Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [443]
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.
* The 50,000 figure is an estimate carefully calculated from many sources by APA’s Online Research Office. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says ten thousand (see www.bls.gov/emp#data); apparently, BLS uses a rigorous criterion in its count.
* Much of the funding of basic psychological research has been coming from NIMH, but in 2005–2006 the director announced that in the future funding priority would be assigned to basic research aimed at understanding and treating mental illness, while basic research of a more fundamental kind would get lower priority, if any. The result may be a considerable shrinkage of federal funding of basic research in psychology (National Science Foundation: Survey of Federal Funds for Research and Development FY 2003, 2004, and 2005).
Notes
PROLOGUE
1. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, bk. II, chaps. 2–3.
2. BBC News, April 29, 2004, citing report of findings in northern Israel as reported in Science.
3. George A. Barton, The Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1929), p. 61, cited in Jaynes, 1976:181.
4. Jaynes, 1976:69–70.
5. Ibid.:72–73.
6. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, bk. I, chap. 209.
7. Bruno Snell, in The Discovery of the Mind (Harvard University Press, 1953), says that this development was definitely post-Homeric.
8. Carnegie Institution of Washington Yearbook, 1923, 22:335–337, cited in Thackray