Lecture 1

Hello. Time for the fun to begin. And I'm going to start with what, what I think
is a really kind of interesting story. It's a story about the relation of this
concept we have of a soul to who we are, and how our views of that have changed
over time, thanks largely to the combined contributions of Philosophy and Biology.
So, let's get right into it. I've titled this lecture Psychology Emerges from the
Shadow of the Soul, nice imagery there. and I want to start, well, actually, I'm
not exactly sure where this starts. Because for literally centuries and centuries,
humans have always perceived themselves as special in some way. distinct from
everything else in the world around us. I think this is captured really well in
a, in a song from the Police, where, where the chorus says, we are spirits in a
material world. The idea there, the concept is that, sure, we live in this world
where everything around us is, is perceived as physical, as material. But we are
something else. We have a spiritual element to us that makes us distinct. Now,
this distinction is really relevant in the scientific context for the following
reason. Things that are physical, things that are material, we assume that the
interactions, the behaviors those things show must follow what we call natural
laws. And in fact, science is the pursuit of those natural laws. The idea that
through careful observation and systematic manipulation, we can figure out what
those laws are. Things like gravity, you know, and, and various other laws. and
that in so doing, we'll gain a really good understanding of this physical world
around us. And so, we studied Physics, we studied Chemistry, we studied Biology
Astronomy, etc. all of those are studies of the physical world around us. But, of
course, if we do not perceive ourselves as physical beings, if we perceive
ourselves as spiritual beings, then what we're implying there is that our behavior
does not follow such constrained natural laws. And if it doesn't, well then, it
doesn't makes sense to study it scientifically. So really, psychology would never
be born unless we started to think of ourselves in different ways and that process
really began with Rene Descartes and here's a story of Rene Descartes that I
really like. the idea is that he was walking through a park in, in, in France,
and as a typical French park, it had statues and it had flowers. Up ahead he saw a
statue of, of Diana, goddess of the hunt, beautiful statue. So, he started to
approach to get a better look at her, but as he came closer out from behind the
bushes came Neptune, barring a trident and blocking his path. A statue of Neptune,
I should say, and that's what was, you know, really so impressive, the statue
moved as if with intention. Now, how did it move? Well, this was the time when
hydraulics was just being understood and used. And so, literally, Rene Descartes
had stepped on a pressure plate which forced some sort of liquid through a tube
and ultimately that force was used to move the statue on some relatively,
relatively frictionless set of, you know, rails or something like that. That's how
the motion actually happened. But in Rene's mind, it was a really profound
experience for the following reason. He knew that statue was inanimate, he knew
it was made of material, you know, physical material, and yet it behaved as though
it was alive. That is, it was animate and had intentions. It looked like the
statue was trying to block his path. So, Rene suddenly started looking at other
things, like animals and humans, and asking whether maybe their behavior was
analogous to that statue. Maybe they you really were physical beings as well and
may be their behavior did reflect something like hydro, hydraulics, some physical
process that made them look animate. Ultimately, Rene concluded that that once the
case for animals, he felt they were fully machine-like, fully mechanical. But
humans, he thought were a little different. Humans, he thought, had a dual nature.
And we now call this notion, Cartesian Dualism. So, he thought, yes, humans are
partly machine. And sometimes, their behavior is reflecting that mechanistic side
of them, but he thought humans also had a soul. And that soul could, at times,
control the body. Much like a, a marionette controller, you know, a puppeteer.
the puppet is moving, the puppet is acting, but it's actually the puppeteer who's
moving the strings and causing the action. So, Rene thought we do possess a soul
and that soul can intervene and take control of this machine, or it can kind of
sit back and let the machine do its own thing. So, this dual nature, Cartesian
Dualism. As philosophers considered this idea, some of them went a little bit more
radical. And I'll, I'll ask you to kind of look at the dates now. Rene Descartes,
he's around 1600s. So now, let's go to John Locke, late 1600s. So, John Locke
started to push the idea that maybe even the mind, the human mind, maybe it was
even mechanical, physical and therefore, maybe it was subject to natural laws that
could be studied scientifically. Now, this notion was given a name by James Mill,
you know, into the 1800s now. James Mill called this idea materialism, the idea
that we are material beings. So, material beings in a material world. And
therefore if we are completely material, if there is no soul whatsoever, then
everything, all human behavior, reflects material interactions that should be
governed by natural laws that could be studied, okay? So, that's a, that cognitive
shift really opens the door for psychological investigation. Now, before I go too
much further, let me just say I have a link to a short video here that explains
this notion of Cartesian dualism in, in a little bit more detail and, and it shows
you some pretty pictures along the way. So, check that out and then come around
right back. Okay, welcome back. Philosophy is all well and good, but Philosophy is
about ideas. How do you know which ideas are right? Well, Philosophy itself had an
answer to that question. And the answer was something they called Empiricism.
Empiricism is the notion of conducting experiments that demonstrate clearly what
is and what isn't true. And when it comes to this notion of, of humans as
potentially being materialistic beings I want to highlight two sorts of
experimentation. So, first let's start with Luigi Galvani. Luigi Galvani, a very
interesting guy did a lot of research on frog legs or he eventually, at least,
did. it was kind of happenstancial, he happened to have, I don't know why, he
happened to have dismembered frogs on, on a table where static seemed to cause a
leg to move. And he was intrigued by this, and he ultimately created a scientific
experiment. So, that's kind of of shown in this panel on the right. These things
that you're seeing are depictions of frog legs and, you know, what Luigi would
stress when he did his demonstration is, there is no soul in these frog legs.
Maybe, depending on your belief system, you might believe that once upon a time, a
soul did inhabit this frog's body. But if that soul was there, it ain't there now.
at some point, when this frog became dismembered, the soul left the body. And
clearly, what we have left here is just biological matter, material matter. But
what Luigi shows is if you apply a current, so imagine, this is a frog leg, if you
apply an electrical current to the muscle, you will see that frog leg retract. And
if you let that current go, it will kick it. So, by applying or not an electrical
current, you can literally make that leg dance. You can make it look animate, you
can make it move, as though it were full of life. There's a short little video,
very short, but let's just do it for fun to give you a sense. Here, we have our
frog legs, applies a current to one place and ground to another, you see the frog
leg kick, okay? Nothing too profound there, but that gives you the idea and Luigi
would go around showing this demonstration. It was very powerful. It showed people
in a very clear way that the body at least seems to be a mechanical kind of
device, not a hydraulic, more electric in what we will now call electrical,
electrochemical. but clearly there was a machine like nature to it. Okay, fine.
It's a frog. Rene Descartes said frogs were immaterial. Why should we be
impressed? Why should we accept that what's true of the frog is true of the human?
And that's where I want to highlight the work of Paul Broca. let me translate this
for, for, for those of you who are not Chinese. this says, Broca's area, this says
Wernicke's area and it's pointing to var, various subsections of the brain. So,
let, let me give you the backstory of this. Paul Broca and, and notice now, we are
into the 1800s. Paul Broca was a medical doctor and he would visit many different
institutions and one thing he noticed was that, he came across these patients, in
different places that seemed to have a very similar and interesting
symptomatology. So, specifically, they would follow instructions well. If you,
you said something to one of these patients like, hey, can you go get that glass
of water on the table over there and bring it to me, they would do exactly that.
