Transcript for:
The Story of Psychology

[Music] philosophies is about reason irrationality while literature or storytelling is about emotions and hope philosophy tries to answer why questions why we die literature reassures us that it's all okay the story continues even after we die but what is psychology simply put it's the child of philosophy meeting with literature philosophy it's father and literature is its mother hi everyone in this course I'll tell you the story of psychology en campusing an incredible 3,000 years of psychological history by the end of this video you will know all the basic psychological ideas schools and approaches as well as some of the most influential psychologists and psychoanalysts from around the world the video has four major parts and each with two or three sections in part one I'll tell you about the origin of Psychology from ancient Greece and ancient India to modern science where does psychology come from two disciplines play a major role in giving birth to psychology philosophy is like the father and literature is the mother philosophy is the rational side and literature is the emotional side in this section I'll also answer what is the purpose of psychology and part two I look into how psychology understands the human mind including the Consciousness and the unconscious first I'll look at the pioneers of psychology including William James Johan Herbert and wihelm WT who try to understand Consciousness then I'll look into Behavior School of Psychology that understands the human Mind through our behavior in other words action speaks louder than words and finally I'll look at the two of the most influential figures in Psychology Sigman Freud and Carl Jung who each try to understand the unconscious in part three I'll look at how psychology became a practical tool for diagnosing and treating patients with mental problems I'll look into two distinct approaches Psychotherapy which has a strong German origin focused on the unconscious and cognitive therapy which has a more Anglo-Saxon tradition focused on the conscious mind empath for I'll look into other factors in Psychology outside the human mind in general factors such as Society age and sex play a crucial role in our psychology so in this section I'll discuss social psychology child psychology and sex psychology at the end I'll also discuss the Paradox of psychology and the Paradox of Personality this course gives you an overview of psychology as an academic discipline by the end you should have a clear picture of what psychology is and what it studies and who are some of the key figures so get yourself some coffee and let's begin by the way if you want to buy the script of this video in a book format you can find the link down below this also supports the channel so thank you very [Music] much one why psychology a brief history in this segment I'll tell you about the philosophical origin of psychology its history it's many different disciplines so if psychology is a child the section will tell you about its birth the term psychology comes from Greek psyche means mind or soul and logy meaning the study of psychology simply means the study of the Mind psychology has been with humans since the dawn of time but it was part of philosophy historically speaking philosophy Y at least Greek philosophy was concerned with three main subjects the physical world of matter the origin of life and the human mind today the physical world of matter is studied in physics and chemistry while biology deals with life the human mind has become the domain of psychology so philosophy encompassed all of them now you might ask why do we humans have philosophy in the first place the simple answer is the awareness of death gave rise to philosophical proving to understand what's the meaning of life and how the world works and how we know about reality so you can say that the main reason we have psychology basically goes back to our awareness of death and The Human Condition as animals we evolve to develop Consciousness self-consciousness which gave us the ability to anticipate our own death long before death itself it is terrifying to know that we all die there has to be a reason behind death thus we invented religions and stories to give death a meaning and console ourselves with the afterlife as another will so afterlife is nothing but a convenient answer to the terrifying ordeal of death so the invention of gods and demons were in a way to numb that existentialist crisis believing that there's a heaven a perfect Utopia waiting for us gives us a bit of comfort now let's talk about early psychological question s within philosophy the early psychologists were partly philosophers and partly Physicians who were tackling the same questions we face today how come individuals have different personalities and tendencies or behaviors when you open a new computer or smartphone you do not expect it to be different from other computers or smartphones of the same model but humans come in many external forms such as height and shape but also internal forms such as personality and mood the first pioneers of psychology were the ancient Greeks and Romans the first true School of Psychology is called humorism it's not a comedy club but a psychological analysis of human personality types humorism the Greek physician hypocrates who lived between 460 and 370 BC has given us the hypocritic oath and Medicine in which doctors promise to do no harms to anyone hypocrates thought the body contained fluids or humor that healed itself and other words the human body had properties such as earth air fire and water that made it capable of healing itself he allowed his patients to rest to allow the body's healing mechanism to kick in today we might call it easing one's body during sickness which allows the patients to get better by themselves or it could be simply the immune system system that fights viruses and illnesses of course hypocrates also prescribed drugs but his approach was a baby step and psychological treatment of easing one from their burdens and letting them rest a few centuries later the Roman Physicians Claudius Gallen who lived between 129 and 2011 ad developed a humorist approach further by arguing that humans have four distinct personalities depending on the level of humor such as as Earth water air and fire in their body in other words if you had one element more your personality shifted in that direction more so the human body for him was like a cooked meal with many ingredients and each with different volumes in proportions could determine your personality type his personality types were sanguin the cheerful type fmatic the quiet type coloric the passionate type and finally melancholic the artistic type these personalities are caused by the imbalance and humor and often from birth but he argued that one can encounter or limit the excess of these temperaments by eating certain food or through physical exercise today we use energy drinks alcohol drugs and so forth to become more cheerful energetic and so forth too much energy exercise to Tire your yourself most people who go to gym would tell you that exercising has a direct impact on their mood if you feel depressed do a good workout and you might feel much better so gin knew this 2,000 years ago so he thought human personality was like a cooked meal The Taste depended heavily on the amount of each ingredient Socrates the father of Western philosophy shifted the focus from body to the mind mind for him the happy person was the one who discovered his true self he developed his questioning method through which when asks a series of questions in order to get to the bottom of a problem this approach is in how modern science analyzes something to understands its property so Socrates used a series of questions to determine what true self was he employed reason to understand what's going on so he concluded that virtue was the ultimate goal of a person and being good meant the person had discovered his true self which should make you happy a virtuous man is not only a good man but also a happy man the reason I use masculine pronouns here is that back then these philosophers are mainly talking about men Aristotle the Greek philosopher who came after Socrates lived between 384 and 322 BC came up with four ways that we can be happy through sensual Pleasures IE sex material possession ethical superiority and logical understanding today we all try to maximize these Pleasures so nothing has really changed since the ancient times Hindu psychology in Ancient India two collection of texts were extremely important the vetas are collection of texts that concern sociological issues such as religion and politics but there was another the group of texts that mainly focus on the individual's inner Journey these texts are called the aots in other words the vas had an external or worldly Outlook while the oppish shots had a more internal and personal Outlook generally speaking the vas have a more social message while the upanishad have a more individual message the upanishad written about 2,700 years ago contain Many religious and philosophical ideas and do Rines but it also contains some deeply psychological insights into the human mind one of the central themes of the upon punish on is the relation between the self which is nothing but illusion and the greater self which is the real self or Spirit or Consciousness Arthur schopenhauer's psychological philosophy was deeply influenced by the upanishad so he argued that within us this will to Life Force motivates us to do things almost subc consciously for example our urge for sex for instance is part of this blind will within us according to punish Jiva is the visible self and Atman is the hidden true self our life's purpose is to fully understand and realize Atman in order to reach mosa and escape from the cycle of reincarnation and other words a kind of self-actualization process to achieve inner Bliss not through Faith but through active level of Consciousness in other words knowing deeper layers of human mind can help us Escape our Human Condition The opponants Divide Consciousness into three stages awake asleep and higher Consciousness most of us experience the first two States during the waking hours we are conscious of what's going on around us during sleep we lose that ability as our Consciousness shut down temporarily but but the third state of consciousness or TOA is only attained through rigorous contemplation and meditation and more importantly through high level of a awareness in which we are actually conscious of the inner self or Atma and some pish text Consciousness is divided into four states in which sleep is in turn divided into two light sleep and deep sleep and the primary force of life is consciousness in today's world meditation or more specifically yoga a very old Indian tradition is used to treat people with psychological problems another important element of a punish is the relationship between the mind and nature in Hindu philosophies humans are not only from nature but we are nature there is no separation between humans and other animals this closeness to Nature brings a level of humility we're not special so according to Pish ons our life's goal is to attain an have knowledge and Consciousness through rigorous meditation and self-actualization so we realize Atma the Eternal Timeless state of bliss Islamic world the next development in philosophical psychology took place in the Islamic world where philosophers and Physicians combined Greek philosophy and medicine with Indian philosophy and medicine to give it a new flavor as we know today as Islamic Golden Age the these Muslim philosophers were very keen on the understanding of Consciousness between the individual Consciousness and the universal Consciousness Islam as a religion has a deeply universalistic Outlook so these philosophers were very keen to find ways to explain the human psyche from a universalistic perspective most of these philosophers were reacting to Aristotle's natural philosophy and tried to reconcile the scientific method with Islamic Universal Soul in other words the animalistic with the Divine Perfection so to speak in Indian philosophy it's like the ladder that reaches Nirvana for Robi who lived between 870 and 950 believe that there are two levels of consciousness the individual which is internal like knowing what we know which is similar to self-consciousness and active Consciousness which allows us to be receptive to external stimuli which allows us to expand on our internal Consciousness this this is somewhat similar to Emanuel K's rational philosophy that we not only have innate knowledge but we also have our mental structure that allows us to categorize external knowledge so farabi divided intellectual Consciousness into two the individual which is subjective and active which is universal and objective which seeks and receives external knowledge somewhat similar to Carl yung's active imagination in other words unlike other animals we have the rational ability to discriminate to make moral choices he also attributed our choices based on our internal organs like heart brain and liver and the level of heat they contain determine our a level of aggression for example men are more aggressive because our heart contain more heat compared to women who are more compassionate iina or aena as he is commonly known in the west who lived between 980 and 1037 was a multi-talented man he was a philosopher a doctor a psychologist and a theologian his famous thought experiments of floating man predates rainy de cards I think therefore I am a Mind Body dualism by almost 600 years in floating man aesa imagines a man Free Falling or suspended in air with his Limbs and body not touching any object would he know he exists in other words if he had no senses like touch smell he in side taste would we know we exist his answer was that yes he would still know our existence without the help of our body his conclusion was that the mind is separate from the body I or AOS as he's commonly known in the west lived between 1126 and 1198 he too tried to reconcile the body with the soul his approach is somewhat similar to Plato and that form gives rise to matter not the other way around which is contrary to modern science that matter is primary and Consciousness is secondary his argument was that the active Consciousness or active intellect becomes individual Consciousness within a particular human body and at words the soul is universal but becomes individual within each human being so the spiritual consciousness becomes the material Consciousness when it occupies a human body or a container so to speak however one this material Consciousness acquired enough