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