They clearly understood language. But when they tried to speak to you, they
couldn't form comprehensible sentences. Their language was all jumbled. They could
perceive speech but they couldn't produce it. Paul found this really fascinating
and he did what had to be a kind of an odd thing for the time. He asked these
patients for their permission for the following. When you die, I would like to cut
your skull open and remove and examine your brain. Kind of a crazy idea, but a
number of patients agreed to this. Said, okay, sure. Well,
I guess they didn't actually say, okay, because they had problems speaking. But
they had some way of indicating that they were okay with this. And now, Paul being
a very, very patient scientist, waited. [LAUGH] And he waited till they died. When
they died, he removed their brain and looked at it, and tumor patient, everyone of
them had damage in this area. This are we now call Broca's area. In fact, since
Broca's work another patient group was was discovered as sort of opposite patient
group who had problems understanding language but could produce it perfectly fine.
When you look at their brains, they all have damage over here, in area we now
call, Wernicke's area. Now, these results are critical because they seem to show
that the brain itself is kind of put together like a machine. Distinct parts of
the brain seem to have distinct functions, a notion that we call localism in the
brain. Local parts of the brain do very specific things. That is true of machines.
You know, the steering wheel does a very specific thing in a car. The acceleration
pedal does a very specific thing. So, the brain kind of looks like that. And it
looks like that even with respect to something like language, which we consider a
very high level ability, a human ability, shall we say and even then, it looks
mechanistic. So, the results of Broca really seem to go along with this, this
philosophical move towards a materialistic view of humans. By the way, this was
also the time, I have Frankenstein over here. Because I think it's kind of
interesting to know, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, that book, was written at about
this time. And really, the fact that it's written about this time is a reflection
of the time. This was a time when doctors, physicians, scientists, started to
think of the human body and the human mind as a machine, something like
Frankenstein, that you could maybe even put together with spare parts. And think
Luigi Galvani now. If you have a bolt of electricity, that might animate this
machine and bring it to life. And maybe that's all there is to a machine. Now,
Frankenstein wasn't, you know, a real success as a human. But he does embody,
quite honestly, that concept, that the human condition maybe a purely physical,
purely material condition. And if that's true, then we can assume that human
behavior must reflect natural laws and that put it squarely into the, into the
realm of science. It suddenly becomes human behavior, suddenly becomes something
we can study scientifically. That's what we'll turn to next. Thank you for your
attention. I hope you enjoyed the story.

Lecture 2
Alright, so what we are going to be doing in the next 3 lectures is pretty briskly
going through the history of psychology and I really have a couple of goals in
doing this. One of which is to really show you the tension that psychology has in
terms of it's scientific merit to be quite honest with you. and, and how that
tension has actually led to in a sense, psychology having what we could think of
as multiple personalities. There's, there's kind of two distinct approaches
within the field of psychology so I want to highlight that, the sort of clinical
approach and then the more traditional, basic research scientific approach. And I
want to use the history to do that, and specifically I'm going to want to use
Sigmund Freud becuase I really see Sigmund Freud as critical in terms of creating
this multiple personalities as it were. so, the next 3 lectures are therefore,
split into the history of psychology before Freud, then a discussion of Freud
himself and the impact he had and then finally a discussion of psychology after
Freud that will bring us in a good position to talk about current psychological
findings. alright so let's just, let's jump in. Alright, psychology before Freud.
Well I want to begin here by just giving you the context in which psychology was
born, because I think, you know that's an interesting part of the story as well.
psychology was born in Germany, and a lot of the names we're going to be talking
about today are, are German names. The first psychologist were German. and the
reason for that is because we're going to be talking about a period in the late
1800s. And this is a period when Germany was economically a very, very strong
country. Okay, they were, they were the strongest country in Europe. And in fact,
in a sense, in the world and like many countries who are experiencing a really
strong economic time, they decided to reinvest some of their money into research
to kind of stay at the leading edge. To give their people the best quality of
life, but also to be leading the world in issues like health care, of course
military design. Anything that they thought would keep Germany at the forefront
and so they were really willing to consider other approaches to research, and new
topics, and new subjects, and that was really, really important. adding to this
were a couple of players at the time who didn't call themselves psychologists. So
the first one for example, Hermann von Helmholtz was actually a a physicist. he
called himself an empirical philosopher, which is coming pretty close to
psychology. but he was also an ophthalmologist and he had major contributions in
all of these fields. What he did for psychology was to really show that some of
the issues related to the machinery of the mind issues that previously people,
though you could not study scientifically. He showed that if you're clever, you
actually can do this and I want to, I want to demonstrate his approach with a, a
more general example of 1 of the issues Helmholtz was very interested in. And, and
that's the speed with which neural tissue transmits information, okay? Neural
transmission rates. Now, previous to Helmholtz, people assumed that neural
transmission happens so fast that it's immeasurable. You just could not
scientifically study it.
3:41
But Helmholtz came up with a bunch of different techniques. So, he did a bunch of
animal research and other things, but I want to highlight a logical approach that
he took and I'm going to highlight it with this example. So, imagine we had
Helmholtz's problem. We wanted to know how fast a neuro signal could move from
this lady's left hand up to her brain and then to her right hand. So specifically,
imagine we said, okay we're going to squeeze your left hand and when we squeeze
your left hand we want you, as quickly as possible, to squeeze your right hand
once you feel that. So the signal has to go to her brain, she feels it, and then
she has to send the signal down to her other hand to squeeze. How fast can that
happen? Well If you try to do this with a single individual, the measurement that
the timing apparatuses they had in Heimholtz's day simply couldn't record speeds
that fast. But imagine the following, imagine you're on a set of roller skates,
and we find 1000 people and we line them up. And we just give them this simple
task. We say, okay, here's what's going to happen, I'm going to squeeze this
gentleman's left hand. And when I squeeze his left hand, I will start my
stopwatch. And then, off I'm going to go on my roller skates [SOUND], down this
hill. And we've, we've cleverly positioned ourselves on a hill so we can go really
fast. So we go scooting around this hill round to the other side, pass a thousand
people and then we go to the last person in line and we hold their right hand, and
we wait for them to squeeze our hand, and they squeeze our hand we stop the stop
watch, okay? Now what we've done is taking this really fast thing but by
multiplying it by 1000, having it have to go across 100 people, we made it much
slower, we made it measurable. And what Helmholtz found is if you just took the
total time, and then you figure out okay what's the average distance of neural
tissue, in the average human being which you can measure, easily enough. So if we
now divide that total time by the average amount of neural tissue multiply by a
1000 because we had a 1000 humans. We can derive a time and Helmholtz did this.
His time was about 25 to 38 meters per second. Again, a little rough, but hey, he
could measure it. And that was the really important point. These nerve cells are
the machinery that the brain is using to communicate with the body. And Helmholtz
showed you could measure and study them scientifically, very important. In the
same vein, but perhaps even more important is the contribution of Ernst Weber.