knowledge of the world it has the chance to become greater than the body and rise up to become a universal Consciousness that can become immortal somewhat similar to the Buddhist Nirvana for example if knowledge is perfected through our senses It ultimately becomes a universal sense or common sense that lives on his philosophy was more focused on the material side of life to the point that he thought the Islamic promise of sensual Pleasures I.E virgins and afterlife was a better motivator to do good in this life compared to the Christian promise of spirituality in the afterlife in other words we humans find material or physical Pleasures far more enticing than spiritual Pleasures this was the first seeds of materialism that arrived in Europe to transform science and philosophy and ground everything on the material world rather than spiritual or metaphysical Realms in other words his emphasis on the Practical side of intellect and knowledge brought sciences and religion together however the Islamic World ignored his pragmatism and dive deeper into spirituality but this practical intellectual Endeavor found itself a new home in Europe also important to note that AOS was born and lived most of his life in Islamic Spain within the Continental Europe so it was perfectly placed to bridge Islamic world world with a Christian Europe Renaissance Europe European scholars and scientists read and absorbed Islamic philosophy and Science and also through the works of Islamic scholars they reconnected with the Greek philosophy and science it gave rise to what is called the Scientific Revolution in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe now Faith and religion were severely challenged by a new empirical and practical science that that the world through a rigorous scientific method Galileo cernus and Newton were the pioneers of material science which became the basis of modernity as science became more sophisticated in Europe and people learned a great deal about the natural world some scientists turn their attention to solving the mystery of the human mind it's like the scientists turn their microscope on themselves the most famous Renaissance philosopher and scientist who tackled the mind was was Rene de cart whose famous thought experiment of 1649 gave us the most famous line in philosophy to prove that we exist he imagined nothing existed then he concluded that at least the person who imagines or doubts or thinks this idea of non-existence has to exist so I think therefore I am became the most famous line in philosophy deards also believed that mind and body were two separate entities which today today is known as cartisian dualism but around this time there was another huge shift in Europe with the advancement of Sciences and discoveries people's belief in God and religion was shaken many scientific discoveries including cernus and Galileo arguing that we are orbiting the Sun not the other way around contradicted the religious view of the world that solid belief and the supreme god ruling the world was severely challenged for thousands of years human Rel relied on God's protecting them and offering them refuge in heaven like children who rely on their parents for protection and comfort this soft protective loving environment is also created by God in heaven when you die you return to your childhood but now science is busting a lot of religious myths Santa is not real this Godless vacuum created a psychological shift as people no longer believe there was a God protecting them from the tragedies of life this era 18th and 19th century is also called The Enlightenment or waking up to the idea that rationality is the only true supreme power we have the believe in the divine power didn't seem too convincing at least among the intellectuals and Elites of Europe This freedom from God came with a huge responsibility now your reason or rationality was the only weapon against life's tragedies while rationality is an amazing tool to make our physical life better through technology and Medicine it provides very little when it comes to our psychological happiness or fulfillment in life while the majority of the poor struggled with life toiling and the physical pain of not having enough to eat the rich Europeans however had a different problem that believe that once you have enough wealth you will be happy turned out not to be true some of the rich Europeans had miserable lives what was going on science could help you with physical pain but it couldn't help you mental pain and psychological suffering so people started asking questions improving into the human mind to understand why we suffer early Pioneers one of the earliest philosophers who tackled the question of suffering was Arthur schuppenhauer the German philosopher today nicknamed as the great pessimist his 1819 book The World As will and representation revolutionized philosophy Shifting the attention from religion and rationality to the human subconscious he understood that wealth Fame status Beauty and all the good stuff were mere surface level but there was a giant Beast Underneath It All We strive to become rich powerful more beautiful and famous but it's not actually us who is seeking them it is this hidden Beast inside each one of us that wants those things the Beast is using us to get wealth Fame status Beauty and all the objects of Desire but who is this Beast why do we never see it shophow articulated the Beast as the blind will that rules every one of us not just us the this will rules all beings and the whole universe the will doesn't belong to you or me it has its own agenda it merely uses us to achieve its goal goal actually the blind will has no goal it has no shape it has no limit it it's like a bottomless well Shen Hower argued that we cannot see the will and all we understand about the world is a mere representation of that will he called it will to life deeply instinctual and we subconsciously follow what this will Wills I should point out that this notion of hidden blind will was very much part of Eastern Philosophy for thousands of years but what's remarkable about shopen how was that the articulated so well that it made sense for the Europeans who were highly rationalistic in their approach it's no surprise that the first psychology lab was created in Germany so schopenhauer's influence on psychology is massive but before I tell you about the first psychology lab there was one more massive development in Europe in 1859 Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection revolutionized science and philosophy but also severely shook the foundation of religious beliefs again I think do Darwin must have read or have been influenced by schopenhauer directly or indirectly and Darwin's evolutionary theory gives stist more freedom and Le to probe into the human mind because we are evolved animals after all since we are evolved animals then our psyche can be studied just like other animals it's no longer only the domain of God and church so in the late 19th century psychology became a new field of study in Europe universities open their psychology departments to understand psychological illnesses that were on the rise but also the human mind was a new frontier and a mysterious place that attracted a lot of young men to explore 19th century Europe was the Age of Exploration some people like Darwin traveled around the world in search of new discoveries and some stayed in their labs to discover what's going on inside the human mind as psychologist started to grow three different psychological approaches emerged merge the German Russian and Anglo American in Germany Psychology was part of the science faculty mainly medicine while in the Anglo-Saxon World psychology departments were considered under philosophy the Germans took an analytical approach breaking things down to its smaller parts like a machine or car to understand how it works while the Anglo-Saxon prefer the more theoretical approach understanding the bigger picture the sum not the parts perhaps due to the British and American psyche of ruling the entire world through the British Empire and American domination as a result the German approach falls under psychoanalysis tradition while the American Falls under cognitive psychology and the Russian focused on behavioral psychology of course I'm making generalizations here you can find exceptions within each of these three Traditions science Works in generalization in 187 9 the first psychology lab was created by willhelm w at the University of liic in Germany he used himself as a laborat to analyze how the human mind worked he took a TL stoan approach to understand something we have to go back in history event by event until you reach the origin his approach was like finding the source of the Nile so you have to search for its tributaries and smaller parts W's conclusion was that the human mind starts at Birth and as we grow it becomes more and more complex as it matures I'll discuss his psychology in more detail later on around the same time in 1890s Ivan Pavlov a Russian physiologist took a more scientific approach by experimenting on animals he concluded that animals can be conditioned to behave in certain ways for example you can train animals like dogs by giving them treats his research paved the way for a new school of psychology called behaviorism the old adage that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks but you can certainly train a puppy by exposing it to certain conditions and it will behave in the way you want the nature versus nurture debate has always been with us so Pavo emphasized that the environment has a huge role in how we behave while both wound and Pavlov were white gown lab scientists they were a lot of armchair psychologists who are replacing the old school Church confessions with Psychotherapy or the so-called talking cure before Psychotherapy if you had psychological baggage you would go to your church pastor and make a confession to unburden yourself but in the 19th century people turned to doctors and psychotherapists one of the most famous of these of course is Sigman Freud often called the father of psychotherapy unlike wound and Pavlov who worked in their Labs Freud Drew on his own observation of real people mainly his own patients so he was in the field so to speak and concluded that there was something far deeper than what we can see he came up with a new realm of Consciousness which he called the unconscious where we hide our traumatic childhood memories sexual urges as we grow up we suppress a lot of things inside so expressing those memories can be cathartic so Psychotherapy or the talking cure was born in the 1950s after two world wars almost everyone in the world was traumatized and beaten down so there was a huge shift in people's mood the USA claimed victory in Europe was turned into rubble and Ashes also a lot of German psychologists fled to America First due to Nazism and later due to Communism in Eastern Europe America became the land where where individuals and ideas could flourish somewhat more freely this American individualism gave rise to a new kind of psychology cognitive psychology behaviorism Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis all lacked one key feature while you can condition someone to behave in certain way you can unlock someone's traumatic past by letting them talk but you couldn't really make people more competent or smarter to take control of their own lives so the American nitive psychology focused on making individuals more competent more skilled more robust as individuals cognitive psychology a bit similar to the self-help industry Champions positive thinking and positive perception in other words the way you perceive something says a lot about you also interesting to note that cognitive psychology was born around the same time as computers just like computers in study of how our mind processing information became highly important how we understand things solve problems remember things and even how to cure psychological illnesses through cognitive therapy cognitive therapy while not completely excluding the subconscious or environmental conditioning puts the responsibility on the individual forget about your past conditioning or childhood traumas what can you do about it now you're not a victim but a responsible agent who can change things so cognitive psychology has has that American optimism which the German psychoanalysis or the Russian behaviorism lacked with the dominance of cognitive psychology the intention shifted to society as decades pass sociology especially the French postmodernist version grew into robust discipline to study the role of society on the individual so social psychology was born social psychology studies is the group side of our psychology how we perceive behave in groups so social psychologist study power dynamics obedience altruism violence and the influence of education system all deconstructed through the French postmodern lens with the microscope on the role of education system on individuals came child psychology how to educate the kids in the best way now all of a sudden Freud made sense if childhood is the most critical period in one's life one ought to study it not just that Society has a duty to educate its children to become good citizens but then came the backlash that the education system was creating uniform citizens why because while the education system has many positive sides as it allows children the opportunity to learn it has an extremely negative side too it focuses too much on standard and Conformity which kills children's unique and original creative science we ought to celebrate differences then came the psychology of difference what are the differences between the Sexes even among different cultures and races how can we evolve differently so evolutionary psychology focus on the history of human evolution so to sum up philosophy was the matter of all sciences and ancient Greece and Rome but as humans develop more sophisticated knowledge of the world we learn more about the natural world philosophy became too complicated as a discipline so it gave birth to many children each specializing in tackling specific questions for example physics and chemistry took over the study of the physical world then in 19th century biology took over the study of life and then then late 19th century early 20th century philosophy G bir to psychology to study the human mind of course there's also a branch of biology called physiology that studies the functions of the brain and the nervous system but the mind has become the domain of psychology in today's world what's the difference between psychology and philosophy the main difference between philosophy and psychology