The Story of Psychology (130 page)

Mind, in short, is the programmed flow of information made possible by the organized patterns of billions of neural events.

Perception, emotion, memory, thought, personality, and self are the mind’s programs at work, drawing on and using the information and experience stored in the brain’s circuitry in the form of synaptic connections to respond to stimuli in one fashion or another.

This is the dominant view in contemporary psychology—dominant but not accepted by everyone in the field. Apart from parapsychologists and others beyond the fringe, a few philosophic psychologists still argue for a kind of vitalism or “idealism,” a contemporary version of classic dualism in which mind or consciousness is something separate from brain processes. They no longer call it “soul”—that term has disappeared altogether from psychology textbooks except in historical perspective—and their accounts of it are couched in up-to-date, if virtually incomprehensible, physical/cosmological terminology. Here is how one speaker at the 2006 Tucson Conference on Consciousness, Pim van Lommel, explained how consciousness, separate from the brain, is constructed of quantum phenomena:

The only thing wrong with this theory is that there’s no credible, tested evidence for it. It’s wholly imaginary, but it fills a need of some sort for Dr. van Lommel. So, too, other beliefs in consciousness or identity not rooted in the physical brain apparently meet a need for those who believe in them. Though there are provable and proven explanations of an ever-increasing number of real-world mental phenomena, for deep-seated emotional and social reasons they need to believe in something else, unprovable and undisprovable. The majority of scientists, however, feel more as did the mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace two centuries ago; when Napoleon asked him why God was not mentioned in his immense work of cosmology,
Traité de la Mécanique Céleste
, he replied, “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.”

Another enduring question that contemporary psychology and its associated sciences have answered is that of nature versus nurture. Generally given a hereditarian answer early in the century, a behaviorist answer later on, in the past few decades it has been definitively answered in interactionist terms. The details, some of which we have already seen, need not be reviewed again, but here is the core of the matter: Many kinds of evidence show that innate propensities, the product of evolution, are developed and molded by experiences (in genetic terms, various genes are “turned on” by environmental influences), which then lead the person to interact differently with the environment. The developing human being is thus shaped by an unfolding and continually changing interaction between innate predispositions or potentialities and environment or experience.
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A similar answer applies to the old question about where our ideas come from: They are the product of experience and learning as filtered through and shaped by built-in neural propensities. Language acquisition is a case in point. The child’s brain has specialized areas that are able, with little help, to perceive syntactical patterns, extract meaning from speech, and group related objects into abstract categories. When the built-in wiring is defective, learning is difficult or impossible. One who is innately low in verbal ability cannot deal with difficult abstractions, no matter how much experience he or she has.

We need not restate contemporary psychology’s answers to certain other ancient questions: how perception works; how the mind solves problems; how we reason and why we often reason invalidly; how and when our actions are determined by emotions, conscious judgment, and the interplay of the two; and how selfish or altruistic, hostile or kindly patterns of behavior are constructed out of latent tendencies by familial and social experiences.

Certain other questions, however, have been called “luxury problems.” Ignorance of them does not impede scientific progress or affect the daily routine of research; seeking to answer them therefore seems unnecessary, and most psychologists, accordingly, ignore them. The nature of consciousness is one such; its use or function in human psychology is unclear, and for many years most researchers, including cognitive psychologists, neglected it and paid attention to more manageable phenomena. But as we have seen, consciousness is now receiving attention in several quarters, and this suggests that as psychology probes ever deeper into cognitive processes, it will find that consciousness plays a major role in mental phenomena and that it can no longer be considered a luxury problem. As has often been pointed out, the most sophisticated computer is vastly inferior in important ways to any ordinary person precisely because it is not conscious of itself as an entity.

Even freedom and will, two concepts all but missing from psychology for some decades, have lately come back into view. Behaviorists had swept them aside as mentalist illusions, and even cognitive psychologists had avoided them because a freely willed act seems an uncaused act—a concept anathema to science. But cognitive psychologists have been unable to sidestep or ignore choice—a meaningless concept if one insists that past and present forces determine what the individual chooses, and yet an inescapable and observable phenomenon.

An answer now proposed by a number of psychologists is that the operating system of the mind can run in a self-reflective mode, examining its own thoughts and behavior, deliberately evaluating the outcomes of various actions and possible actions, deciding which is the best, and intentionally choosing to carry it out. When we do not pursue this process, we make choices for less conscious reasons—the condition Spinoza referred to as human bondage. When we choose on the basis of self-reflection and evaluations, we approximate human freedom. Albert Bandura has made much the same point time and again. In his therapeutic research on “self-efficacy,” he has argued that freedom should not be conceived of negatively as the absence of external coercion but
positively as the exercise of self-influence: “Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences…By the exercise of [self-regulation] they help to determine the nature of their situations and what they become.”
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This is the very core of his current agentic theory, mentioned above: “The evolutionary convergence of advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their immediate environment and made them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances and the courses their lives take. In this conception, people are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products of them.”
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Where do we go from here?

Every issue of
Annual Review of Psychology
is full of forecasts and predictions of the future of the field. Many of them suggest that on a number of fronts psychology is breaking through into previously unknown and unimagined realms of knowledge and that the broad, sweeping, crude formulations of the past are giving way to narrow, specific, testable theories. However, contrary to this view of a fragmenting science, much of what we have seen above shows that in recent decades the many psychological sciences have been overlapping and interacting despite the absence of an all-embracing megatheory.

But we have also seen that one candidate for a Theory of Everything is knocking on the door, if not yet admitted. Martha Farah, you will recall, said that cognitive neuroscience might become the overarching theory of psychology because it is a cellular-systems explanation of how the brain acts during all the classical processes of cognitive psychology: how we learn, think, behave; why we differ from each other; the sources of personality. In sum, “All these things are in principle explainable by various levels of brain activity at various levels of description.” For good measure, she later added, “Neuroscience is showing that character, consciousness, and a sense of spirituality are all physical functions of the brain.”

Maybe… but it is not clear to everyone how neuroscience can become the Theory of Everything, although it will surely be a major component of that theory. For even if all the mental processes that make up mind are the result of physical functions of the brain, the great—indeed, the
greatest—of questions, currently unanswered, is: How do those physical functions become our own individual thoughts, memories, hopes, joys, sorrows? Or as asked earlier in this book: How do our neural processes become
us
?

Whatever the tomorrow of psychology is, it is almost certain that many of the discoveries of the future will, like those of the past, prove useful to humankind in ways ranging from the trivial to the highly consequential—from tips on child care and memory improvement, say, to the radical improvement of education and the reduction of racial and ethnic hatreds.

Finally, to a far greater extent than ever, psychology surely will satisfy that purest, noblest, and most truly human of desires, the wish to understand. Albert Einstein once said, “The most incomprehensible thing in the world is that the world is comprehensible,” but psychology is proving the great man wrong. It is making our comprehension of the world comprehensible.