Again, mid 1800s is probably when Weber is doing his best work. Weber like the
following kind of procedure. He would present stimuli, he would present two
participants two different stimuli at a time. Imagine two lines and give them very
simple tasks, which line is longer? It could also be which sound is louder? Which
light is brighter? It could be which touch feels like it has a little more
pressure to it. He studied all sorts of sensory stimuli, and he found this really
fascinating truth, or law, I guess you would call it. Which went as follows, he
was interested in how different you had to make, for example, the lengths of a
line before people could see the difference. The first thing he found out is that
our sensory stimuli have limits. Okay, we can't take one line and just add a
little tiny bit to it, and people go, oh, there it is. You have to add a fair
amount before they notice that the two lines are different. How much do you have
to add? Well, Weber called that amount something he called the Just Noticeable
Difference, or JND. That was how much extra length You had to add before people
could tell a difference. Or how much extra sound, you know, loudness, how much
extra brightness, et cetera. And what he found is that, that amount, how big that
amount was, depended on the original length of the line. Or the original, more
general terms, the intensity of the stimulus. Let's look at this formula. He
said, if you had some original intensity and you ask, how much of a change do you
have to make to that before people notice it. There seems to be this constant
ratio, let me explain that. Let's say this was a 10mm line, and we kept making
this one bigger until people suddenly said, okay, I can, I can now perceive in my
mind, I can see those are different. And let's say we had to add two millimeters
to do that, so they could tell the different between a 10 milliliter line and a 12
milliliter line, okay? So we found 2 or 20% extra then they could see it. What if
this was now 100 millimeter line? Well if you're presented 100 millimeter and 102
millimeters, they still couldn't see the difference. so it's not a question that
we can detect a 2 millimeter difference. Rather, you had to keep increasing this
until you got to 120 millimeters, that is 20% more than the original size. So when
you got to 120, now people could see them. So he found these what we now call
Weber fractions, these ratios that hold true for our different sensory systems.
And the really important point of all this for psychology, is that he was actually
studying people's mental perceptions. He called, what he was doing psycho physics,
studying the physics of the mind. And what he showed is that, hey you know what?
Math seems to work, we can apply math. There are things like constants to
perception. And again, that suddenly, in this environment where people were
willing to explore new research methods, these sorts of findings suggested, you
know what? The mind is open for study. We can have a science of the mind, so they
really opened the door. Now, who walked through the door? Well that's Wilhelm
Wundt. Wilhelm Wundt is credited as being the first psychologist. That's on two
bases, really. he established the first experimental lab devoted to psychology in
1874. And he wrote the first textbook, over here, the Principles of Physiological
Psychology, in 1879. so those two things give him the title, the first person to,
to really call himself a psychologist and the father of modern psychology. now
from it's birthday, psychology started to have this battle in terms of science.
So specifically, Wundt really favored a procedure that he called introspection.
Introspection literally means you know, inspection to inspection, something to
inspect inward, to kind of inspect the contents of your consciousness. This is
what Wundt did and this is what he trained people to, he has so-called trained
observers that he would teach. The proper way to kind of both look into their mind
and to report what was going on in there. and so he would train these observers
quite heavily and then he would present various stimulants. They could be just
colors or sounds or, you know, anything really and these people would have to tell
Wundt what they were seeing in their mind or what they were hearing or, you know,
anything that was going on in their conscience mind. and what Wundt was really
after it's, it's now what we call structuralism was that idea of what conscience
experience looks like. What, what, what's the structure of conscious experience?
Now, a lot of scientists didn't like introspection. they thought this was
problematic, because Wundt was no longer directly studying the thing he was
interested in, the structure of conscious experience. He required his trained
observers to look for him and accurately report what was going on in their mind.
And a lot of people questioned whether anybody could really do that. and whether
things like, you know, making it verbal changed the whole experience. And so
suddenly, there was this little controversy over the techniques Wundt was using
and how scientific they were and that was kind of going on, and yet Wundt still
continued on and found a lot of interesting things. However, then something
happen. One of these transformational figures, Darwin. Of course, Darwin
transformed all of science what he did to psychology parallels what he did to
biology. Here's what I mean by that, when Darwin was on the beagle, he was
collecting specimens from exotic places. This is what a lot of biologists did
during Darwin's time. He was collecting all these specimins and then he was
behaving in the typical biological way. In that, he was bringing the specimens
back, and then he was trying to put them into taxonomic categories. So you know,
we think of things like birds versus reptiles, that kind of thing. How did those
categories come to exist? Well biologists would look at the features that some
specimen had. Then they would group different specimens according to their
features, and ultimately create some class around that. Now that's all well and
good, but Darwin made another mental leap. He said, you know what, we're focusing
too much on what the features are and classifying that in that way, but there's a
whole other interesting, more interesting story to this. And that is we should be
asking why the features are the way they are? So of course in his famous work he
focused on finches that he found in the Galapagos and he made a big deal out of
things like their beak shape. So he noticed that, for example, some finches like
this one, had sort of short stout strong beaks. Other finches, had much longer,
thinner beaks. The longer, thinner beaked finches, tended to live in places where,
there were insects, within wooden logs, or other places where the bird had to get
in to get those insects. So the long beak helped them get the food. Other finches
like this one with the shorter beak tended to live in places there was lots of
seeds or nuts. So these beaks helped them crack the seeds or nuts. So, the
feature of what the beak looks like is not just coincidental, it's not just
random. It's very much tied
into the context that the animal lives, and it has a very distinct function. And
so Darwin's essentially told the biological community, don't worry so much about
what things look like, worry about what they're good for. What's the function?
That's the real interesting story, that mentality came into psychology. I told you
that Vout was very interested in the structure of conscious experience, while
following Darwin and heavily influenced by him, William James you know, now we're
seeing psychology broaden out of Germany and coming into America here. William
James, was interested in the function of various psychological processes. So he
changed the whole dialogue away from what does conscious experience look like.
And instead, you know, he's, he's a fascinating guy, William James. He would
essentially, this is my image of him, you know, he would experience life, sit in a
chair, reflect on things like. How does memory work, and what's it good for? And
what about attention, you know, what does that do for us? And conscious experience
and will. you know, what is the human will? do we actually control our own
behavior? So he would think about all these deep issues. And you would come to
these theoretical stances on them. The really creepy thing, I think it is creepy,
is how accurate the guy was. In the fact, that William James himself, did not do a
lot of empirical research. He mostly generated ideas, in some ways, he was more of
a philosopher than a psychologist. But all of his psychology was about cognitive
things, so he came up with all these ideas. Years later, we're doing all of these
experiments, and it really is uncanny how much our experimental data seems to
match a lot of James' ideas. So he's a fascinating guy and I'll include a link to
The Principles of Psychology, the full text which is his text book in 1890. and
it's kind of interesting to look through that, and it's not coincidental here that
you see it right beside Darwin's Origin of the Species. You know that's really,
these two do go hand in hand. So, he really changed the direction of psychology
towards this functionalist mentality. Alright, so that's where we are going to
leave the story for now, except I really want to emphasize the following. Up until
now, psychology has been a very young science, trying hard to be scientific and
trying to really you know promote, we can't scientifically study the mind. Keep
that in mind and bring that with you, into the next lecture on Freud, where you'll
see Freud messes things up totally. In the meantime, I've got a couple of videos,
you could choose to watch here. The 3 minute history of psychology is just that,
it's a real quick history that'll cover everything that we've been through Long
biography on Darwin. Darwin's just a critical figure, and I do have a link to the
text of the principles of psychology. and I encourage you just check out a section
or 2. Wording is very Victorian the style of writing, but just to get a sense of
how, how James thinks, I, I think is worth the effort.