lies in the question they ask philosophy generally asks why questions or tries to find the reason behind ideas thoughts or why we have a mind in the first place psychology on the that hand asks how questions for example how the mind works how thoughts and ideas has come to us and how the mind breaks down to fully understand the two different disciplines let's imagine Shakespeare's Hamlet holding a skull in front of him and asking questions if Hamlet was a physiologist who would hold the skull and ask how the stuff inside the skull are you the brain matter works on mechanical level if he was a philosopher he would ask why this thing exists in the first place does it exist or not if he was a a psychologist he would ask what happened to my father and damn my childhood joking aside psychologist Hamlet would ask how the stuff inside this skull controls my body my life and my behavior so that was a brief history of psychology in the west and around the world of course it has far more complexities then can be fully conveyed here so with the invention of psychology as a separate discipline in the 19th century it grew to become more complex with its own unique approaches schools and ideas the German School of psychoanalysis broke the human mind down into smaller parts while the Russian behaviorists saw how we can be conditioned to behave in certain ways and the American School of cognitive psychology focused on how to empower the individuals despite the handicaps of subconscious or the environmental conditioning in the next segment I'll answer the big question question what is psychology and more specifically what is consciousness I'll discuss the various psychological approaches and branch of psychology I'll also try to answer why we have psychology and what its main [Music] purposes two what is psychology previously I talked about the origin of psychology and give you a brief history of psychology its philosophical origin and a brief overview of its development in Europe and its various branches such as psychoanalysis behaviorism cognitive psychology social psychology and child psychology in this segment I'll dive a bit deeper into what psychology studies or more precisely what the human mind is I'll discuss how modern psychology leans more on the material side of the Mind rather than the spiritual or Divine notion of the Soul which was the case throughout history I'll also tell you a few important psychological terms and branches of psychology that will help you in the subsequent sections to illustrate psychology in the human mind let me give you a computer analogy there's a belief that humans are just machines so let's run with that let's assume we are a smartphone or computer I said before physiologists study the brain or the hardware where the thought and ideas occur without the hardware or neural wire ings there is no idea or thought for all we know a rock cannot think as far as we know for philosophers the focuses more on the software or applications why do we have such and such software and what are their purposes psychologist sits somewhere in the middle between the hardware and the software therefore psychologist more concerned with the operating system and how the thoughts are processed and how it impacts the subject I.E us so so the brain and the nervous system is the hardware the mind or the psyche is the operating system and the thoughts and ideas or software or applications that function in conjunctions between the hardware and the software so psychology mainly deals with the operating system how it Bridges the hardware with the software or how the mind Bridges the brain with thoughts ideas and most importantly our behaviors now to understand what psychology is first we need to ask a fundamental question what is a human mind is it just a few brain cells fused together or is there something deeper than that is it just matter or soul in philosophy two opposing schools have battled for centuries on the one hand we have materialism stating that everything is in essence matter from Tiny atoms and cells today most scientists especially physicists believe that there is nothing Beyond matter so they are materialists idealism on the other hand argues that everything is based on ideas the Greek giant Plato argued that everything that exists is a mere copy or shadow of a perfect form that only exists as an idea in most religions this Perfection is often referred to as the god that created all the matters we see but God himself is invisible because it doesn't matter so one of the biggest dichotomies and psychology is mind versus matter or materialism versus idealism Mind Body dualism evolutionary biologists would argue that the mind is just an evolved tool to help us navigate life it connects our brain with our nervous system to interact with the environment the mind has some pre-installed software like the instincts to eat have sex and find company and these instincts have evolved over millions ions of years but it's also open to learning and evolution as we grow the Mind grows with us to help us adapt to changes in life the philosophy of materialism goes along these lines there is no soul nor God nor Spirit everything is evolved as a means to an end mainly for the sake of survival the answer to the question as to why humans are so much more intelligent than other animal is simply because we had to deal with different challenges compared to other animal animal some animals prioritize speed like cheetah some height like giraffes some brain size like humans and some cooperation like bees it's simply a means and end how to survive and thrive in a merciless nature the Greek philosopher Plato on the other hand argued that matter is secondary to ideas for him everything that exists only exists because of an ideal form the ideal form only existed as ideas reality is just a portion shadow of those ideas so he argued that our Essence is separate from the physical matter like atoms and bones and flesh the philosophical School of German idealism including Emmanuel Kant George Heel and Arthur schopenhauer agreed with Plato that ideas override matters so psychology is the analytical branch of German idealist philosophy one of the biggest schools of materialism is Marxism develop by the German philosopher and Economist Carl Marx who took hegel's history based philosophy and married it to modern science to create a new school of materialism Marx famously said that religion is the opiate of the masses Marx believe that we are motivated by material things the idea of Soul or Spirit or God or nothing but made up to numb the pain of not having enough material things in the world for Marx the poor work in class instead of having access to the material resources in society go to church to console themselves just like a drug addict who uses Ops to numb the pain of harsh existence so Marx would base his psychology on materialism basically we invent ideas religions drugs and everything in between to cope with a lack of enough material needs we are a simple animal made of matter and seeking matter and coping with ideas or imaginary things when we don't have enough material objects put simply we imagine things we do not possess as soon as you have them you can no longer imagine them so today's psychology in general leans more on the side of the material science and less on ideas or Soul or philosophy today the terminology is less philosophical or religious but more scientific psychology itself has branched out based on what questions psychologists have asked the three main branches are behaviorism psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology three branches of psychology the early psychologists took a physical approach to the discipline but it turned out the mind was a little more difficult to break down into its physical parts because of the deeper subconscious mind as well as instincts so how do you study the invisible mind there are a few ways to know the Mind observe in Behavior listening to the patient talking and recording changes over time the German psychoanalysis focused on patients talking allowing people the freedom to talk gives a window into their childhood memories through which you can have a glimpse of their subconscious mind not only could the patient describe their state of mind but the mere Act of talking seem to bring change in the mind often cathartic so psychoanalysis and Psych therapy went hand in hand to understand the mind you have to listen to the person Sigman Freud popularized the talking cure in which patients would lie down talk openly without someone judging them Not only was it therapeutic it also open a window into the person's mind today this method is widely practiced in the developed world where patients spend hours in hours on therapy with a psychiatrist or a counselor people in the developing world do not have the means or are less prone to seek therapy another famous psychologist was the Swiss Carl Yung whose theory of the collective unconscious manifested itself in myths and literature specifically through archetypal characters within storytelling while fro was talking to people Yung was reading myths and stories that have survived for thousands of years while Freud focused on the individual Yung focused more on the collective sign of our unconscious while psychoanalysis became extremely popular two important criticism remained unanswered one it is hard to generalize based on individual patients telling their stories or relying on myths to fully understand the human psyche and the second problem was that people often lie and make up stories and stories are just made up in other words it's fiction not fact so not everyone is telling the truth so to overcome this two problems of subjectivity and unscientific storytelling another School of Psychology was born to make it more scientific behaviorism instead of listening to people talk observe the subject's behaviors and actions the old adage that don't listen to what people say instead watch how they act the way people behave can tell us far more accurately what's going on in the mind so behaviorist psychologists study not only what their subjects say but also observe what they do action speaks louder than words but just as psychoanalysis had some shortcomings behaviorism too had some shortcomings one of its biggest problem was that human behavior is not set in stone it can be learned and changed in other words the human mind is far more complex than our Behavior can show another problem with behaviorism was that knowledge impacts Behavior not just that the Observer can change what is observed just like in quantum physics the mere Act of observation changes how the subject behaves so Consciousness is more complex than just Behavior so psychologists shifted their attention on our cognitive ability and how our knowledge can shape our Behavior so a new branch of psychology focused on on the learning process which is called cognitive psychology it studies a connection between someone's perception intelligence memory problem solving ability and more and their behavior in other words how knowing and learning things change one's Behavior so cognitive therapy similar to psychotherapy argues that knowing something or learning something can have an impact on someone's Behavior within cognitive psychology we have social psychology how individuals behave within a group dynamics or how a group behaves against another group also child psychology how children learn and grow and how the education system can be utilized effectively to teach children positive behavior but the most fundamental question in Psychology is consciousness Consciousness subconsciousness and unconsciousness Human animals are the most sophisticated when it comes to cognitive ability no other animal comes close our level of cognitive ability allows us to see things far more crispier than other species but Consciousness is far more mysterious than it may appear there are different levels to it in other words it has so many chambers and we are only aware of its upper chamber more most accessible to us which allows us to make decisions and choices in life we often think what we do is our own free will in other words whatever we do our decisions on a daily basis are based on our free choices you chose to watch this video you chose to eat the lunch you ate you choose your partner you choose your clothes these choices are done on a conscious level which means we are aware of what we do however there's a deeper layer to Consciousness which we are not aware of of the subconscious mind is when we are not fully aware of what we do for instance when walking we are often not conscious of taking each step it is done almost automatically we can focus on something else while walking sometimes subconscious and unconscious are used interchangeably the unconscious mind is the deepest level of Consciousness if you think of a well Consciousness is the top level you fully see it the subconscious is midlevel half dark and half lit the unconscious is the bottom level which is too dark to see but when it comes to our behavior and actions we might think we make decisions and choices on a conscious level but psychologists agree that most of what we do in life is determined by the unconscious in other words when we choose a mate it's more unconscious than conscious who we are attracted to is often an unconscious decision as I discussed before schopenhauer argues that our Free Will is extremely limited the fact that you select certain clothes certain foods Etc reveal a deeper subconscious level bias that we are not even aware of first we have deeper instincts food sex and Company are the three most basic human instincts which means we have no choice but to obey these urges we eat to survive we procreate pass on our genes and see company of others because our survival depends on the group we are in we have no choice in these matters at all those decisions are made for us by our Natural Instincts even the mere Act of watching this video might also not be conscious because this subject itself triggered something inside you in other words what we're drawn to is trigger somewhere deeper than Consciousness according to psychon analysis School of Psychology most of the mental illnesses are because of our deeper unconscious desires hitting a brick wall called reality as schopenhauer said the blind will has no purpose so when life is good it needs some chaos to steer Us in some way it has been proven that mental illnesses are far more prevalent in affluent countries than poor countries because in poor countries the outside reality is chaotic enough that the blind will have to deal with an affluent countries life is no longer a battle for survival so the mind has to create