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.

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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.