Lecture 3

Sigmund Freud. Of all the names in psychology, that's the one name I'm pretty sure
you're already familiar with. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you talked about
somebody making Freudian slips, or if you described one of your friends as being
"anal", or something like that. All of that is really the legacy of Sigmund
Freud. Sigmund Freud is a fascinating character on many levels. What we're going
to focus on now though is the influencing that Freud had on the development of
psychology as a discipline. Freud will come back. He will be in this course off
and on. especially as we get, you know, later towards the clinical and personality
issues. But here, I want to give you a taste and again, really emphasize how Freud
changed psychology. Alright. So, here we are, week one, lecture four: Freud, the
Fork in the Road. Alright. So, I want to put this in a little bit of context.
Freud um[UNKNOWN] a lot of his ideas in the late 1800's, early 1900's, during what
was called the Victorian Era. And during that era, the notion is that you know,
men were gentlemen, women were ladies. There was a properness about how things
were supposed to happen. And there were certain issues in two paramount among
them. sex and aggresion that people just did not talk about. They were not polite.
It's not the sort of things people discussed. And in this context comes this guy
named Sigmund Freud telling this you know sort of dark story of man kind. so
Sigmund Freud, these are just a few quotes but let's just focus on the underlying
stuff. He talked about that humans are far more immoral than they can imagine, and
that there's this you know, dark side of them on the third quote that approximates
that of a psychotic. Within us there's like this little psychotic and that if we
look at somebody carefully we will see evidence of this, the betrayal oozes out of
his every pore. So if somebody who's trained to analyze can see things about a
person that that person not even know about themselves. and he describes this
tendency to aggression and in fact to sexuality as being innate Independent and an
instinctual disposition in man. So he really describes humans as having this
really dark side, you know. Think of Jekyll and Hyde. This was the same time as
the, the book Jekyll and Hyde was out. So he says humans have this dark side.
It's inside of us but a lot of us aren't even aware. Some of these aspects of
ourselves. and so perhaps not surprisingly this fascinated many people in the
Victorian era. They couldn't help but be drawn to this very provocative notion of
humanity. and then once they got there, Freud had this really kind of complex
story of how he thought. humanity worked and, and let's go to that story. so, he
thought a lot of issues people had came about from psychic conflicts. I'll
describe the virus part of that in just a moment. But let's go right to the little
monster inside of a cell. Forray thought there were three components to our
Psyche. one was the id, which in German just translates to the it. so within us is
an it. This is a very primitive, primitive part of us. It has various drives you
know, it wants all the biological drives met. So it wants food, it wants water, it
wants comfort. but it also wants sex. And, in certain context it wants to behave
aggressively. And it behaves according to what Freud called the pleasure
principle. That he thought the Id, wanted to gratify these desires immediately. So
the notion of immediate gratification. If I'm hungry, I want to get some food. If
I'm thirsty I want to get something to drink. If I'm cold I want to put on a
sweater. If I see somebody over there I'd really like to have sex with then the it
within me wants to just go and do it. Now we say primitive because perhaps this
is how things happened in the primitive times. Y'know perhaps Primitive humans did
just try to force themselves on whoever they wanted and did just have you know,
aggressive acts on whoever they wanted, when they wanted. But Freud thought there
was this interesting interplay between that part of us and society. And the
society part was largely represented by a part of our psyche he called the super-
ego. The super ego is that part of us that wants to be the perfect us, 'kay? Wants
to be the kind of us that people like and respect. And so we, we want to be
somebody that does things competently, does things well, has sort of leadership
qualities. And that other people have come to like us and admire us. Now
obviously, if we're just going to go and, you know, force ourselves on everybody
we'd like to have sex with, that's not going to get us liked, respected, or
admired. You know, that, there's going to be a problem, there. and so there's
conflict between these two - the primitive version of us, and then the version of
us that society has made us endeavor to be. And so how do we resolve those
conflicts? Well that's where the ego comes in. The ego, the job of the ego is to
try to find ways of satisfying the id without compromising the super-ego. Not
always an easy job. And Freud talked about all these interesting ways in which.
These conflicts could play out. So let me just give you one taste, just so you
have a feeling for it. Let's say you were raised very conservatively, in a culture
that was very conservative, perhaps very religious. But you've heard about this
thing out there in the real world, called pornography. And there is part of you,
this part of you, the Id part of you. That wants to see it, that wants to
experience it. But there's another part of you, the superego part of you, that
wants to be viewed as a correct, good, positive member of society. And this part
of you knows that viewing pornography is not geenrally seen as virtuous, is not
the kind of behavior that would get people to like or respect you. So how can you
view pornography and yet not compromise this identity? Well that's where the ego
comes in and here's one potential solution. Maybe you could become a crusader
against pornography. If you're going to crusade against pornography, well you have
to know your enemy. You have to get a sense of what, what is out there? if, if
I'm going to talk about how evil pornography is, well I have to know what it is.
So now I have a reason, a reason to view pornography, satisfying the id and yet
justifying that in a very moral, outstanding way by saying, yeah, I'm only doing
this so I can argue against it. Which allows you to fit with your societal norms
and be viewed in a positive light. Okay so that's that's a complex way in which
the ego might try to satisfy both. And Freud thought you know all through our
lives we're trying to kind of do these two things. And then often we can find.
Reasonable ways of satisfying those two things, but sometimes we can't. Sometimes
these things cause an inner conflict that gives rise to psychological problems.
Okay. And a lot of times, by the way, the real cause of these psychological
problems are below our level of consciousness. So we don't even know about the
conflict that's going on but it is going on and it is shaping our behavior. So,
now let's bring this back into the discussion of psychology as it was growing. It
was growing as a science. But what Freud brought to psychology is a nonscientific
perspective. Specifically, he brought a medical perspective. so Freud approached
Psychology as a doctor approaches disease. And what I mean by that is if you go to
a doctor and imagine this little girl here is suffereing flu like symptioms so we
see all the symptomolgy. You know, headaches, fever, maybe a stuffed sinus. maybe
achy body, These are all symptoms. And to a doctor, yes, they're relevant and,
yes, if you can alleviate them that's cool. But what you really want to do is
figure out what's causing all this, because these are just reflections of some
underlying cause. In the case of a flu, it could be like a virus. So what you
really want to do is to deal with these symptoms. Is to not deal with them
directly but instead deal with the cuase. If you can get at the cause, and if you
can somehow eliminate it then the symptoms should just disappear. And so that
assumption that symptoms relfect some underlying cause and it's the underlying
cause you want to go after. Is reflected in their method. in the medical approach
you typically come up with some treatment, that hope, that you hope for whatever
reason will treat that underlying cause, will reduce it's strength, and if that
works then the patient will feel better. Now, now in this case it didn't work.
Apparently, we tried a treatment and the patient looks just as, as bad, as she did
before. and so we might try different treatments and it becomes this quest of
coming up with treatments that work and we sometimes don't even really care why
they work, if we find some treatment that makes a patient feel better, that's
cool. That's really cool and we'll use it widely and hope it makes other patients
feel better. Now this whole way of doing things is very different from the
scientific method. The notion of, you know, manipulating some variable tightly
across groups, and seeing what effect that variable has, and measuring everything
as you go along, and doing very controlled, Intentional comparisons of data. That
is not what Freud did. What Freud tended to do was interact with patients, and if
he found a patient that had psychological issues, but no clear physical cause, he
would try to figure out what the underlying conflict was. And he would go back to
eh, notions like the id and the ego, and what could be going on underneath,
causing this conflict, that ultimately was causing the symptoms that you'd see.