newer chaos and dramas horror movies dangerous sports and addictions replace the chaos of survival in a safe and comfortable Society Consciousness also includes ego the rational side of the human mind that controls often suppresses and regulates the instinctive impulses and urges so Consciousness is this Dynamic back and forth between the upper conscious rationality and those that are the base level unconscious instinctual forces Wolf Gang ker who lived between 1887 and 1964 was an Estonian born German psychologist who along with a few other psychologist develop what's called gastal psychology it basically means that human perception of reality is a complex system but also very Dynamic according to the Russian behaviorist Pavlov animals learn through trial and error or back and forth conditioning which you could say was perhaps very cyclical meaning it was contained and limited to only animals responding to outside stimulus in other words the animals were incapable of thinking about the solution but merely reacting to the stimuli but ker argued that animals also use something called intelligence to give them a deeper insight into the process that speeds up learning a great example is the invention of new tools and Technology he saw how chimpanzees solved problems not only through trials and errors but also through insight and intelligence in other words after many trials and errors there is also a breakthrough or a moment of insight his Psychology was a progressive learning trial and error leads to a new insight and the future Generations built upon this Foundation to continue the pro progress in philosophy this is very similar to George hegel's Progressive history through dialectical process this Dynamic Learning System is called gestal psychology which is a more holistic approach so Pavlov's behaviorism saw animals as somewhat passive Learners while gastal psychology saw them as active and dynamic Learners in 1935 he fled Germany and settled in America where cognitive Psych iology became prevalent and where individual Innovation and productivity was championed now let me answer one of the most important question you might have what is the purpose of psychology psychology is a discipline came out of philosophy to respond to the modern condition when faith in God in church declined humans were becoming the masters of Earth so any problems needed solving were left to science to solve while it's origin is in philosophy its practical origin is offering help to people with psychological problems in the 19 century hysteria was a phenomena particularly common among women psychotherapists in Europe offered services to patients before the Scientific Revolution people sought help in churches in local parishes but now they visited psychiatric clinics with the advancement of medicine mental illnesses were treated in the same way as has other physical illnesses people visited a clinic to get help from a professional psychotherapist outside the mental clinics or asylums Psychology was used to dig deeper into the human mind to understand what makes us tick this was more driven by curious minds but also by companies to develop drugs offer medical help but also in the areas of education and advertising schools employ counselors psychologists hospitals employ psychiatrist sports clubs employ psychologists so psychology became a tool for competition among companies companies who understood the human psyche could sell more and get ahead of their arrivals but it also poses some serious questions the biggest problem psychology face is that it's highly subjective we are scientist as well as the patients or subjects psychology like a mirror looking at a mirror due to its subjectivity it's highly exploitable in some parts of the world psychology has become a tool for drug companies to sell highly addictive drugs another use of psychology is to understand the human mind enough to Target the subconscious mind through advertising in order to sell other products for dopamine Rush chemical that makes you feel good not that you need the product another use of psychology has been ideological once we penetrate the human mind you can also bend it in a way that fits your narrative your ideology so psychology is relatively young discipline but an extremely powerful weapon in today's world to sum up psychology is mainly founded on the idea of Material Science and less on the spiritual or Divine notion of the human mind psychology mainly studies Consciousness through our behavior and our cognitive abilities it has developed into to a robust sence so much so that companies and governments employ psychologists to make policies today the biggest battleground of psychology is gender identity for example which has become highly political in some Western countries in the next segment I'll discuss Consciousness from various perspective is it a system or is it a functional entity in other words is consciousness A system that is set up or has it just grown out of necessity [Music] three Consciousness structure versus function previously I discussed the history of psychology its various branches and the debate between materialism and idealism psychology tends to focus more on the material side as it applies methods used in Material Sciences in this segment I'll look at Consciousness through two different approaches in psychology on the one hand we have structuralism that sees Consciousness as a holistic system that we're born with and we slowly get to know it as we grow up functionalism on the other hand analyzes Consciousness through its functions and argues that Consciousness doesn't really understand itself so structuralism has an optimistic Outlook that one day we will understand Consciousness while functionalism is more pessimistic that Consciousness may never understand itself Consciousness in Latin means knowing with so it has a social or interpersonal and even moral connotation somewhat similar to the word common sense in a literal sense is a tool for knowing others but of course today we think of Consciousness being more individual generally referring to our awareness of the world ourselves our intentions emotions and sensory experiences it's a window that we see the world with but it's also a window that sees itself Consciousness as a mechanism allows us to be aware of our environment ourselves our ideas and generally to make sense of the world but awareness is just one component of Consciousness the greatest mystery of Consciousness is the power of selfawareness in other words Consciousness is like a computer that knows its own existence not only that it can also grow meaning our awareness can increase as well as decrease this makes it tricky to understand what it is and how it came about and how it works for thousands of years humans mainly philosophers have tried to understand how the human mind works even to this day nobody really knows how Consciousness works today we divide Consciousness into three different layers the conscious at the top the subconscious in the middle which is a bit muddled and finally the unconscious at the bottom of the world that is dark and often unreadable through our conscious torch in modern psychoanalysis it's often agreed that the partt and scene seem to have a huge influence on our lives as Sigman Freud argued the first philosopher to tackle the question of Consciousness was the French philosopher and scientist Rene deart he saw it as our god-given ability to think and Mak sense of the world as a rationalist philosopher he thought we're born with the ability to reason and thing so our Consciousness had very little to do with the outside world it was given to us by God but the British philosopher John Lo a pioneer of empiricism argued that we learn everything through experience in other words we learn things through our interaction with the outside world in his famous 1690 work asay concerning human understanding he defines Consciousness as the perception of what passes in someone's mind in other words whatever we see hear smell taste or touch allow us to perceive things and Consciousness basically registers all those sensory data so L's philosophy was influenced by the Natural Sciences and he in turn influenced future philosophers who grounded their ideas more on the concrete and less on the abstract Johan Frederick Herbert who lived between 1776 and 1841 was a German philosopher he was interested in how our conscious mind worked he was curious since we get so many ideas on a daily basis and we're bombarded with sensory information overload yet our mind seems to sort things out pretty well to keep us less confused about the world how does the Mind do it he used magnetism as as an analogy for how the conscious mind works Consciousness he argued Works in Reverse meaning the opposite repels while the same attracts when similar ideas or patterns come together they form a bigger or complex idea and concept but when two contradictory ideas come to mind they battle it out the losing idea is not destroyed but it falls down into a darker part of Consciousness or storage space which we call the unconscious they remain there until Sigman Freud comes along to tell us what happens next those ideas in the subconscious do appear from time to time to haunt us terrify us and even pleasantly surprise us for example in the works of Marshall Bruce In Search of Lost time so his Consciousness for Herbert was well-developed sorting system like one used in post offices our senses is send information to our mind and our conscious mind sorts things out it keeps the useful information at ready and not useful information is sent down to the unconscious storage space as clutter to sum up Herbert was the first philosopher psychologist to tackle how our conscious mind deals with sensory information and he was also the first to identify two level of Consciousness the conscious and the unconscious which influence future psychologist such as Freud so he was a pioneer of a psychological approach called structuralism who asked how Consciousness worked in other words he saw Consciousness as a sorting structure like post office with different rooms willhelm wound Born In 1832 and died in 1920 is generally considered the true Pioneer of psychology because he founded the first psychology Lab at the University of liik in 1879 interestingly his father was a Lutheran Minister just like the philosopher fedick Niche who lived around the same time as him wound influenced by Darwin believed that all living organisms including animals and plants had Consciousness in fact he saw life itself as a mental process it's important to point out that in Germany the greatest philosophers like Kant Hegel schopenhauer and others believed in the Primacy of idea over matter the mental side of life was was far more important than the physical side the German School of idealism and philosophy has been immensely popular not only in Germany but throughout the world so w also subscribe to the idea that life from the very beginning was mental as well as physical so he believed that the true purpose of Psychology was to describe Consciousness to prove his hypothesis W didn't sit in his chair he got his hands dirty by dissecting frogs like a true scientist just as Aristotle turned philosophy into an empirical science one made philosophy into an experimental psychology but the biggest challenge for any psychological experiment was that Consciousness is not simply an external phenomena like in physics or biology it's mostly internal but this didn't deter wound wound saw Consciousness is a structure or a machine that can be broken down into smaller parts that can be studied German science tends to be more analytical breaking things down to its smaller parts or elements that each can be analyzed separately he found subjects real people and showed them a beam of light he measured the light's color intensity and duration he then observed their reaction either voluntary or involuntary on top of that he also asked the participants to describe the sensations they felt he was thorough in his job just like a true stereotypical German he concluded that our Consciousness is born out of our sensation depending on the quality intensity and the type of feeling it triggers for example a smell triggers a certain sensation depending on its quality of good or bad intensity strong or weak and feeling Pleasant or unpleasant wound put Consciousness into three categories representation willing and feeling representation simply means perception of visible images or intuitive imagination of memory of a particular thing or even illusion as Arthur schopenhauer argued a few decades earlier so representation simply means we find certain images sounds tastes and so on like trigger warnings either to act or not to act to eat or not to eat so forth rotten food versus a delicious pizza is an easy one one triggers you to be repulsed and the other triggers you to eat the second category of Consciousness which w't called willing is our experience with the outside world meaning it triggers us to act or not to act run or not to run so representation is the first warning trigger and the Willing is what we do with representation the third category is feeling so once we perceive something through representation then we act as in willing and finally how we feel after the fact this is similar to schopenhauer's theory of the world as will and representation which I covered in My Philosophy course but schopenhauer only talked about the blind will that determines most of our actions and representation of that will is how we see the world W also conceded that the Willing part was difficult to study as as it is deeply internal it is somewhat similar to intention so it is always tricky to know the true intention of someone you can study Consciousness as a representation by providing the participant with images sounds smell and so forth which trigger certain Acts or Wills either voluntary or involuntary while the Willing part is difficult to analyze they ask the participants to describe how they felt so w concluded that the two categories of Consciousness that can be studied or representation and feeling the Willing category however is difficult to study as it happens internally inside the person wound considered while Consciousness was purely sensation based cultural aspects such as religion as well as language also played a role in shaping it in other words Consciousness was developed through our interaction with the physical world but our culture or nurture side of life also plays crucial cral role in shaping our Consciousness so to sum up W pioneered experimental Psychology by tackling the biggest elephant in the room Consciousness he concluded that Consciousness and