history of psychology

A man known to most psychologists only as H. M. has died. Benedict Carey has the story. After a brain operation to relieve profound seizures, H. M. was left with a complete inability to form new declarative memories. And his condition led to a revolution in the science of memory itself:

At the time, many scientists believed that memory was widely distributed throughout the brain and not dependent on any one neural organ or region. Brain lesions, either from surgery or accidents, altered people’s memory in ways that were not easily predictable. Even as Dr. Milner published her results, many researchers attributed H. M.’s deficits to other factors, like general trauma from his seizures or some unrecognized damage.

“It was hard for people to believe that it was all due” to the excisions from the surgery, Dr. Milner said.

That began to change in 1962, when Dr. Milner presented a landmark study in which she and H. M. demonstrated that a part of his memory was fully intact. In a series of trials, she had Mr. Molaison try to trace a line between two outlines of a five-point star, one inside the other, while watching his hand and the star in a mirror. The task is difficult for anyone to master at first.

Every time H. M. performed the task, it struck him as an entirely new experience. He had no memory of doing it before. Yet with practice he became proficient. “At one point he said to me, after many of these trials, ‘Huh, this was easier than I thought it would be,’ ” Dr. Milner said.

The implications were enormous. Scientists saw that there were at least two systems in the brain for creating new memories.

Behavioral science depends so completely on the willingness of subjects to volunteer for analysis and study. But rarely has so much understanding been achieved upon the cooperation of a single person.

It is hard to find a better discussion of how anthropology relates to culture than the first chapter of Robert Lowie's 1917 book, Culture and Ethnology. For instance:

[S]ince there is a persistent tendency to associate with culture the more impressive phenomena of art, science, and technology, it is well to insist at the outset that these loftier phases are by no means necessary to the concept of culture. The fact that your boy plays 'button, button, who has the button?' is just as much an element of our culture as the fact that a room is lighted by electricity. So is the baseball enthusiasm of our grown-up population, so are moving picture shows, thés dansants, Thanksgiving Day masquerades, bar-rooms, Ziegfeld Midnight Follies, evening schools, the Hearst papers, woman suffrage clubs, the single-tax movement, Riker drug stores, touring-sedans, and Tammany Hall (6-7).

I think that's a great example mainly because of how many of those things are gone! Plus, I was watching Citizen Kane last night, so the reference to the Hearst papers seems especially timely.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Russell Jacoby bemoans progress (paywall). He thinks that colleges aren't teaching people to revere the right nineteenth-century intellectuals:

The divorce between informed opinion and academic wisdom could not be more pointed. If educated individuals were asked to name leading historical thinkers in psychology, philosophy, and economics, surely Freud, Hegel, and Marx would figure high on the list. Yet they have vanished from their home disciplines. How can this be?

In the case of Freud and Marx, because they were wrong. They built grand theories on a foundation of unobserved entities that don't exist. If you think they are still relevant to modern psychology and economics, your opinion isn't very ``informed.''

He goes on for an entire column this way. I see it as a surprising sign of hope that the academic fashions of the 1970's have given way.

On the subject of Hegel, I have to point you to Brian Leiter's take: "Please, Oh Please, Could You Publish Something about Philosophy by Someone Who Knows Something (even a little!) about the Subject?" in which he shows just how un-neglected Hegel has been.

Leiter ends with a note relevant to my current featured topic, blogging about your field:

For obvious reasons, intellectual tourists like Mr. Jacoby and Mr. Romano will regularly volunteer their amateurish musings about philosophy to [the Chronicle], since they aren't going to appear in any forum in which the editors know something about the subject.  That makes it even more imperative for philosophers to present their work and their discipline to a non-specialist audience.