And once he, and now this is hard, of course, because often these psychic
conflicts are completely unconscious, so he came up with all these ways of trying
to get at this conflict. Because he felt really the right way to treat this was to
bring it in to the patient's awareness. That once they understood that underlying
conflict, that alone might be the beginning of a treatment that might alleviate
the symptoms. So before we go any further I want you to get a bigger picture of,
of Freud in general. And so I've got a couple of links here. One is just, this is
meant to show you why Freud was provocative. Okay, this is a, a link to a short
video about Freud's psychosexual development of personality. So even with kids he
thought, he emphasized that kids were seeking sensual pleasures in the Victorian
era so check that out see what you think of that. And then once you watch that,
watch this which is part one of a documentary that really kind of outlines Freud's
influence And, and and why he has this dual nature of being both loved at some
ways and hated in others. Okay, so check that out and then come on back. Alright,
welcome back. so what I now want to emphasize is just at the very end of this is,
is, is this impact Freud had. By through his ideas and through his approach, he
forged a new path psychology was all about showing you could scientifically study
the mind. The story I was telling you before this lecture. But, suddenly Freud is
bringing a much more clinical approach, he's, he's trying to treat people with
psychological disorders and he's coming at it from a medical perspective. and
that's very different and that caused a lot of tension in the early days in
psychology. What was psychology to be was it to be a science or was it to be more
like a healthcare approach
12:43
That's the story we're going to continue in the next lecture. And you're going to
see there was some really strong backlash within the scientific community to
Freud's ideas that led to, you know, in some ways this identify crisis widening.
although more recently I think it's coming back together. So we'll talk about that
in the subsequent lecture. I did give you just a couple of other things here you
could follow up on. First of all there's part two and three of that documentary
that you just watched. If you, if you haven't gotten enough and you want more.
But I also gave you a link here to the complete works of Sigmund Freud. why I did
that is I think you should just pick some, pick something and read a little bit of
it because what I would like you to notice is that just about anything that you
read is fascinating. I mean Freud had something really interesting stories,
interesting ideas about how things all work. But can't help but fascinate the
mind. They're good reading. But I hope you'll also consider the following: When
you're exposed to these ideas, ask yourself, "If I were a scientist, how would I
test this idea to find out if it were true or not?. And what many scientists have
concluded is that the vast majority of Freud's ideas are scientifically
untestable. They're just interesting ideas that you can never verify as being
correct or not. And to a scientist, that makes them almost worthless. So think
about that too, because that will be a good lead-in to some of the scientific
backlash we'll take up in the next lecture.
lecture 4

Alright. Back to the past, not back to the future. We're back to the past. talking
more about history. History of psychology. and specifically looking at the
ripples, I guess, from that big stone that Freud threw into this discipline that
was developing. It was developing with a very scientific focus. and then Freud
suddenly brought in this medical curveball, as it were, and stopped it being about
sort of the study of the conscious mind. And instead kind of shaped it toward the
study of pathology, of mental disorders. in fact along the way developed all these
theories that extended well beyond mental disorders. And became in a sense
theories about human behavior but theories that the scientific community felt just
couldn't be tested. They were not scientific theories. They were just pulled out
of thin air very fascinating, very interesting. But how do you know if it's real
and if can never test whether it's real, then it's not science. Okay? So how did
they then react to this. Let's find out. Lecture five, psychology after Freud.
Alright. Well, perhaps not surprisingly the reaction was to suddenly retreat and,
and in fact, become more scientific than ever before. And, and what I'm referring
to of course now is the scientific group within psychology. Though the, the
clinical psychology that Freud started continued on and flourished, okay. And I'll
come back to that in a point, but it's certainly not the case that people went
flocking away from clinical psychology. Once Freud had kind of set that stake in
the ground, it was there, and it continued on. But the more scientific-minded
psychologists they did react to Freud's ideas. And they reacted by saying, oh my
goodness, we want to be a science of, a science of the mind, a science of
psychology. We really have to be scientific. we cannot just come up with things
like id and ego, and throw it out there, and, and suggest maybe its true if we
can't prove that's true. we have to be much more discipline. now specifically they
really went to a far end of the discipline scale. the suggestion was by most
behaviorism and that's why this new school of psychology is called behaviorism.
Behaviorists said, here's the best way to go. Let's restrict our experiments and
our theories to things we can manipulate and things we can measure precisely. Some
people call this SR psychology , Stimuli, which are things you can manipulate and
responses which are things you can measure. And, you know, what happens in
between? Let's not talk about that because we don't know. Those are theoretical
things. We can't see what happens between when we present a stimulus and a person
responds and so let's just not go there. Let's keep that separate. Okay, let me
give you an example and I'm gon, I'm going to use this example for a couple of
reasons. First to show that you can still get out some very interesting issues.
despite these constraints but, also I hope to give you a sense that these are
constraints. Boundaries and therefore it's not surprising that future
psychologists are going to try to break out of them. But here's a good example to
give you a start. So this is the little Albert experiment. It's one of the famous
psychology experiments partly because of it's dubious ethics. It's a little
worrisome. If this was your child I don't think you would be happy about it. But
this is how the experiment worked. We start with Albert here, little Albert, and
before anything happens we have little Albert in a room and we expose him to nice,
little, furry creatures like this. And we look at his response. So the creatures
would be the stimulus. So here's a stimulus here, a little furry rabbit. And the
response would be literally how does Albert respond. And as kind of suggested in
this picture, if you ignore the ominous hammer for a second. Albert's okay with
the rabbit, oklay? And early on, before anything happened in this experiement,
Albert was fine with furry critters. No fear response, no negativity at all. Now
he did show negativity to other stimuli. So let's forget about the critters for a
second and say, okay, we have Albert in a room. And somebody bangs on something
metal with a hammer, makes that clanging sound. That scares Albert. So Albert gets
scared and he cries and he reacts in fear. So rabbit doesn't produce any reaction.
Hammer produces fear, and so now the experiment is, well what if we now associate
the critter with the noise? 'Kay, what if we reliably do the following, we have
Albert in a room right now, there's nothing else in the room, but then we
introduce a furry critter. And if Albert approaches the critter or if the critter
approaches Albert then we clang. We hit our hammer on that thing and clang which
of course makes Albert cry because he's scared of that noise. We give him trial
after trial of this. We introduce another critter, another clang, another critter,
another clang. Let's say we do that 20 times. Then we, then we're not going to
claim it anymore. We're not going to hit anything anymore. But now we just bring
the critter in. What's Albert do? well what Albert does is he acts scared. Okay
he's learned to associate this critter that used to be perfectly fine for him with
something that scared him. And now he reacts in fear, not only to rabbits, by the
way, but to stuffed rabbits, to shoals that are furry, to anything sort of like
that. He's suddenly scared of all these things. So to the behaviorists they say,
okay, now this is a cool experiment. because we've just manipulated the stimuli
in ways we can measure. You know, the rabbit was there without the clang and then
we had a rabbit with the clang. so this is all very clear and scientific what we
did. And the behaviors that Albert shows are clearly measurable and categorizable
in a way we all agree. And what we've shown in this experiment is that something
like fear can be conditioned. Okay. You can learn to become scared of something,
and that's what we've demonstrated. So, you know. Absolutely true. it's, it's a
bit of a creepy experiment so I've got a link here. And what I'd like you to do is
take a moment and follow that link. And it'll show you, you know, real footage of
this experiment and I think you'll find it a little uncomfortable. but you know
it, it really does show this notion of Behaviorism and the importance of the
environment in terms of effecting how we grow. So it has some profound
implications. so let's start there. 'Kay, check that out and come on back.