life go hand in hand Consciousness has three categories representation which is our intuitive perception of reality willingness which is an internal trigger that pushes us whether to act or not to act and finally feeling which is how we feel our after the act or in action in other words the process of Consciousness goes like this we sense something we act and then we feel in 1959 Charles Darwin published his famous book On the Origin of Species in which he argued that humans have evolved from other animals through what he called the process of natural selection not only he revolutionized biology its influence on philosophy was immense it paved the way for philosophy to become more evidence-based so a new discipline was born psychology came out to make philosophy of the Mind a scientific Endeavor around the same time as W in Germany there was an American philosopher psychologist who saw Consciousness somewhat differently not as a structure but more like a stream with a specific functionality won't belong to the structuralist School of Psychology that studied or understood the as a structure that could be broken down into smaller parts American psychologists however favor the more darwinian approach which is called functionalism which is related to evolutionary biology according to darwinian approach species live and die based on how they adapt to the environment in other words in Psychology the mind or Consciousness is an Adaptive mechanism not some solid structure that was bestowed upon us from God or somewhere else that can be broken down into smaller pieces so one has to state it as a whole not analyze its parts William James born in 1842 died in 1910 was an American philosopher psychologist and artist his brother Henry James was a great novelist William James was a pioneer of psychology in the United States while want saw Consciousness is somewhat a solid structure that can be broken down and analyzed separately James followed in the footsteps of Charles Darwin and his evolutionary biology as I discussed won't ask what Consciousness was while James asked what it did or how it functioned he asked a very specific question how does our Consciousness tackle the problem of sensory overload at any given moment our Consciousness is overloaded with sensory information it's like a river or a waterfall gushing with information he used River as a good metaphor for Consciousness which also became a literary style particularly in the works of James Choice Virginia wolf and others in which they wrote about characters who instead of carefully formulating and articulating ideas Express their inner thoughts and monologues just like a stream that runs without stop this is called the stream of Consciousness so William James wanted to understand how our Consciousness functioned James saw it as a process like Evolution not an outcome or solid foundation for him Consciousness was more fluid than solid when you see Consciousness as a Non-Stop stream it becomes highly tricky to Define it you need to plug the flow to really understand it but the real question is that despite the Overflow of information our mind seems to function pretty well and we don't get overwhelm most of the time there has to be a mechanism by which our mind copes with the Non-Stop stream of Consciousness James just like Herbert understood that the Mind must categorize or combine ideas and information to make it easy for us just as farmers use channels and ferrow to control river water for irrigation our mind also must have a mechanism by which it controls the Overflow of information to understand William James let's go back to the German giant Emmanuel Kant the German philosopher argued that the human mind imposes a structure to the outside world we are not passive receivers of information from outside but an active participant in imposing structure to the outside world James argued that the river that runs inside our mind is not a constant River but it sometimes pauses to take a break to reflect this reflective moment allows us to assess things if you stand under waterfall soon you will be overwhelmed by the amount of water and make it hard to breathe but if you have a switch like a shower you have time to breathe and reflect this allows our mind to sort things out and categorize things so we make sense of the world James also argued that Consciousness doesn't have a specific course or beted instead it shifts from part to part so I would say for William James Consciousness is more like a Cascade than a stream instead of flowing smoothly information often jumps and Falls so each person is a different casket through which our conscious ideas flow and move about William James also developed a theory of emotion with a fellow psychologist named Lang they argued that emotions are tied with actions in other words certain actions trigger emotions for example when you see a wild animal before you feel fear you start to flee the feeling of fear only comes after you become aware that you are running in other words your feeling of fear develops through the perception of the act of running which also raises your heartbeat sweating and so forth so fear results from your awareness of an action another example is you are only happy when you know you're smiling this is somewhat counterintuitive because we think our happiness makes us smile or our fear makes us run James and Lang argued that when it comes to the consciousness of emotions we act and then become aware of emotions in other words we are not conscious of our emotions unless we see something change for instance a smile or a frown this is somewhat similar to want's Theory Of Consciousness as he too argue that willing or action comes before feeling but what's the difference between feelings and emotions to understand this let's talk about a Dutch psychologist who made the distinction quite clear niik frider who lived between 1927 and 2015 was a Dutch psychologist made a distinction between emotions and feelings emotions are unconscious therefore we have no control over them for example fear Joy anger sadness disgust and shame feelings on the other hands are our interpretation of our emotions for example worry irritation frustration grief resentment Etc in other words emotions are the invisible part of the iceberg while feelings are the visible tip feelings are tied to our conscious thoughts and we generally have control over them we can choose to feel certain way but emotions are spontaneous for example when we see a dangerous animal fear forces us to flee since emotions are deep they affect our behavior and physiology so others can see our emotions Fe feelings however don't impact our behavior and others tend not to see it to sum up William James saw Consciousness as a fluid mechanism that runs like a river or Cascades and cascad some information remains to form our memory you could say that he was conent and that our mind is like a fishnet and it catches information needed in other words our Consciousness is very much outcome driven and purposeful it remembers what it does so next time it has a choice repeat or ignore so Consciousness is not some blind mechanism it's quite a goal oriented mechanism since Consciousness is closely tight to memory to really understand human memory let's go back to 19th century Germany Herman eing house who lived between 1850 and 1909 was a German psychologist who studied memory to work out how it worked he tested his own memory by trying to remember two lists of work one a list of meaningful words and then a list of 2,300 nonsense syllables each three later long he would look at the list for a second or two and then pause for 15 seconds he repeated this process a few times until he could remember them he recorded his result meticulously like any scientist would what were his results he found three interesting results first he realized that he could remember me meaningful words significantly better than nonsensical words so meaning is closely tied to memory second he also noticed that the longer he spent memorizing something the faster he could recite them so the more time you spend remembering something the better your memory is and third he also understood that the interval between seeing the words and reciting them also affected his memory in other words the longer he waited to recall the harder it was so as time passes our memory loses most of the information so he concluded that the contents meaning and duration of exposure and the length of the interval between exposure and recall affected his ability to remember so our memory best retains information that is Meaningful to us the more we time spend memorizing them and finally the quicker we are asked to recall them in other words our memory is goal driven and time efficient this is no surprise as we all know revision before an exam actually works and a week after exam we tend to forget most of it but what happens to the information we do not retain and in late 19th century group of psychologists realized that below the conscious memory lies a whole different world a gray subconscious or dark unconscious world where we keep some dark memories we know that what we forget it doesn't go away it goes somewhere in our deeper subconscious that later comes to haunt [Music] us in the late 19th century hysteria was a huge phenomena in Europe mostly among women but also affected men especially soldiers today known as PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder it basically meant an explosive outbursts of emotion often uncontrollable akin to some volcanic eruptions would come out families were struggling to deal with their loved ones emotional outbursts often negative emotions we know that volcanos happen because the earth's core is a molten rock and sometimes it breaks through so hysteria was something similar there had to be a subconscious or unconscious chamber that erupted sometimes one of the earliest to study the unconscious and memory was the French physician Pierre Janet who lived between 1859 and 1947 who worked at a hospital in Paris in 1880s and 1890s his work predat Sigman Freud's psychon analysis so some argue he was the true Pioneer of the subconscious mind he observed trauma among his patients who were terrorized by some past traumatic experiences in other words there was no Terror in the present life but it was inside the subconscious mind so some past memories were haunting these people he called this phenomena disassociation what does it mean simply put it means you are safe right now but the past trauma is still inside you and telling you that you're not safe hence the name disassociation for Janet this trauma that caused disassociation might or might not have happened to the person if someone experiences a traumatic experience du during their childhood which they may have forgotten it doesn't go away but merely sits in the subconscious and when triggered by something else they resurface but he also said the experience of dissociation could also happen to people without past trauma because some people are more predisposed to feel that way this perhaps hints at the yungan collective unconscious and that we inherit some traumas from our past ancestors for example we all have nightmares such as falling down from high place perhaps an experience passed down to us from our human ancestors as well as primate ancestors living in trees most people have nightmares while asleep but those suffering from Hysteria experience those nightmares during their waking hours Sigman Freud read Janet's book while rejecting some of his ideas he was immensely influenced by him in the next section I'll discuss Freud and Jung so to sum up psychologists have tried to understand Consciousness there were two approaches when it came to explaining Consciousness German structuralism led by willhelm wound and anglo-american functionalism led by another willhelm William James for the structuralists Consciousness is like any structure that can be broken down to its parts and then those parts can be studied and analyzed wound broke down Consciousness into three parts representation willing and feeling just like a house made up of exteriors interiors and temperature regulation so to put it crudely structuralism sees Consciousness a structure built by someone I.E God or someone else if you see a machine or a house your immediate reaction is that someone must have created it so that's this structuralist view but if you see a river your immediate thought is not a Creator but rather you see it as an organic process which is a functionalist view functionalists see Consciousness as an Adaptive mechanism that has evolved and it functions the way it does because it has evolved to solve problems of existence it's more fluid rather than a solid structure Consciousness changes and adapts and responds to its environment while functionalism has more Anglo-Saxon Roots thanks to Charles Darwin's influence structuralist School of Psychology has more German Roots due to its influence of German idealist philosophers such as Kant heel and schopenhauer Anglo Saxon philosophy has traditionally prioritized pragmatism while the philosophy of the Continental Europe prioritized ideas I should also mention that in Russian speaking World another School of Psychology was more prevalent which took a more physiological approach to the study of Consciousness so the Russians mostly focused on the brain studies and how Consciousness and brain are connected this is partly due to Communism prioritizing materialism so some of the most influential study of the brain have been done in Russia and again it goes back to Pavo who took a behaviorist approach to psychology in the next segment I'll focus on behaviorism and discuss the old debate between nature and nurture how much of our behavior is determined by the outside condition or the environment we live in four behaviorism nature versus nurture in the previous section I discussed that there are two distinct approaches to the study of Consciousness and the German speaking world the psychological School of structuralism saw Consciousness as a solid structure perh perhaps built or preassembled so to study it it broke it down into a smaller part just like a machine or house in the Anglo-Saxon World however there was a different approach to Consciousness influenced by The evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin the functionalist School of Psychology saw Consciousness for how it function as an Adaptive mechanism for the functionalist Consciousness is not as solid like a house but very much fluid like a river in the Russian speaking world however the focus of psychology wasn't on philosophical questions on Consciousness but more on how our Behavior can tell us about our