Sunday, 11 September 2011

First Lesson - What is Psychology?



"Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science." — Sigmund Freud

Welcome to the 12e Psychology Blog. We spent some time in today's lesson talking about what psychology is. A tidy textbook definition is the study of 'mind and behaviour'. Sometimes this is given as the 'science of mind and behaviour' but this is controversial due to the difficulties of experimenting on people (it often isn't practical or ethical to manipulate them the way we'd like to) and directly observing their thoughts. BUT, Freud's 'streams' are being made more accessible to science by new technologies such as fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging).
The holiday task, looking at Freud's theory of personality, why it is widely believed to be wrong, and why it is still highly influential despite this, is to be completed by Tuesday's lesson, if you haven't already. Here's a link to the subject information sheet which has it on the bottom.

No comments:

Post a Comment