7:04
Alright, welcome back. Well, so behaviorism was really important for psychology.
it, it was that retreat to a much more scientific place and so now we really had a
pretty big split. We had clinical psychology going strong but clinical psychology
was really about the treatment. Pre-, predominantly a mental disorders. Then we
had this experimental psychology that was more just generally inquisitive about,
you know, human nature and what can we learn. But the problem was that this
behaviorist approach, restricting yourself to stimuli and responses, there's only
so much you can do within that space. And it was kind of like psychologists needed
a way out and they got a way out. The, in the 1960s, computers started to become
more common. And that's important because computers formed a very important
analogy for psychologists. Here were devices that kind of did things humans did.
They took input and they produced output. So kind of like a behavioral stimulus
response. But, there were also very clear concrete things that happened in
between. So that input, it was plotted into the computer but then if you're a, a
technician or an engineer. You can really specify how that information was past
from component to component. How it was changed and how it ultimately, for
example, produced something on the computer screen. So this notion was called
Information processing. That's what a computer did was processed information. And
when a lot of psychologist looked at this they said, it's kind of like what we do,
isn't it? as a memory system, it's getting inputs from the world. It's producing
outputs on the world. Maybe we can think of this as[UNKNOWN] to a human. Maybe we
can think of the hardware as the brain, and then the program, the software, is
thoughts. As cognitive experiences. and so suddenly this was an analogy. And
suddenly things like memory, which seemed really squishy before. There was this
concrete notion of memory in a computer, and so it didn't seem quite as
theoretical. It seemed much more reasonable to talk about various components of an
information processing system. And a lot of that way of thinking was now imported
into psychology and with it came the notion that, okay we agree with the
behaviors. We have to be scientific, but what we don't agree with is that you have
to be able to directly measure everything you're[UNKNOWN] Interested in. If what
you're interested in leaves some sort of trace, so if learning leaves a trace of
some sort. And we can look at that trace, we can make inferences about learning.
We can go ahead and talk about that theoretical construct. And infer what the data
tells us, about that. So that really opened the door. And it was kind of a middle
ground. We're going to be a little theoretical. We're going to deal with some of
these abstract concepts, but we're going to do it scientifically. Now cognitive
psychology was primarily interested in the individual. Thinking about sort of the
average individual. And how does the average memory system work, and the average
attention system work. this was also a time of course of civil unrest in, in the
60s, and 70s, and think of things like Vietnam, political unrest. You know,
communism versus fascism, although fascism was large, was largely kind of
deteriorating by that point in time. But there was political instability and so
people kind of, some psychologists said well, I want to know more than that. I
want to actually study things like how humans influence each other, and how groups
work together. how things like prejudice are formed. This was also times in
America, things like segregation. And so this new kind of psychology opened up,
social psychology. That's really about how humans interact with one another. At
the same time, both of these, you can kind of say, are still focused on the
average human being. The way an average human being's system works, the way that
average human being is influenced by others. Some psychologists thought, well,
that's interesting, but I actually want to know how a given individual is
different from another. So they study things like, for example, intelligence.
What makes one person more intelligent than another person. And is there anything
we can do about that. So it's often educational systems really drove studies of
individual differences and trying to learn about that. Things like personality
would fall under this too. How is my personality different from your personality?
Can we measure that? how, how stable are our personalities? so these are things
that make one individual different from another. That's now a thriving area of
psychology. I'm just kind of throwing out some of the things that are big now.
Cross-cultural psychology is newer but really critical and really interesting in
the context of something like this mook. the idea behind this is, hey, the way we
think and the way we behave is partly determined by the culture in which we live.
That there isn't a human behavior. There, there's a culturally bound human
behavior on what might be considered perfectly reasonable behavior within one
culture may not be considered reasonable behavior within a different culture. or
even you know more suddenly than that perhaps there are ways in which culture
determines the way humans think. and so this is an area called, called cross-
cultural psychology. And it's becoming quite big now because of, of, of how much
our cultures are intermixing in this globalized world. It's really important that
we understand each other and how we're different. As I mentioned, clinical
psychology, of course, has been, has been marching on. I highlight it here because
I, I just want to be clear that it's, it's not just Freud. since Freud other
schools of clinical psychology have also opened up. I'll give you one taste of
that. There's one kind of clinical psychology that's called Positive psychology.
And the pause of psychology is also a reaction of Freud in a way. Because it was
kind of like these people looking at Freud's theory and saying, gee he's focusing
on aggression, sexuality. Kind of like the darkest aspects of human nature. But
there's some good things about humans. There's things like empathy and creativity.
And altruism, shouldn't we study those? Shouldn't we try to understand those? What
about a clinical approach that isn't focused on disorders, but is focused on
helping individuals reach their maximum potential. And so a positive psychologist
doesn't even talk about the people they see as patients, they call them clients.
And they think of themselves kind of like a financial planner would think, you
know I'm helping you get a healthy bank account. Well positive psychologist is
trying to lie to lead a mentally healthy life, so they're not focused on the
problems. They're focused on positive side of things, that gives you a taste of
clinical psychology. But the last one I really want to highlight and it's party
because of it's recency, but also because of its dominance. Is what I'm calling
the Biological Revolution. With scanning devices, brain scanning devices,
becoming so powerful and so within reach to researchers over the last, oh I'd say,
you know, 20 years, but especially the last 10, let's say. we can now watch the
brain in action. And so while a cognitive psychologist is, would say they're
primarily interested in the software, the mind. How information is processed, we
can now ask our participants to do some information processing task. But we can
watch their brain as they do it. So we can actually, in addition to seeing how
they do on the task, we can learn the relationship between that and the underline
hardware, the brain. So over the last little while while we've learned a lot about
the brain from these devices. And, it's become so omnipotent that any of these
areas that we taked about now you could remove the word psychology. And throw in
the word neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, well this
doesn't really happen in psychology but, cross cultural neuroscience, clinical
neuroscience As areas where, yeah, maybe someone's interested in prejudice let's
say, but maybe they're interested in seeing how prejudicial behavior is related to
the brain. And so they're considering the brain at the same time. So that's a
very important part of psychology, in fact it's so important now, that's where
we're going to begin. We're going to move now in week 2 to a careful analysis of
the brain so that we have a good understanding of what it's about. And then once
we have that in our pocket, we can now talk about some of these other areas. And
some of their coolest experiments and kind of play that same game of learning what
we learned. And also thinking about how it relates to the brain.

