Reading a review of ‘The Idea of the Brain’
This week I read a review in Nature of Matthew Cobb’s forthcoming book, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. The review by Stephen Cas...
All posts tagged with history of psychology
Chomping Chomsky
I ran into Deevy Bishop’s review of a recent book by Noam Chomsky and James McGilvray, titled The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray.
Quote: Boring robot squeezes
From the conclusion of Edwin Boring (1946), “Mind and mechanism” Boring:1946, which is an exposition of the philosophical value of operationalist methods in ...
Neuron theory
Ferris Jabr has begun a series called “Know your neurons”, which will be a tour of the types of neurons. The first installment (“Know Your Neurons: The Disco...
Eugenics legacy
The AP reports that North Carolina has convened a task force to hear testimony from the subjects of the state’s forced sterilization program: “NC grapples wi...
Tortoises down
John Wilkins comments on an old fable, often attributed to William James, in the service of commenting on the snooty attitudes toward common folk beliefs (“T...
The "blooming, buzzing confusion" of William James
I ran across a heavily used quote by William James – the “blooming, buzzing confusion,” which he describes as a baby’s first experience of the world.
Seventy years of studying happiness
The Atlantic has a feature story, “What makes us happy?”, about the Harvard Study of Adult Development – a 72-year-old study of originally-normal Harvard und...
Darwin smiling
Fig. 20 from Darwin 1872. "Terror"
H. M. dies after helping build the science of memory
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 ...
Robert Lowie on anthropology and psychology
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 ...
Harvey Cushing
At Neurophilosophy, a cool post on the photorecord of early neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing:
Obsolete thinking discarded, life goes on
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Russell Jacoby bemoans progress (paywall). He thinks that colleges aren’t teaching people to revere the right nineteent...