Consciousness in other words how Consciousness manifests itself in our actions and behaviors do you behave because there's an innate structure telling us how to behave or do we behave because we learn to behave due to our environmental conditions nature versus nurture is one of the oldest debates in philosophy and psychology our are animals programmed on an instinctual level to behave in certain way or are they capable of learning this question was one of the very first that early psychologist tackled and we have come to know it as the behaviorist School of Psychology behaviorism is one of the most important branches of psychology simply put behaviorist psychologists study how humans and animals behave behaviorism as an approach began with animals for the obvious reason it's a lot easier to carry out experiments on animals than humans the second reason behaviorism started with animals is that animals cannot talk so to study animals you have no choice but to study how they behave unless you're a wizard but behavior is also more accurate way of understanding humans watch what people do not what they say our actions speak louder than words one of the very earliest experiments that k kickstarted behaviorism took place in 1890s in Russia as well as in the United States around the same time the father of behaviorism is the Russian and his greatest childrens are American ion Pavlo who lived between 1849 and 1936 was the son of a priest just like willhelm w and was supposed to become a priest himself but he changed his mind and instead studied medicine which ultimately won him a Nobel Prize in medicine in 1904 in the 1890s he carried out a few experiments on dogs in which he planted a device to measure the saliva secreted when dogs were offered food which he called uncondition stimulus in other words you see food you know we want to eat it it is simple Association you can do the same experiment on me not with dog food but with pizza he soon noticed that whenever the dog was not shown directly but it was implied through other signs the dog also secreted sver in other words the dogs did not clearly see the food but they Associated certain signs like Bell buzzer or even light with food therefore stimulating them to release saliva this second degree stimulation he called conditioned stimulus this conditioned response was a learned response and in other words dogs were trained to associate food with certain sounds or light or a person so he concluded that animals were capable of learning as well as unlearning when the stimulus was not followed by food repeatedly the dogs learn not to anticipate food we all know the story of the boy who cried wolf if you repeatedly lie to animals they no longer trust you today it's known as pavlovian conditioning in which animals learned to associate certain sounds objects or people with food Pavlo scientifically proved what humans had done for thousands of years slowly domesticating certain animals with the promise of food to sum up pavo's experiment showed that animal behavior can be conditioned through a stimulus that promised food in other words the dogs didn't see food but thought of food when they saw a sign which is nothing but a promise someone might do a lot for promise of a free lunch me included so we humans are no different from dogs we learn by association and memory while the Russians experimented on dogs the American did a similar study of other domestic animals to understand how animals learn to behave in certain ways why or how do we learn the things we [Music] learn Edward Thorndike who lived between 1874 and 1949 was a US psychologist ologist who did his experiments around the same time as Ivan Pavlov's the Russian experimented with pets while the American chose another domestic animal Kentucky Fried Chicken I mean chicken Thorn Dy built a series of Mazes and let a bunch of chicks to navigate their way through the labyrinth in order to get food he later carried out more experiments with cats instead of a maze the cats were supposed to solve certain puzzles in order to get out and get food he learned that the cat solve the puzzle through trial and error but as they practice solving more puzzles the cat also found the next puzzle easier to solve the more they practiced the better they got he concluded that learning is outcome driven which he termed as the law of effect when the animal soled a puzzle their neural connections increased because the link between a situation and response solidified around that stimulus as a solid answer but when they failed to solve a problem their neural connection weakened and those responses were discarded quickly so learning is heavily solution oriented animals remember good outcomes and forget bad outcomes good outcomes solidify in the brain to reinforce a bias towards those solutions for future problems in his famous book animal intelligence published in 1911 Thorn Dy concluded cluded that animals learn not through insight as they lack rationality but they learn through simple trial and error for Animals good outcomes lead to good feedback and bad outcomes lead to bad feedback in the brain to sum up Thor and concluded that in nature learning is heavily outcome driven and ruthless you don't get many chances to make too many mistakes you either eat or get eaten which keeps you on your toes when it comes to quick learning this is EV Evolution 101 among animals the quick Learners leave on to mate and slow Learners die out without leaving any genetic Legacy so learning is an Adaptive mechanism but how does learning take place in the brain in other words how knowledge and brain matter Collide is there a specific part of the brain where knowledge is [Music] stored Carl Lashley who lived between 1890 1958 wanted to know how learning takes place on a physiological level in the brain and cells he removed parts of the rant's brain but noticed that they still retain what they had learned to some extent he concluded that memory is not localized but takes place in the entirety of the brain not only the brain retains learning in memory but even our muscles keep memories which we conveniently call muscle memory writing a bik is something we do not forget because it's stored not only in the brain but also in our muscles Lashley concluded that there's no physiological change as a result of learning in other words learning is not like Photography in which you expose the chemicals to the light to capture a photo there's a chemical reaction that leaves a mark But animal brain is not like that it's far more vers stle even if you damage one area the task is taken over by another area but learning is not just a matter of the brain but the timing is also crucial for instance we all know that younger children learn languages faster and better than grown-ups it's true among animals too the first psychologist to study age specific learning was an Austrian Conrad Lawrence who lived between 1903 and 1989 was an Austrian psychologist who studied how young ducklings Bond Ed with their mothers but when the mother was absent the little ducklings attached themselves to another duck a foster parent but what was interesting for him was that this bonding only happened at a certain age typically at a young age this is called imprinting if the bond happens at a crucial stage of development that Bond cannot be forgotten in other words you cannot teach an old dog new tricks but you can certainly do with younger animals he concluded an an deeper instinctual level learning is very stage specific or age specific just like young ducklings can bond with a foster parent at a certain age among humans young people are far better at learning a language than older people it is perhaps an Adaptive mechanism in which our survival relies on how closely we bond with a parent or how quickly we learn the language of the community we live in it ensures survival some psychologists have however disputed that animals only learn instinctively in some cases our learning can override instincts one of the most interesting experiments was done by a Chinese psychologist to counter laurence's Instinct based psychology Zing yyang KU who lived between 1898 and 1970 was a Chinese psychologist he put kittens in the same cage as rats to observe if they grow together and where the cats see rats only as food not only they didn't attack the rats they played together as mates he concluded that there is no such thing as Instinct because cats didn't eat the rats if they lived with them he argued that instead of finding nature in the animal we should build nature in them I wonder what would have happened if the cat was not given food or starve for a while would it instinctively eat the rat but of course this raises the ethical question of deliberately starving an animal so far we've just discussed experiments done on animals but not on humans this changed in America in the 1920s by Sherlock Holmes sidekick John Watson I'm kidding it's a different John Watson John Watson who lived between 1878 and 1958 was an American psychologist with a somewhat Rocky childhood of his own due to his alcoholic dad and religious mother not just that his career also had a rough patch as he was forced to resign due to his romantic affair with a colleague while the previous psychologists did most of their experiments on animals Watson wanted to observe humans so he found a 9-month-old baby called Albert B the purpose of the experiment was to find out if they could condition the baby to fear certain Animals by accompanying that animal with scary noise the baby was shown various animals like dogs rats monkeys and rabbits first he was shown these animals and objects without the noise as expected the baby showed no fear of these animals then in the next step the animal was paired with a loud frightening noise this resulted in the baby associating fear with the animals although such an experiment would not be possible today it proved that pavo's conditioning applied to humans in the same way what's worse little El ber not only Associated the white rat with fear he was also frightened of anything similar to a white rat so not only can we be conditioned to behave in certain way our emotional response can also be conditioned in other words the environment a child grows up in has a massive influence on their behavior as well as their emotional response John Watson advocated parents to take a proactive approach to child rearing which some criticized as to rigid and Factory like approach his own childhood must have influenced his work as later psychologist thought while his findings were remarkable his prescriptions were not very helpful with behaviorism taking a firm root in America in the 20th century it became much closer to darwinian evolutionary biology that learning is not a luxury but a necessity of life in other words our survival necessity is the matter of all inventions and learning BF Skinner who was born in 1904 and died in 1990 considered the most famous behaviorist psychologist was an American who despite wanting to be a writer turned to behavioral psychology building upon Pavlov and John Watson's research but just like his fellow Countryman Edward Thorndike he concluded that learning is primarily outcom driven or result based instead of a neutral stimulus like Pavo and Watson sound stimulus he developed a physical lever for the animals to operate in order to get food his experimental subjects were rats and boxes that had a bar fitted in when the animals pressed the bar first out of curiosity or deliberately or accidentally food would appear it turns out the rats only continue to press the bar if they previously received food those rats who didn't get food decreased or stopped doing so so the learning was based on positive outcome as he continued his experiments while varying slightly the conclusion was that rats were also learning to adapt to the changes that were happening to their environment animals learned to respond to positive and negative reinforcements based on their previous experiences not only that the rats responded to stimuli that reduce their negative reinforcement in the shape of electric shock it turned out the rats learn better through positive reinforcement than negative ones so reward is better than punishment or carrots are better than sticks skanner also found that different rats responded differently to different stimuli concluding that rat's genetic makeup to a large part determin its intelligence or curiosity that favor them and the environment they are in in other words nature as well as nurture determine how a person or animal adapts to the environment they live in nature is the foundation while nurture is the walls and roofs Skinner also question traditional education by offering a more feedback Based Teaching approach in which the teacher and student interact more often not waiting until the student is done with a project a more interactive education is more effective itive his psychology is known as radical behaviorism arguing that Free Will is nothing but an illusion he even coined the term selection by consequences in reference to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection that our behavior is determined by the consequences of our action it is not a passive learning process but a somewhat Dynamic one in which the subject presses a lever to receive Food in other words we act and beh behave in a way that helps us get more positive outcomes and avoid negative outcomes so to sum up Skinner continued Behavior psychology but added a more proactive mechanism in his test to observe that animals basically learn in respond to positive consequences better it's all good and dandy to know how we learn based on good outcomes but an important question is how to unlearn things so far we have only discussed how humans and animals learn but we have not tackle the question how we can unlearn things feor doski wrote about how we can be contaminated by bad ideas and would be awesome if you could unlearn some terrible things it would make life a bit easier to unlearn bad things we have learned either voluntary or involuntary the old saying that once learned cannot be unlearned but our next psychologist trying to show that we can actually unlearn things as we learn things I discussed in pavo's experiment that we learn things by association but we can also unlearn through Association or dissociation Joseph walp who was born in 1915 and died in 1997 was a South African born American psychologist Who is credited with the new technique and behavioral therapy he understood that humans cannot be anxious and relaxed at the same time if someone is relaxed he's not anx anxious and vice versa he asked his patients to imagine the past events that gave them anxiety when