)
The explanation of Donders’ Complication Experiment was kind of interesting - I can at least kind of understand where they were going with that, now. It's weird how anyone comes up with theories on how our thinking process works, though: because, for the most part, they all sound so contrived and unnatural to me. (If I open this door and release a tiger upon you, will you think, "The color orange (that's 2 time-units); pointy white teeth, (that's 3 time-units); outstretched paws with razor-sharp claws (that's another 1 time-unit)..." or will you simply think, "Blimey, I've crapped myself"?
I think that the chapter tries to show that these guys were trying to continue transforming psychology into a ‘real’ science by using scientific methods and procedures (i.e., quantifiable, observable, repeatable, testable). The thing that will be most useful to me in understanding the history of psychology is understanding that these guys were really just shooting in the dark, trying to figure out where they could even begin asking meaningful questions.
It was from the classroom discussion, not the chapter, but I'd be interested in seeing the video on the Bubble Boy experiment. It sounds kind of heartless, and I’m curious how the experimenters themselves perceived the experiment.
One of the most interesting people I read about in this chapter was Wundt. Not necessarily because of what he did completely, but because of how he did it. He started out getting his M.D and after studying under the guy who invented the Bunson burner, became a professor himself using visual displays like Bunson. While teaching, he did a lot of research on some cool things like cranial nerves in breathing. After practicing medicine for not very long, he realized his real passion was in research and went back to that which I think it pretty cool. He did few things after that got him a 3 steps forward and 2 steps back and eventually reached his goals and accomoplished everything he wanted to. I envy that, he never seemed to give up and always had goals, where a lot of people just settle when they get to a certain point in life. He lived his life fully dying just three years after retirement.
He also interests me because he announced in 1875 that psychology can be experimental and this became known as the new Psychology. This new psych had the idea that many of his methods for psych, like reaction time, were developed in physiological labs. I also enjoyed reading about Wundt’s study on immediate consciousness. He explained how internal perception, or self observation, and how we respond immediately to precisely controlled stimuli. Knowing Wundt’s experiments and findings will be very helpful to us in understanding the history or psychology because he plays such a major role.
The least interesting thing I read in this chapter, mostly because I don’t understand it, was the results and the findings of the complication experiment. I know Dr. Maclin explained it in class, but I still don’t get it, and honestly, it seems like one of those things that for now, I can go without completely understanding.
I would like to learn and read more about Ebbinghaus’s study of memory.
One thing that I enjoyed reading was the part about the two- point thresholds. This explained the points of the skin where the perception changes from feeling one point to feeling two points. I found this interesting because parts of the skin are very sensitive but yet some struggle to tell when its one point and when it is two points. The more sensitive the part of the skin is the threshold tends to be quite small. While it is the opposite for the less sensitive parts of the body. I found that the points on the greater sensitive parts did not have to be very far apart for one to tell that there was two points. I found this all very interesting, and after readings I realized that I had done some similar experiments for classes while in high school. I however did not know about the sensory circle. That was something that was completely new to me and I did not understand how he came about this thought. I however did not understand to the fullest what it was meant to do.
The second thing that I found to be interesting in this chapter was Weber himself. He was one that was able to learn and investigate more about sensation of the skin. I felt like Weber went outside of the box and wanted to learn and find out more about the sensentations that were not the hot topic. He was also able to get a law named the Weber’s Law. For this to happen to someone who stepped outside of the box is a great completion of many different things.
The third thing that I found interesting was the fact that that Germany was so popular fold the large number of American students that were studying the sciences in Europe. I was so shocked that many people went to the same college. The college of choice was Leipzig, which there is where many studied a new approach to psychology that was developing there. This educational system was known for promoting a philosophy of Wissenchaft.
The one thing that I did not like about the reading was all the stuff on psychophysics. I just did not find anything interesting and it was very hard to read. The reading was very dry; this might have been because I have dealing with my aunt’s death, while trying to focus on school.