Textbook of Psychology (Psychology Revivals)

D.O. Hebb, D.C. Donderi

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317819738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Donald Hebb was one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century and the first version of this textbook was written in 1958. This 4th edition, co-authored with Donderi, was originally published in 1987 and the object of the book was to introduce the student to the scientific study of the human mind and behaviour. The authors' concern was with scientific psychology and fundamental principles. They felt this understanding was the best preparation to following future developments in psychological knowledge and to understand the changes in how that knowledge was applied. Although psychology has developed in many directions since its publication, much of the information in this book is still relevant today.

CHAPTER 1

Psychology and Human Behavior

The object of this book is to introduce you to the scientific study of the human mind and behavior. That is essentially what psychology is about. Psychologists study animals too, and they are fascinating, but the main reason for studying them is to understand human behavior.

Our concern is with scientific psychology and fundamental principles. Each year more is learned about human nature, and you will want to follow the evolution of psychological knowledge and theory. A good understanding of fundamental principles is the best preparation to follow developments in psychological knowledge and to understand the changes in how that knowledge is applied.

STUDYING THE MIND

How are we to study the mind? Your own mind is not open to inspection. It was once supposed that you could look inward at any time and know what you were thinking. In 1820 the German philosopher Herbart realized that there is much that is going on in your mind about which you know nothing at all. Sigmund Freud, in about 1900, made this a central part of his theory. Like Herbart, Freud assumed that unpleasant things, things you do not like or are ashamed of, are suppressed and kept in the unconscious. Freud, like others at that time, thought that all other mental processes were available for examination. But now it is clear that introspection, or “looking inward,” does not exist for any mental processes. You are not conscious of your consciousness. You are conscious of your body of your speech and “inner speech,” and of the world around you, but not of what is going on inside your mind.¹

We said before that you are not conscious of your thoughts. But imagery is a part of thought (chapter 5), and you may believe that you are at least conscious of your imagery. Not so. Try this small experiment: Look for a few seconds at a bright object. Now look away toward a plain wall. You see a dark patch, corresponding in shape to the bright object. Where does this dark patch seem to be? It is outside you, not inside. You know the dark patch doesn’t correspond to a real object, because you feel nothing when you put your hand out to touch it; besides the dark patch moves as your eyes move. You conclude that there is nothing outside and that what you see is just an image caused by some activity of your visual system. You are right, but you have inferred the truth, not directly observed it. You are conscious of something outside yourself, and not of the mental process that generated the false image.

So we can learn about the mind only indirectly, from knowing how human beings are made and what they say and do. There is complicated machinery inside. We can find out something about how it works by stimulating it in different ways and seeing what output follows a given input. But the mechanisms are indeed complex, and psychology has a long way to go before the problem is solved—if it is ever completely solved. In principle, however, the method is straightforward: you must learn about others’ mental processes—and even about your own, much of the time—from what they say and do. The great American philosopher C. S. Peirce (1958) said that he knew what he thought only when he heard himself speak or when he found himself acting on a conclusion his mind had come to. (Peirce, 1958).

Clearly Freud was right in supposing that you can be thinking something and not know that you are thinking it. It is common to hear someone say, “I don’t know how I could have forgotten” or “I don’t know what got into me” about something done or not done. Freud took his ideas further, suggested that by laughing at someone you show you dislike him; that if you can’t remember a name, or how to pronounce it, you may dislike him even though you think you like him. These are examples of how one may use behavior to make inferences about thought. Inferences of this kind are not always true: before one could be sure, one would have to examine the person’s behavior further. Laughter is not always malicious; simple forgetting does occur. But though we would not now generalize as much as Freud did when he proposed these ideas, we should see that in proposing them Freud was exploring the problem of how to think objectively in studying the mind. When he went so far as to study his own unconscious in this way—for example, when he himself forgot a name—he was clearly a pioneer in the development of objective psychological methods.

MIND OR SOUL?

Now for the nature of mind itself: What is it? What does it consist of? We will take for granted, as a working assumption, that mind is a function of the brain and not something that can exist apart from the brain. We will assume that thought and consciousness arose in the course of evolution. They are not activities that we alone are capable of. Dogs and cats, monkeys and chimpanzees also think and have minds.

