About Psychology

• What are people most afraid of?
• What do our dreams mean?
• Are we natural-born racists?
• What makes us happy?
• What are the causes and cures of mental illness?

This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, persuasion, emotions, and social behavior. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.

The astonishing hypothesis

Brain, neuroscience

An idea here is nicely summarized by the Nobel prize winning biologist Francis Crick

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Mind = Brain

Materialism, material beings - human beings

Mental life, what makes us special, our most intimate feelings and thoughts also arise from these material things.

Dualism

Philosopher, Rene Descartes believed that animals were material things. He thought that the doctrine of materialism was correct about non-human animals. “But humans are different”

For humans, there’s a duality. We possess two sorts of things. We are composed of two sorts of things. We are in part material, but we’re also in part spiritual, separate, mental, psychological. In some way that doesn’t reduce to the material.

He made two arguments for this, and they’re both reasonably good arguments:

1. The creativity and spontaneity of human action: for a non-material nature, humans are capable of doing things that no machine, no material entity ever could.
2. “I think therfore I am”: we don’t feel like bodies. - the method of doubt. You can’t doubt your own existance.

Dualism seems right. Interllignet beings without bodies. The survival of the self after the destruction of the bodies.

Dualism is wrong.

1. Dualism does not answer important questions.
2. We now have better understanding of what physical things can do
3. Strong evidence for the role of the brain

Neurons

Physical sead of thoughts - the source of our emotions, decision-making, passions, pains, etc.

Sensory neurons: touch Motor neurons: move Interneruons: making the connection

Neurons code for intensity: frequency of neurons firing; number of neurons firing;

Parts of the Brain

You don’t need your brain for everything.

Subcortical structures: medulla, berebellum, hypothalamus

Cerebral cortex - human have a lot

Against Dualism and support Materialism

Our two brains

Right & Left Hemisphere - dominance

Lateraligation:

Contralateral Organigation

Sensory information is sent to opposite hemisphere crosing over in pathways leading to cortex

Visual crossover: left eye to right hemisphere, right eye to left hemisphere

Motor crossover: right hemisphere controls left side, left hemisphere controls right side

Corpus callosum:

• Major (but not only) pathway between sides
• Connect comparable structures on each side
• Permit data received on one side to be processed in both hemispheres
• Aids motor coordination of left and right sides

A bit of humility

Dualism is wrong.

MIND = BRAIN

This is radical.

When physical you goes away, so do you.

The mind is a computer, information processor. - recognition, language, motor control, logic…

but: THE HARD problem of consciousness. - subjective experience, qualis…

Materialism calls for a mechnistic conecption of mental life.

but: what aboout humanist values? - free will & responsibility intrinsic value / spiritual value.

(credit to Coursera)