they show signs of distress he would ask them to stop imagining and relax he would repeat this process a few times and within a short time the patient would be reconditioned to associate the distressing events with feeling relaxed this went against the Psychotherapy practice that tried to get to the bottom of the trauma or to root cause to a at instead he focused on the symptoms and Associated those symptoms with relaxation in the present this technique of Des synthesizing the patient to the traumatic experience allowed reconditioning the brain to focus on the present relaxation not the traumatic past events so this went against the grain because in order to treat someone from past trauma he introduced the past enough time so that patients felt desensitized in other words in order to get rid of a phobia one has to touch the spider it simply tricks the brain to associate fear or trauma with good stuff if you add enough sugar to something bitter it becomes sweet to sum up the behavior School of Psychology started with Ivon Pavlov's environmental conditioning experiments then the Americans carried experiments on other animals and humans later on the Russians focused more on the brain side as they saw psychology part of physiology and Americans more focused on learning and education so American behaviorists Skinner Watson walp and others concluded positive reinforcements was better than negative ones today we associate positivity with Americans and brooding pessimism with the Russians behaviorist looked at how Behavior was established in Animals by restricting or providing condition conditions for a desired outcome you can train a dog to behave in certain ways which often goes against their innate instinctive response while those instincts cannot be eliminated through conditioning animals have the capacity to learn and adapt to new conditions so learning is closely tied to survival and adaptation to the environment so we behave and learn to behave that guarantees our survival food is the best way to train an animal while behaviorism looks at how animals and humans behave on the surface the human mind is far more complex than simple Behavior there are layers of Consciousness that are totally hidden from us this question of hidden Consciousness was a pressing issue in the German speaking World in my discussion between structuralism and functionalism the Germans were more in favor of a structure than a functional mechanism while behaviorism which is closer to functionalism and darwinian Evolution became a dominant approach in Psychology in the US and the German speaking World psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy dominated that discipline two of the most important figures in Psychology came from the German tradition of analytical psychology so they saw Consciousness as a complex structure with different layers or Chambers next I'll discuss the Austrian Sigman Freud and swiss Carl H and the P that is called uncon five Carl Yung versus Freud the battle of the unconscious in the previous segment I discussed how early psychologists carried out the experiments with animals to understand why they behave the way they do or how to condition animals Behavior later on the experiments were conducted on humans and the results were the same that humans too are subject to environmental learning this approach pioneered by Ivan Pavlov in Russia but became widely popular in the United States became known as behaviorism while behaviorism was established scientific approach psychology in the German speaking World there was this feeling that lab science truly couldn't explain everything the human mind was far more mysterious or sophisticated than experiments and Labs can truly understand so this led to another approach in Psychology which became known as psychoanalysis which has its roots in German structuralism of Wilhelm F who is considered the father of modern psychology instead of relying on Behavior psychoanalyses focused on understanding Consciousness through two methods first they looked at mental illness and asked why the mind gets sick second they looked at dreams and asked why we dream this led the early psychoanalysts to the conclusion that Consciousness is more complex than we can see or understand there has to be another level to Consciousness which is not really available to us this became known as the subconscious or unconscious two of the most important psychoanalysts were the Austrian Sigman Freud and the Swiss Carl Yung so in this section I'll discuss their approaches to psychology their similarities and differences in the battle of the unconscious while the previous generations of psychologists studied psychology in the lab through experimental psychology some psychotherapists were in the fields dealing with people with mental problems so their study was not based on lab experiments on animals or humans but approach psychology through fi observation at the time behaviorism was the dominant approach in Psychology to which studies were based on experiments however around this time and a new approach psychology emerged from the field mental asylums hospitals and Psychiatry clinics where psychologists observe their patience and discover the existence and the power of the subconscious one of the earliest pioneers of psychoanalysis was the French doctor Pierre Janet Who is credited to having both influenced Sigman Freud and Carl Jung however when it comes to establishing psych analysis it's Freud and Yung who stand out Sigman Freud often called the father of Psych analysis and the Swiss carong agreed that the unconscious is perhaps a more powerful part of their Consciousness despite their similarity in focusing on their unconscious as the best source of understanding the human mind they also had a few differences Sigman Freud who was born in 1856 and died in 1939 was a practicing psychotherapist in Vienna the capital of austr hungaryan an Empire and one of the most sophisticated cities in the world at the time despite its sophistication and wealth there were a lot of people with mental issues but why would such an affluent City have so many people suffering from psychological problems materially people were well off and they had a few worries regarding survival Necessities like food and shelter there had to be something deeper than just material needs we humans crave with science diminishing religious credibility people had lost faith in God and church now each person had the responsibility to come up with a solid meaning for their lives it's easier said than done so Freud realized that there has to be something deeper than we are consciously aware of he took the task of understanding what lies behind the conscious mind just like his predecessors he took a structures approach to the Consciousness and came up with a three-level structure the conscious the preconscious and the unconscious he concluded the unconscious was the deeper well and the source of water and some of our thoughts and experiences in other words it's a hidden unconscious Beast that determines some of what we think and do and philosophy schopenhauer called it the blind will I should also point out that both schopenhauer and Freud were influenced by Hindu philosophy more specifically the concept of Maya which which is very complex but simply put it means that the world we believe in is nothing but an illusion or a mask we put on as we go through the cycle of reincarnation Atman or Brahman on the other hand is the unchanging reality or the true self which can only be understood through vigorous meditation and conscious understanding in Hinduism Maya is the perceived reality Atman or Brahman is the true reality reality which is also the conscious reality shophow called the true reality will and the perception of this will as representation in other words we know the reality is often an illusion and the truth lies somewhere deeper only revealed to us through active digging I.E meditation or being conscious in the present Freud as a clinician came across patients who suffer from Hysteria he quickly learned that when when patients were asked to describe their fantasies or hallucinations the mere Act of expressing those thoughts alleviated them from the illness he concluded that many mental illnesses such as anxiety phobia hysteria paranoia were caused by a bad experience in the past that were stored in the unconscious instead of forgetting those traumas the patients must have kept them somewhere in their unconscious memory in other words our experience due do not go away but stay with us often hidden from our conscious mind it was not external forces such as God or destiny that drove the human mind to Madness but it was all internal it was here that Freud understood the power as well as the scope of unconscious mind and our conscious life the conscious mind is just a tiny part of our psyche there's a whole new world that sits beneath the conscious mind and makes some of our decisions and determines some of our experiences just like an iceberg Consciousness is just the tip and always at the mercy of what's hidden however it's somewhat Dynamic process between conscious preconscious and unconscious just like an iceberg that floats it reveals different parts at different times while Science and Technology were making the lives of Europeans more comfortable and predictable the unconscious mind was a source of all the chaos that a person may experience in other words no matter how orderly and safe the out outside world is the unconscious mind is the main source of our psychological problems often caused by things that happen to us long time ago in our past and some cases in our ancestral past the unconscious is also the place where our deepest animalistic urges reside for example our instinctive and often unlimited desire for food and sex as schopenhauer said quote life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom in the unconscious mind According to Freud there is no freedom of expression but a lot of repressed memories and suppressed emotions I should also point out that this is modern condition because in the olden days people confess their inner turmoils guilt or suppressed memories during a church confession or people were much closer to their families and communities so they could confide in those around them but in big cities like Vienna where more people were living closer the emotional distance was much wider it was far more difficult to confide to anyone this has not changed today most people live in big cities yet we feel lonelier than ever while these conflicts occur Down Below on the conscious level it causes us a lot of pain suffering and even grave mental illnesses because they find no venue to vent out it's like living in a flat and you're surrounded by noisy neighbors who constantly find to make noise and there's no Escape at some point you lose it and you go back on their doors our unconscious runs a Titanic battle between opposing forces your WS hitting brick walls your urg is unanswered which can cause turmoil of course our rational conscious mind tries to tame the beast but we are not always successful when the rational conscious mind gets overwhelmed we experience mental problems so how to cope with the problems of the unconscious mind Freud offered a really unique treatment it was so simple that it became revolutionary he didn't invent the wheel he simply copied as Century old method for hundreds of years people went to church to confess their sins the mere Act of talking was enough to alleviate them from the pain of guilt or trauma they were holding inside the mere Act of expression unburdened them from their emotion turmoil Freud did the same he opened the church no he asked his patients to relax on a comfy chair and talk which became known as Psychotherapy or simply the talking cure today millions of people mostly in wealthy countries get their treatment from their therapists in poor countries people either cannot afford or perhaps a more reasonable explanation is that life on the outside is harder than the inside so when you survival mode your mind is focused on living another day your mind has less time to create problems for you internally but when we have plenty of food and live comfortable life the fight moves inside our psyche Freud noticed that civilization was one of the leading causes of more mental illnesses as it limited individual Freedom as an aggressive animal and the wild mental illness is perhaps not on your priority list as you battle elements and wild animals this became the basis of Michelle fuko's philosophy that Madness and civilization go hand in hand I should also mention that the talking cure was as much about letting it out but also it was about someone listening to you most of us live lonely lives in big cities so having someone who listens to you you alone without you shouting is incredibly powerful so your therapist is doing the job of your partner parents friends or colleagu colleagues who don't listen to you so therapy is as much about letting things out as it is about having someone who can lend you their time and listening ears of course in modern time you have to pay for that service Freud's proofs Freud's theory of the unconscious sounds neat but what evidence did he show that we truly have an unconscious mind he offered four pieces of evidence if volcanoes and hot springs are evidence of molten rock beneath the earth's crust then there ought to be some evidence for the unconscious mind too for's first evidence of the unconscious mind was mental illnesses experienced by his patients they were physically healthy so why should they suffer from these unknown psychological problems he listen to them describe their mental state and their childhood memories in other words they were exper experiencing hysteria or hallucinations often very randomly this proved to Freud that there must be an underlying unconscious Freud's second piece of evidence of the unconscious mind was dreams we all Dream It's Universal among all humans young old men women across all cultures for Freud dreams or how our UNC conscious mind is communicating to us about our deeper urges and wishes often repressed wishes from childhood Freud's third piece of evidence is our verbal mistakes he argued that our repressed wishes also come to us through simple verbal mistakes which we know today as fraud and slip which is another way to understand the unconscious our conscious mind fights to keep certain things at Bay but from time to time we involuntarily give out what we really desire for example instead of saying I like you books you might say I like your boobs if you're attracted to the woman I've done it finally Freud also studied expression in general for example a lot