Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [441]
—another order higher: the simplest circuits, about a millimeter long, of a few linked neurons that fire in sequence, producing such elemental reactions as a response to a directionally oriented visual stimulus;
—one to two orders higher: circuits of anywhere from one centimeter to ten centimeters in length, composed of millions of linked neurons—the hardware (or, more accurately, wetware) in which the programs run that we experience as mental maps, thoughts, and language;
—finally, another order higher: the entire central nervous system, roughly a meter or so in length, in which all the above take place at their own levels of organization.38
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:
Based on the universal reported aspects of consciousness experienced during cardiac arrest, we can conclude that the informational fields of our consciousness, consisting of waves, are rooted in phase-space, in an invisible dimension without time and space, and are present around and through us, permeating our body. They become available as our waking consciousness only through our functioning brain in the shape of measurable and changing electromagnetic fields.39
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