Lecture 21

Hey, Week 2, excellent. got through Week 1. And actually, let me, let me just
start by, I like to thank you once already for registering for the course, but I
want to really thank you. I'm, I'm a bit of an educational technology geek, as
you'll come to find out. And, you know, it really is kind of cool for me to, to
be part of this whole MOOC thing that we're all doing together. just before taping
this lecture, the number of students enrolled in this course reached 10,000. I
know it's going to reach a lot higher, but that's just kind of a cool thing, and,
and it's a cool number. so literally, thank you, I really appreciate it and on
with the fun. so, let me sit here right, there we go. for, for this week, we are
going to be talking about the brain which lives somewhere around here. there's a
lot to talk about in the brain so, I'm going to get right at it, okay? Alright.
So, Week 2 Lecture 1, Brain, The Matter of Mind. let's start with some stats.
brain weighs about three pounds which is about 2% of our total body weight. Now,
in fact, if you compare this to other animals, that's actually a very high, what
we call brain to body ratio. We have the biggest brain of any animal relative to
the size of our body. other animals like whales and such obviously have bigger
brains, but they have bigger bodies as well. So, at 2%, we have the largest brain
to body ratio. but the really interesting thing is the brain is only 2% of the
body, but look at the resources it consumes. 25% of our oxygen so one of every
four breaths you take goes to your brain, as a way of thinking about it. 70% of
the body's glucose supply, blood sugars goes to the brain. So, the brain is a very
sugar hungry organ in the body. and 25% of the nutrients you eat go towards
keeping your brain healthy. So, despite its relatively small size in the body, it
clearly is, is you know, a really powerful, powerful organ that's critical to our
survival. there are about a 100 billion neurons, but perhaps more important than
the, the number of neurons are the number of connections between these neurons, 1
quadrillion. So, million, billion, trillion, quadrillion. so there's a lot of
connections, and that's really where the brain gets its computational power. The
neurons themselves are relatively simplistic, as you'll see, and actually transmit
information in a relatively slow way. A common copper wire transmits information
much more quickly than brain tissue does. but what the brain has is this tightly
interconnected web of connections. And, and that's where the power really comes
from. We, we'll get to that. but I wanted, before I leave this slide, make this
point that you have heard people say things like we only use 20% of our brain or,
I, I don't know, I honestly have no idea where these numbers come from. And I can
tell you that it's, it's just complete not true. Complete not true. it, it just
really isn't not true. It's, it's, it's every bit of tissue in the brain is used
at least at some point to do something. It may be the case that at any given
time, perhaps only 20% of neurons are active. so the brain at any given time my
have 4 5ths of its neurons silent. But any given neuron will come into play at
some point in time and probably not before too long. So, I, so I suspect, you
know, over probably even a, a relatively short period of time, an hour, you,
you've probably used every neuron in your brain. So, don't believe that when
people say that, you know, only 20% of the brain is used, you just have to learn
to untap the rest. We all use all of our brain. Okay, so onward. Let's get into
the skull a little bit literally. What this is, is imagine, imagine somebody was
sitting there, this is a, a really nice thought to have. But we took a, a, meat
slicer, a guillotine, and cut their head completely in half, including their
brain, completely in half. And now, were looking in. one of the things you see
first of all, when you look at a brain cut in half this way is there seems to be a
distinction between people call white matter and what people call gray matter
around the outside. So, the white matter is the much denser tissue. and it
literally does a couple of things. One is, it provides structure. You know, kind
of like our dense bones in our body provide our body with structure that other
stuff hangs on. It's kind of like the gray matter hangs on the white matter, and
the white matter gives it structure. Although clearly, it's not nearly as, as
dense as bone tissue would be. it also delivers nutrients and allows communication
to go back and forth. So, the white matter doesn't do a lot of the actual
computation, not, not a lot of the figuring out of stuff. It does more of the
communication of signals, more of the structure and more of the delivery of
nutrients. So, you know, it kind of underlies everything. But the real
computational power seems to be, all happen in these gray areas, what we sometimes
call cortical tissue, the, the stuff on the outside of the brain. now, notice that
these, these things are, are very kind of wrinkled. if we, if we go back for a
second, look at this brain, this, this is actually, this may confuse you a little
bit but the nice pinky stuff would actually be the gray matter. It doesn't look
very gray in this, in this beautiful, healthy, pink brain picture. but what I want
to stress for now is look at all the curves on, on this brain. We call the upper
parts of these curves, the gyrus or the gyri. so, you know, anything that's on the
top, whereas these indentations we call the fissures. And in fact although
there's clearly individual differences my brain would look differently than your
brain if we plonked them out and sat them on the table. generally, there's also a
lot of similarities. And where these fissures lie tend to be in the same places
and they allow us to kind of segment the brain in certain ways. And we're going to
spend a lot of time talking about four different parts of the brain and when, when
we get there, I, I won't do that now. But one question is, of course, why do we
have these gyrian fissures and I want to give you a sense. Let's sneak back to the
other camera for a second. Alright. So, this is kind of what the brain, we think
happened with the brain that as the brain was evolving, as we were evolving brain
power became very evolutionarily significant. Okay. The, the smarter critters were
able to survive better and produce more offspring and so there became this ever
increasing need for more and more brain tissue. But, of course, the problem is our
skulls are limited, there's only so much space in a skull. So, how do you take
something big and put it into a small area? Well, one of the things you can do is
wrinkle it, okay? And by wrinkling it, you can actually get it in a smaller area,
and see we have gyris and fissures forming there. and so this is the, the, the
notion that if you actually took the brain and you unwrinkled it, flattened it all
out, you would have a whole lot of gray matter, and the gray matter is where the
action is happening. That's, that's the powerful part of the brain tissue. So,
these wrinkles are all about getting as much gray matter as possible into a small
skull. kind of cool. Alright.
7:42
Let's now zoom in a little bit. Okay, this gray matter, white matter. What is this
stuff? So, imagine we can zoom right in and look at the smallest sort of
functional element within the brain matter and what we'd see and this is really
just two depictions of the same thing. What we'd see is something that we call
neurons. So, this is like a nice artist rendition. Very pretty. this is just more
of a, you know, easy sketch to, to think about things with. but they're really
representing the same thing, which is a neuron, what we call a neuron. Now, these
neurons have various parts to them. first of all, there's the body, just that
central what we call cell body. here you see it here. In this one, it's, it's
right here and it has a nucleus in the middle and you see that in both as well.
This is where the neuron will make it, make decisions. It really makes the same
decision over and over again. Well, what's that decision? It's deciding whether
it's going to send a signal to the other neurons it's connected to. So, you can
almost think of this as like a, a Twitter kind of verse or social networking kind
of thing. That, you know, at any given moment, you have to decide whether you're
going to send out a tweet about something, or not. but for you to send out
something, there has to be enough reason to do that. Well, how do you know whether
to do that or not? I'm mixing my metaphors here, I hope you stay with me. here's
how neurons work. They have these dendrites at the end or in these nice artist's
renditions. This is where other neurons can communicate with this neuron, okay?
So, what you see, for example, in the artist's rendition here, this would be
another neuron that it, it's sending to, it's not actually connecting. If we could
zoom in on what's going on here, you would see that there's a space between the
sending neuron and the receiving neuron. So the, there's these little space that
we're going to call synaptic cleft. But this is literally how these neurons
communicate. And so, other neurons are communicating to this one. And they're
telling it essentially one of two things. They're either saying, hey, get excited.