Speaking very generally, there are two theories of mind. One in its clearest form is animistic, a theory of demonic possession. It assumes that the body is inhabited by an entity, a demon known as the mind or soul. Less extreme (and less clear) forms of the same theory simply are called dualistic. They assert only that mind is not physical, and is separate from the workings of the body. The second theory is physiological or mechanistic. It assumes that mind is a bodily process, the activity of the brain or some part of that activity. This is monistic theory. Modern psychology works with monistic theory, and we will do the same in this book. It is a working assumption. Both theories are intellectually respectable—there are thinkers of the highest ability to be found on each side of the question. It is essential that you understand that a scientific theory should never be “believed.” A scientific theory is best thought of as a sophisticated statement of ignorance, a way of formulating possible ideas so that they can be tested, rather than a statement of final truth. In the case of psychology, the working theory is to assume that a separate soul does not exist. There is no conflict here between religion and scientific method. Science approaches truth by a series of approximations and psychology is in no position to be dogmatic about the correctness of its notions about the nature of mind.

PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Learning

The foregoing discussion will have more meaning if we look now at some areas of psychological research. Psychologists do not spend all their time trying to settle outsize questions like What is mind? or Is there a soul? They usually study easier topics, like learning, motivation, perception, intelligence, or memory—all of which must be understood if we are to understand the mind.

The first, and main, area of research is learning. The distinctive mark of the psychologist is an interest in learning. Learning may seem very simple to you, because you have been doing it all your life. But do research? Learning is just a matter of repetition. Practice makes perfect. The more often you catch a ball, the better you are at catching it; the more you read, the more you will remember …

Or will you? That last statement may sound right, but it is a trap. Learning is not so simple. There are better ways to learn more and to remember more than by repetition. Human learning is very peculiar in a number of respects. We will come back to it in later chapters, but here we can give you some idea of how much there is still to find out about learning—even about study methods.

Let’s take a moment to look at study methods. (For a fuller account, see the study methods section of chapter 6.) It may be true that the more you read this textbook the better you will remember it. But it is not true that simply reading it over and over is a sensible way to learn. You will get better results with less pain from a different method. Less than half your time should be spent reading; more than half, making notes, or trying to reorganize what you have read, or trying to recall it.

Stop reading at this point and look through the whole of this first chapter to find out why the parts are arranged as they are. Read the headings, sample the text, look at the Summary, and see if the organization of the chapter makes sense. If not, sample more of the text and try again. How would you organize these points? Instead of just reading and trying to remember, find out what the pattern of ideas is. You will remember more not by trying to remember but by just trying to understand. This method is easier as well as more efficient. It’s also easier to talk yourself into study when you do it this way. This is how you should approach any new chapter or any new book. Look for the main picture and the details will look after themselves.

Nevertheless, there are times when straight memorization is necessary. When you are studying the anatomy of the brain, you must be able to name the twelve cranial nerves. In biology, you must know the classification scheme of kingdom, phylum, and so on. Many generations ago students discovered something that psychologists still cannot explain to their own satisfaction: learning more is sometimes easier than learning less. Instead of pounding away at olfactory, optic, and the names of the other ten nerves till they can be repeated, you add something: a short ditty that goes as follows “On old Olympus’ tufted top, a fat-armed German viewed a hop.” The first letter of each word is the first letter of the twelve cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory, hypoglossus. Similarly, “King Peter came over from Germany seeking fortune” will organize and help recall kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, and form. Most English-speaking people learn the number of days in each month with the familiar jingle “Thirty days hath September….” Eventually you know that November has thirty days without having to go through the rhyme, but it is easier to start by learning the rhyme. In the case of the cranial nerves, it is quite clear that by adding something to the task, the task becomes easier. One must learn those anatomical names, glossopharyngeal and the rest, in the end; yet they are easier to learn with the jingle. This surely is a surprising state of affairs. Orators and actors have used mnemonics like these from ancient times. Papyrus was an expensive luxury, and wax tablets were too heavy for lecture notes, so there was a higher value on good memory. The practice of mnemonics is not new; but the theory is still poorly understood.

Another example of a learning problem aided by a mnemonic is learning to tell your left hand from your right. Many people all their lives have to stop and think a moment before knowing what to do when someone says “Take the next turn to the right.” This should be simple: All you have to do is to associate the sound of the word “right” with a movement of the right hand or moving the eyes to the right. Why is there trouble? Partly at least because of the symmetry of the body, the similarity of the left and right sides. In learning to tell left from right, children learn more than they have to, and in this case the “more” causes trouble. What is learned first is not to associate the word “left” with a particular hand or side, but with sidedness, with one of the dimensions of the body in space. Children also begin to learn to name the right and left sides of someone facing them, which of course is opposite to their own left and right. The result of all of this is confusion (see Fig. 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1. Children learn the differences between p and q, b and d very slowly when they begin to learn to write the alphabet. Not only do they mix up the left-right direction in writing single letters, they sometimes confuse the direction for writing entire words. One of the authors recalls visiting a kindergarten where children were painting. Two children shared a single large easel, one child on each side. At one easel, a girl finished her painting first, and wrote her name—CATHY—in large letters at the upper left-hand corner of her paper. The other girl at the same easel finished later. Not knowing where to write her name, she looked around the easel at Cathy’s painting, and then wrote her own name in the upper right-hand corner of her own painting and directly opposite to Cathy’s name, and starting at the same place, wrote inward from the edge

