The history of psychological studies of consciousness is long and somewhat odd. At the outset of scientific psychology, it was the field’s #1 topic. Wilhelm Wundt and his associates, in psychology’s first laboratory, studied the flow of thoughts and feelings that make up a person’s conscious experiences (Blumenthal, 2001; see Chapter 1). Three decades of research culminated in the publication of the book Experimental Analysis of the Phenomena of Consciousness, by Wundt’s main laboratory assistant (Wirth, 1908).

Wundt’s efforts placed consciousness in the forefront of psychological science. Researchers in Europe and the United States explored the structure of conscious experience and the functions that consciousness serves. By 1911, a textbook writer could proclaim that “the generally accepted first problem in psychology is to determine the character of consciousness as we immediately experience it” (Pillsbury, 1911, p. 60).

But soon thereafter, everything changed. A school of thought known as behaviorism (see Chapter 7) contended that consciousness studies should be jettisoned from psychological science. The behaviorist argument was simple and, to many, compelling: Science progresses through careful observation and measurement; conscious states cannot be directly observed and measured; consciousness, therefore, cannot be a topic for scientific investigation in psychology. “The time seems to have come,” a leading behaviorist declared in 1913, “when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness” (Watson, 1913/1994, p. 249).

In the early 1960s, psychology saw the emergence of a new school of thought. Researchers asserted that thinking processes—memory, reasoning, problem solving—could be understood by drawing analogies between human thinking and information processing in computers (Newell & Simon, 1961; see Chapter 6). The computer metaphor invigorated the study of many aspects of thinking. However, it did little for the study of consciousness. Computers can process a lot of information, but, as we discuss in detail below, they are not conscious; your word processor can fix your spelling mistakes, but it does not feel pride in its accomplishments. The computer metaphor thus did not spur consciousness research.

Thanks substantially to behaviorism and the computer metaphor, consciousness studies essentially dried up for three-quarters of a century. By the late 1980s, consciousness had become “an unmentionable topic in science” (Prinz, 2012, p. 3).

363

But then things changed dramatically again. In the past quarter-century, the study of consciousness has experienced a rebirth. Its sheer magnitude has been startling; nearly twice as many scientific papers on consciousness were published in one recent 15-year period as had been published in the previous 85 years put together (Prinz, 2012). Psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have combined efforts to produce new answers to fundamental questions about consciousness. Let’s begin our study of consciousness with two of these questions: What is consciousness? Who has consciousness?