In some cases, the Reflections and Connections section at the end of a chapter is intended to help you organize your review of the chapter. In other cases, it makes explicit some idea that was implicit in the chapter or that emerges in reflecting back on the chapter as a whole. Here are two concluding thoughts, of the latter type, for the chapter you have just read.
1. Psychology as the study of normal behavior In the world outside of colleges and universities, psychology is often associated with the study of mental problems or disorders and the clinical practice of helping people overcome them. Popular television shows and self-help books also promote this “helping” view of psychology. When people “go to see a psychologist,” they are seeking help. But, as you have gleaned from this chapter, psychology as a research field is primarily aimed at understanding normal human ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving. From an intellectual point of view, the problem of how any entity normally works—whether it is an automobile, a computer, or a human being—is much more interesting than the problem of how it breaks down. Philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, and the British empiricists were fascinated by the workings of the normal human mind, and that is what fascinates most academic psychologists today. The normal mental experiences that we take for granted in our everyday lives—such as our ability to see the color red, or to remember anything, or to learn our native language—become intriguing mysteries when we stop to think about them. As you go through this book, we hope you will allow yourself to become fascinated by all the normal things that you and other human beings do. If your ultimate interest is clinical psychology, keep in mind that some knowledge of normal functioning is essential background for figuring out where a breakdown has occurred and how normality might be restored. After all, automobile mechanics and computer repair specialists need to understand the normal operations of the machines they fix.
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2. The concept of the mind as a product of the brain After reading this chapter, you may be confused about the meaning of the term mind. Join the club. Even today, mind ranks as perhaps the most debated of all philosophical concepts. Psychologists use the term in two quite different ways. In one use, it refers to people’s conscious experiences—to the sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, desires, and emotions that run through our conscious awareness such that we can describe them to ourselves and to others. This is the usage that generates the most debate in philosophy because it is hard to imagine just what “consciousness” is or how it emerges from physical matter. This difficulty leads some philosophers even today to be dualists. In psychology, we usually sidestep that philosophical mystery by defining consciousness as whatever it is that a person can tell us about his or her experiences. If a person can tell us about a memory, or about something that he or she is looking at, then we say that the person is conscious of that memory or that visual perception.
In its other use, mind refers to all of the knowledge and operating rules that are somehow built into or stored in the brain and that provide the foundation for organizing behavior and conscious experiences. By this definition, mind is analogous to the data and software that are programmed into a computer to organize its ability to calculate and perform all the operations we expect of it. In this usage, mind is not equated with consciousness. People are not aware of most of the inner knowledge and processes that organize their feelings, thoughts, and behavior, any more than a computer is aware of its software programs.
We have used the term mind in both of these ways in various parts of this book, but it should be clear from the context which meaning we are using at any given time. Many psychologists in the past, and a few even today, have argued that we should avoid the concept of mind entirely. They point out that by either definition, mind refers to something that we cannot see directly. What we observe is people’s behavior, including their verbal reports of their thoughts and feelings. With modern techniques of monitoring the brain, we can also observe physical changes in the brain—but, again, that is not the same as observing the mind. According to some psychologists, therefore, we should define our science as the study of behavior, or as the study of the brain and behavior, and leave the unobservable mind out of it. Most psychologists, however, find the concept of mind to be very useful and believe that a psychological level of analysis provides a different understanding of human behavior than a biological one. Having a theory of the brain does not replace having a theory of the mind (Bjorklund, 1997). We can infer characteristics of the mind by observing behavior, and then we can use those inferences to make predictions about further behavior. Gravity can’t be seen directly, either—it is inferred by observing the behavior of physical entities; yet, physicists find the concept of gravity to be very useful.