Learning is cumulative. Daily routines like tying shoelaces or counting change include many acts that were at first learned with difficulty but which are now done without thought or effort. Learning these acts need not be specifically recalled in order for them to be done in the right way at the right time. In discussing memory later on, we will see that what can be recalled has certainly been learned, but not everything that has been learned need be recalled. We shall also see later that “recall” is no respecter of history—you may “recall” things that never really happened—and that the brain mechanisms for learning and for recalling may be very different.

Learning is like the tip of an iceberg. When something new is learned, it is usually only the specific associations or the specific relationships that are new; the ideas or words or actions are usually not new at all. Most people reading this book had to be told (or had to hear) only once the name of the person elected president or prime minister of their country; “one-trial” learning was sufficient both to establish and to maintain a new association between two well-learned words or phrases: the candidate and the office.

It appears that the human brain does not do simple things in a simple way. This makes the world very interesting for psychologists, but there are drawbacks. If you meet someone who thinks that learning is easy to understand, ask why it is so hard to learn which side is left, and which side is right.

Experimental Neurosis

Consider mental disorder in a dog. Though this example involves an animal lower than man and cannot prove anything about human behavior, it does show that failure in a learning problem can produce a serious problem in some animals and suggests the possibility that similar problems may happen with human beings.

An experimenter in the laboratory of the great Russian physiologist Pavlov, using the method of conditioned reflexes (see chapter 2), was trying to find out how small a difference the dog could detect between two objects. He taught the dog that food would be given following the sight of one object but not following the sight of another. No punishment was given if the dog failed to discriminate between the objects. The objects were made more and more alike until, after several days of failing to discriminate, the dog’s behavior suddenly changed. Instead of coming eagerly to the experimental room, the dog struggled to avoid it. Instead of standing quietly in the apparatus, waiting for the next signal to appear, he bit and howled. Discrimination disappeared. The experimenter went back to easier forms of the problem, which the dog had solved previously, but this had little effect on the changed behavior. The disturbance never completely disappeared; even after a long rest, the dog became excited again if he was put back into the experimental room.

It is remarkable that a simple perceptual conflict should have such drastic and long-lasting effects. No pain was involved, nor fear of pain. Might a human neurotic disturbance be produced in the same way, when something learned in childhood, say, conflicts with some adult experience? Is neurosis all a product of learning? Before leaping to that conclusion, we must take one more fact into account: only a few dogs, perhaps 1%, developed a neurosis in that experimental situation. It seems there must be a special susceptibility for the breakdown to occur. Here we are dealing with an interaction between experience and a particular hereditary disposition. But the phenomenon does remind us that small differences can have large effects when we are dealing with something as complex as the brain. Human beings are more vulnerable to emotional experience than dogs, as we will see later (chapter 11), and so conceivably the human susceptibility to neurotic breakdown following minor stress may also be more widespread and not limited to a small proportion of the population.

Hyperactivity

The interplay of biology and experience characterizes the puzzling childhood disorder commonly called hyperactivity, a disorder affecting more boys than girls. Some children cannot stay still; they cannot sit quietly and listen. They fidget, they move restlessly from one thing to another. They react impulsively to tasks or to questions, doing or saying the first thing that comes to mind. They respond to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• From the Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• 1/ Psychology and Human Behavior
• 2/ Conditioning and Learning
• 3/ Pathways in Learning and Perception
• 4/ The Nervous System in Development and Learning
• 5/ The Control of Behavior: Cognitive and Noncognitive
• 6/ Learning, Memory, and Forgetting
• 7/ Heredity, Maturation, and Early Learning
• 8/ Statistics and the Control Group
• 9/ Intelligence
• 10/ Motivational Mechanisms
• 11/ Emotion and Motivation
• 12/ Sensation and Perception
• 13/ Thought and Language
• 14/ Psychology and the Scientific Method
• Glossary
• Author Index
• Subject Index