Traditionally, psychology is often broken up into the following — into five sub-areas: Neuroscience, which is the study of the mind by looking at the brain; developmental, which is the area which I focus mostly on, which is trying to learn about how people develop and grow and learn; cognitive, which is the one term of the five that might be unfamiliar to some of you, but it refers to a sort of computational approach to studying the mind, often viewing the mind on analogy with a computer and looking at how people do things like understand language, recognize objects, play games, and so on. There is social, which is the study of how people act in groups, how people act with other people. And there is clinical, which is maybe the aspect of psychology that people think of immediately when they hear psychology, which is the study of mental health and mental illness.
I am convinced that you cannot study the mind solely by looking at the discipline of psychology. The discipline of psychology spills over to issues of how the mind has evolved. Economics and game theory are now essential tools for understanding human thought and human behavior — those issues connecting to philosophy, computer science, anthropology, literature, theology, and many, many other domains.
Neuroscience: The physical basis for everything that we normally hold dear, like free will, consciousness, morality and emotions...how a physical thing can give rise to mental life.
Developmental: the question that preoccupies developmental psychologists is how do we come to have our knowledge, and in particular, how much of it is hard-wired, built-in, innate. And how much of it is the product of culture, of language, of schooling? What are the basic components of human nature?
Multiple personality cases force us to address the question of what is a self. To what extent are all of us composed of multiple people, and to what extent are we a single unified person over time? Cases like Capgras are important because they tell us about how we see the world. They tell us for instance that there is a difference between recognizing something in the sense that you could name it, and knowing what it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment