The biological perspective - The mind and the body.

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THE BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

  • The mind ~ what contains our memories, thoughts, emotions, and controls our actions
  • The body ~ the vessel that interacts with the physical world
  • Mind and body ~ united: we need both to function effectively

  • Oliver Sacks (1985) > “The Man who Mistook His Wife For a Hat”
  • Mr P. faced neurologist Oliver Sacks with his ears, not his eyes
  • Gaze fixates on Sacks’s features one at a time
  • Mistakes his wife for a hat
  • Unable to recognize rose: “convoluted red form with a linear green attachment” => smells it and realizes what it is
  •  Could recognize geometric shapes – senses work
  • Agnosia ~ inability to recognize people/objects even when basic sensory modalities are intact. Senses tell us about an object/person but we cannot recognize them

  • Phantom Limb Phenomena
  • People perceive an amputated limb as if it were still there
  • May feel burning, cramping, shooting pains in amputated limbs
  •  Neurons from amputated area are still firing to the brain
  • Body controls mind

  • Phantom Pregnancy
  • Woman believes she is pregnant when she is not
  • Will have symptoms of pregnancy (morning sickness, abdominal swelling, foetal movements and may even claim she is in labour)
  • Menstruation not entirely suppressed and woman may under pressure admit to “scanty cyclical blood loss”
  •  Approaching menopause/wanting children
  •  So convinced that her brain made her body think she is actually pregnant
  • Mind controls body

  • IMPORTANT LESSONS IN THE BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
  • It is possible to overpsychologize ~ many diseases have been blamed on psychological factors (bad mothering, bad attitudes), but biological research has proved this wrong
  • We are influenced by the workings of our bodies ~ to understand human beings we must understand the actions of genes, hormones, neurotransmitters, sensory organs and neurons

  • Dualism (Rene Descartes)
  • Mind and body are distinct => interact via the pineal gland in the brain
  • Humans and animals have machinelike bodies, but humans have souls which interact with the physical body
  • However how can a non-physical mind control a physical body?

  • Monism/materialism
  • Mind and body are a single entity
  • Cabanis (French Revolution) ~ guillotine victims were not conscious after beheading because consciousness is a function of the brain
  • Phineas Gage ~ while working on railroad construction in 1948, an explosion drove an iron bar through his left jaw and out his frontal lobe (contains personality)
  • Severed his limbic system (core of brain) from frontal lobe (emotion, reason, intellect) => emotions completely uncensored
  • Link between psychological condition and physical condition
  • Paul Broca ~ encountered a case in a mental asylum in which a man lost the ability to speak coherently after a head injury. Autopsy => Broca proved that the cause lay in damage to a specific point in the brain
  • Localization of function ~ specific functions associated with specific areas of the brain

  • Consciousness
  • Awareness of one’s own mental processes
  • Awareness of one’s perceptions, thoughts, feelings
  • Vivid, undeniable, but very difficult to study (not observable)
  • In the last 30 years, consciousness has become a major research area of psychology because..
  • BEHAVIOURISM ~ Watson and Skinner  believed that the mind was a black box (behaviour must be observable) => little research on mental processes
  • TECHNOLOGY ~ new ways to study the brain since the 1960s
  • PET SCANS allow analysis of brain activity
  • COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY studies memory, reasoning, problem solving
  • COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE studies sensation and perception
  • 2 VIEWS ON CONSCIOUSNESS
  • Theatre View ~ consciousness is a “stage” where different sensations converge to play before “audience” of the mind (all senses are processed at the same time)
  • Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) ~ mind simultaneously processes many parallel streams of information => linked by reciprocal interactions to create unity in experience of consciousness
  • PET SCANS have shown that different things are processed in separate regions of the brain (memory, language, sensations)
  • If they unite in common regions => supports the Theatre View

  • The Relationship Between Heredity and Behaviour
  • Heredity ~ the biological transmission of characteristics from parent to offspring
  • 18th century belief => Creationist theory (God created man), each species of plant and animal were individually created
  • CHANGE >
  • Linnaeus (1735) Swedish professor who catalogued 4000 plant/animal species and suggested a connection between them (established a hierarchical system of biological classification)
  • Lamarck (1809) French naturalist who described how he believed evolution could occur => first evolutionary theory (no evidence though)
  • Darwin (1859) Studied finches at Galapagos Islands
  • Survival of the Fittest ~ variations helped survival pass on
  • Natural selection ~ nature selects living forms that can handle their environment from those that cannot => random variations in a species which enhance reproduction perpetuate new characteristics
  • “Descent of Man” (1871) ~ book by Darwin claiming that man exists on a continuum with other organisms => man and other organisms can be studied scientifically
  • Conflict with religious doctrine ~ Biblical Creationist theory => humans were set apart from other creatures (Judeo-Christian thinking and Western theology) ~ Darwin’s theory offended religious institutions because it said humans evolved from “inferior” apes
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  • Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) cousin of Darwin who studied family, twins and adoptions => nature vs nurture
  • “Hereditary Genius” book (1869) ~ found that success runs in families => in a politician’s family, there are many politicians
  • Said that successful, smart people should mate with other successful, smart people
  • Nature – Nurture ~ concluded that nature is more important; good marriages = talented kids (did not consider socio-economic advantage)
  • Concept of eugenics

  • Study of Consciousness Stopped in the 1st Half of 20th century
  • Impact of Watson and Behaviourism
  • Environmental determinism: Watson’s claim that ...

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