Get excited. Get excited. Or they're saying, Chill, man, relax. So, we call that
an excitatory signal or an inhibitory signal, okay? They're either trying to
excite the neuron or they're trying to inhibit it. and now, a bunch of different
neurons are connected to this one. Some of them are trying to excite it, some of
them are trying to inhibit it. And really, what's going on in the cell body is
it's summing all of these signals and it's asking itself the question not, not
literally, of course, mathematically and, and neurochemically, is there enough
excitement for me to get excited? So, it's literally comparing the how much, how
many excitatory signals am I getting? How many inhibitory signals am I getting?
If there's enough of a difference, if there is enough more excitatory than
inhibitory, enough to exceed some threshold level, then this neuron is said to
fire. Okay, what's that mean? Well, what it means is, this electrochemical process
is initiated, these gates are opened, which allow chemicals to flow back and
forth. These chemicals have different charges, positive or negative. and so when
they flow back and forth, they trigger this chain reaction, kind of like, you
know, in a sports stadium where people do the wave. one person does the wave and
then the person next to them and next to them, same idea. There's this chain
reaction that happens down what we call the axon. So the axon is this very long
tail as it were, that leads from the cell body, and at the very end, has these,
what we call axon terminals, or terminal buttons. So, if we go to the artist
rendition, you see here, is the axon. and so, the signal would translate down
here, kind of like the wave, the sports thing. and then, ultimately, would come to
one of these buttons, which is what we have the blow up here. And what then
happens is this neuron releases some chemicals into the synaptic cleft, into that
space between it and the receiving neuron. Those chemicals are received by these
receptors. So, they're, they're special receptor sites that are channeled,
they're, they're shaped to receive certain neurotransmitters. And so, if those
neurotransmitters are released, this one catches them essentially and that's how
the signal gets from one neuron to the other neuron. and it could be an excitatory
signal or an inhibitory signal. Just because this neuron is firing doesn't mean
it's sending an excitatory signal, it could be trying to shut something down as
well. but that's where the, the transmission actually happens. I'll have some
videos at the end of this that will point you to, that will talk about that a lot
more specifics. But this is the general, you know, lowest common denominator,
smallest functional unit in the brain are these neurons. The neurons are
important, but what's really important are all these connections. So, if you kind
of think about the way I described this now, we have a given neuron getting input
from a whole bunch of neurons and then sending. This looks like it's sending it to
just one neuron, but that's not accurate. It would be sending its signal to a
multitude of neurons. so, it gets information from a multitude and sends it to a
multitude. So, it's a highly, it's one part of a highly interconnected network.
And that's really important to understanding brain processing, because if we look
at something like pain, for example, pain recepting, reception, there's not a part
of the brain, like a little tiny part of the brain that reacts to pain. Instead,
the brain seems to respond to stimulation using what's called distributed
processing. It represents the information in a multitude of areas simultaneously.
Sometimes, the specific information being encoded are sort of parts of the greater
picture. So, here's an example. This is brain areas that are related to pain
processing. But we've kind of broken pain up into three aspects of it. The actual
feeling that you're feeling, the emotion that feeling is causing, and any thoughts
that might be triggered by this painful event. so just to give you a sense of
that, imagine what you're feeling is muscle pain because you've worked out last
night. Well, there is a pain, there is a sensory feeling of that pain. There's an
emotional feeling, which might be a little bit of but when you combine it with the
cognitive, you know that that came from the fact that you worked out, and you
probably feel good about working out. And so it could be that this is effective,
even though it's pain, it could be sort of a positive aspect that's linked to the
cognitive fact that you worked out. so now, if we look at the brain, we see that
some parts of the brain are very reactive to the sensory aspects of it. Those are
the green ones. Some parts are very sensitive to the emotional aspect, the
affective aspect. We see those here in [UNKNOWN], especially. Other areas are
reactive to the cognitive parts, much more frontal areas of the brain. and some
areas are reactive to a combination. So, this sort of brownish color reflects the
combination of sensory in affective, those are areas like here. And finally the
purplish represents the combination of affective and cognitive as you're seeing
here, here, and here. Now, I'm not going to get into what all these brain areas
are right now. The point I am, I want you to take from this is that, that
experience of pain is a distributive experience. It's represented by multiple
parts of the brain simultaneously. Thanks to these highly interconnected neuron
networks of neurons. That's a really important point because the brain has to deal
often with noisy inputs. So, let me make this clear. here's an apple. this, this
is a distributor representation, the way I presented it to. when we see visual
things, they are distributed representations. What I mean by that is if we imagine
the screen and the pixels lit here, what we really have is a combination, some
pixels are sending out a white signal, some pixels are sending out a red signal,
some are sending out a white signal in the middle of a bunch of others that are
sending out a red signal. The brain is taking all of this information and somehow
combining it in order to form this concept that we all have of an apple. So we can
see an apple from all this, all this information. Now, imagine instead of thinking
of pixels, imagine these were neurons reacting to something out there. and again,
all these neurons can be sending their signals and that pattern of activation
across the neurons could be what actually defines the fact that this is an apple
we're experiencing. now, the nice thing about this is that it's very tolerant of
noise, okay? Let me throw this image up here. Let's say, we put a bunch of dots
over here to block out what the information that some of the pixels are sending,
if you want to think at that way or imagine some neuron stopped sending signals.
Well, just because a bunch of neurons are not operating well or not giving us a
clear signal, we can still see the apple. If there are enough that are sending
consistent activation patterns, then we can still interpret what's out there even
though there's a whole lot of noise. So, when we talk about graceful degradation,
what we mean is if parts of brain tissue actually died, you still have an ability
to interact perfectly well. no single neuron is going to suddenly make you not
see what apples are anymore. and this also allows the brain to be very tolerant of
noise, and that's really important. So, so, let me give you an example of that for
a second. You've been listening to my voice but I'm going to shut up for
a second, it'll be a rare event and [LAUGH], in these lectures I promise. But
I'm going to shut up for a second and I want you to listen to other sounds that
are around in your environment. Okay, here goes. Okay. So, hopefully you heard, I
don't know, maybe traffic sounds, maybe voices, maybe the heater in your home,
maybe, you know, hums of fans who knows. My point is, as I'm speaking, there's all
of this other noise around. And your brain has to be able to deal with that. And
it's by using these distributed representations that it's able to do that. and
that's critical because as we, when we talk about brain functioning in general,
you'll see that there's always noise present. and that's part of the brain's
power, is, it's its ability to function in noisy environments to function really
effectively. Okay. So, that was a big intro of the brain. And we're going to
start going into other more specific issues. But here's a couple videos. they're
related to recreational drugs. a lot of people find recreational drugs interesting
for whatever reason. but they also give you a really good sense of how that
synaptic transmission works, information flowing across the synaptic cleft and the
critical role that neurotransmitters play in how these drugs are, are having their
effects by mimicking or blocking or interfering in some way with the natural way
the brain works. So, you'll learn a little bit maybe about cocaine and marijuana
here but you'll also learn a whole lot about synaptic transmission, and that's why
I have those here. I have a Wikipedia reading but I also have a neat website where
you can interactively kind of learn about the brain, so another great way to, to
follow up from this. Alrighty, so we will continue on. Our next lecture is going
to, to, to talk about the whole issue of why we can suddenly get so excited when
something, say, scary happens. and, and the idea that there is actually kind of a
switch inside of you that can switch you from being relaxed to ready and how the
brain relates to all that. Alright, see you in the next one. Have a great day.