of novelists write fictional Tales but often don't even sell or don't even show them to anyone Freud called this an act of catharsis you express simply because you cannot bring yourself to tell people how you feel in other words you're letting out your supress emotions in stories storytelling or writing is so powerful as a method of catharsis that sometimes it's used to treat mentally ill patients as it allows them to let it out catharsis also happens when you read a book or watch a movie as you feel a release when the characters you relate to in the story gets what he or she wants so novelists and storytellers act as our therapist as they allow us to express what we feel in inside but cannot express either we don't have the words for it or feel socially restricted today online comments is one way of such release Freud's childhood for Freud childhood memories were the most powerful ones sitting in the unconscious why as we grow up we have to leave our childish behaviors feelings memories behind but we cannot really leave them behind instead we leave them trapped inside us we suppress them a great example is the American novel The Catcher And The Ry by JD Salinger about an Angry Young Man who refuses to grow up because he sees grown-ups acting fake children are very honest but as they grow up they are expected to be nice and polite which means often being fake so part of this facade of niess is suppressed Expressions which mean means most of social situations you cannot be truly yourself another element of Modern Life is the value of predictability from trains to work hours everything is meant to be predictable like a machine yet the unconscious is often volatile chaotic and Restless our conscious mind has to reconcile the inner turmoil with a predictable outside world it's like taming a wild beast to behave in a world run like a factory this struggle takes a huge mental toll as ourc conscious and rational mind tries to calm or suppress our unconscious a pool of urges and Chaos hence more and more people break down under the weight of modern demand to keep a tap on their emotions for millions of years we have evolved animals that roam the Wild and now live in urban boxes While most of us can adopt to this life some cannot to some map Sigman Freud Drew on philosophers such as schopenhauer nich and other psychologists as well as Hindu philosophy to understand that beneath the rational conscious mind lies a much powerful unconscious he observed patients suffering from Hysteria and other mental illnesses and allowed his patients to talk about their deep desires and Fantasies to understand the unconscious he also studied dreams as well as slips of the tongue to reveal the hidden Earth es we suppress in our unconscious while fruit understood the power of society and civilization on the individual he mainly focused on the individual psychology his or her own unconscious his or her own suppressed memories his or her own suppressed emotions his or her own childhood as a result he neglected the group Society or the collective side of our Consciousness here comes another giant of psychoanalysis Carl Jung who built on Freud's individual Center psychology with a more collectivistic psychology Carl Yung was born in 1875 and died in 1961 he was a SS psychologist who became very close to Sigman Freud but later they parted ways after some disagreements while Freud was interested in the individual what went on their subconscious their childhood and their inner struggles Yung looked outside he was interested in the commonalities that we all have despite our cultural or religious differences in other words there are certain similar myths and symbols that all humans share irrespective of their cultural backgrounds while your own childhood experience are restored in your own individual memory the common myths and symbols are restored in what he termed as the collective memory as part of the collective unconsciousness this Collective memories are not the result of your own individual experiences but inherited from our distant ancestors past down to us from generation to generation despite slight variations these myths and symbols are more or less the same in all cultures in other words a large part of our psyche or conscious mind is filled by the memories of our ancient ancestors just like some software while each individual Hardware is different but we often share the same software to really understand yung's Theory we can look at it through philosophy the Greek philosopher Plato thought everything that exists in the physical world are mere Shadows of the form that only exists in the mind the mind is primary and outside world is mere shadow of that mind later in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe rationalists believe that humans have an innate knowledge of the world as babies grow up this innate knowledge simply unfolds itself so that we make sense of the world Carl yung's theory of the collective unconscious is somewhat similar we have inherited most of our unconscious memories and archetypes from our ancestors as we grow up we simply unfold those memories to make sense of our personal experiences and build a Persona of Our Own in the world in other words most of our psychology is given to us at Birth as we grew up that psychology mainly unravels itself in our unconscious to guide us through life for better or wors the inherited psyche or the collective unconscious manifested in myths and symbols determines a lot of our beliefs experiences and emotions Yun call these symbols andits as archetypes that are molded inside us prior to our birth in other words archetypes are like templates or Windows for us to understand our our own experiences in life but interestingly we're not aware that they are given to us in other words we're not conscious of these archetypes we often think of them as somewhat naturally our own just as your genes are passed down to you through your ancestors these memories are passed down through cultural archetypes if your DNA is the memory of your genes the archetypes are your Collective cultural memories you could make a connection between yung's archetypes and Richard Dawkin theory of memes just as genes spread through Offspring memes spread in the same way so not only do we have a genetic memory of our past ancestors we also possess the unconscious Collective memories of the early humans to fully understand Yung let's go back to philosophy in the 18th century Emanuel Kant argued that our knowledge of the world comes through our experiences but not only that we have an innate mechanism of of rationality that puts a structure onto the world in other words we are not passive receivers of Knowledge from the outside we impose our own mental structure on the world yung's archetypes are somewhat similar and that through these archetypes in our Collective memory we make better sense of the experiences in the world archetypes sit in our unconscious mind to give us pattern so our experiences and emotions appear meaningful to us in the same way we have the capacity to learn a language we also come preassembled with the capacity to relate to archetypes and stories which ensures our survival within a group in a similar fashion as our physical features like Eyes Ears Nose allow us to make sense of the physical world our capacity for storytelling allows us to navigate society and culture just like Freud Yung also belonged to the structural School of of psychology so he saw Consciousness or the human psyche as a structure divided into three parts the ego the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious the ego is the rational or conscious side of our psyche that regulates our daily lives it's like a control mechanism like steering wheel in a car the personal unconscious which Freud mainly focused on includes our own individual memories including repressed memories and supress emotions from our childhood the collective unconscious which J mainly focused on is where the archetypes we have inherited from ancestors or restored just as Freud provided dreams as evidence of the existence of the unconscious Yung to use dreams as evidence of the collective unconscious in other words our dreams are like Windows into our past Collective memories be it in early humans or even Apes who lived in trees or even farther in the past but yung's most sophisticated evidence or his most important contribution to psychology didn't come from Material Science or lab science but from storytelling or literature window to the collective unconscious while fruit looked at mental illnesses dreams verbal mistakes and cathartic expression as evidence of the unconscious mind what was Jung's evidence for the collective unconsciousness in other words how did he know we are wired to relate to archetypes you looked at one activity that we all humans share storytelling from a very early age children are mesmerized by stories and even in adulthood we love stories why because stories not only teach us they also have a deep emotional impact on US stories teach us about the world through other people's mistakes and trimes but they also emotionally Bond us with others just as we Bond over food we also Bond over stories the first time we meet people we are desperate to know who they are and what their story is in fact you could argue that most religions establish themselves through stories at the heart of which is the story of creation and heaven and hell even in the age of science we humans crave for science to explain to us the story of our orig through scientific evidence most tribes communities societies even Empires were built upon stories and myths without a common myth it's hard to unite an Empire or a community in fact we humans crave for meaning in our lives how do you find meaning through the stories we tell ourselves every morning we wake up and go to work because we believe in a story that our life is moving somewhere depression or anxiety result when we lose faith in our life's story so our life's meaning is closely tied to the stories we tell ourselves some believe in religions some in success some in love some in social justice these are all stories that give people's lives meanings nations are built on stories patriotism or nationalism story in which people inside the country believe in that country being the best or better than other ones or people often talk of morale among soldiers it simply means they are losing faith in the story told to them so story and belief are closely tied like conjoined twins great storytellers and filmmakers are the ones who tell believable stories that are convincing Yung found that storytelling is where archetypes live in other words archetypes are common and recurring characters in all stories some of the examples Yun gives us are the wise old man the wise old woman the hero the father the mother the devil and so forth if you look at myths and stories you can find many of these archetypes throughout the world Yung even called the masculine and feminine as archetypes which he called animus and anima we are born with both masculine and feminine traits so as we grow we grow into an archetype depending on our sex the strong masculine man is craved by females and the soft feminine Woman craved by males in other words these are refined characters through the river of History just as Pebbles are refined by running water over the years and centuries and Millennia these archetypes are refined characters through a thousand years of human evolution so these archetypes are not the results of our conscious mind but the collective unconscious if a woman laughes to read about a strong masculine man like in 50 sheets of gray not because it's a western concept but it is because females on the unconscious level are hardwired to seek such archetypes as a mate in the same way the male psychology craves a feminine woman why archetypes now you might ask why these archetypes came about the simple answer is in our evolutionary biology as a living organism or animal we Face predators and prey we Face survival challenges how we behave when faced with these survival challenges Define our archetypes so archetypes are wired into our DNA because they allowed us to survive and pass on those genes to others archetypes are our survival instincts written in Stories the same rule applies to stories themselves only stories that have resonated with most humans have survived through centuries as italic calino said folktales or Legends are told and retold that they have become smooth like pebbles by the time they arrive to us in other words the longer story or myth survives the more bare born or their Essential Elements remain so one can say that these archetypes are the essential characters in the survival of our species as they guide each generation to survive thrive and successfully reproduce not only do these archetypes guide us in life to make sense of our own experiences they also play a role in our personality in fact we unconsciously use the archetypes to display a Persona of our own to the world when we present ourselves to others we are careful to show some bits and hide other bits not only that we are also selective about what to show depending on where we are we might take a different Persona in the presence of a beautiful woman who we are romantically interested in but in the presence of our family members or friends we put out different Persona all together the the same when we go to a job interview we present our stronger s the Japanese have a concept called hone and TMI hon means your true self and the one you show inside your own house tatma is a Persona you show to others or a social facade they are vastly different Yun calls this public self or archetype the persona but there's also the part that we don't want the world to know Yung calls it the shadow which is the opposite of the persona it sits in the dark and we do everything to hide it from others these are our secrets and suppressed urges or thoughts in storytelling it's the villain and the religions the devil we tend to associate the Shadow with others and rarely with ourselves the bad guys are always someone else and rarely ourselves for example throughout history in all Warfare both sides call the other side as the bad guys or villains or evils and amid all these archetypes Jung argued that our life's ultimate goal is to realize the true self which is the most important archetype Martin heider called it authenticity which he argued can be achieved if we truly understand and accept death as a necessary condition of life for Yung finding the true self needs a lot of work just like in Hinduism it can only be achieved through consciously seeking it Yung says by understanding the unconscious we free ourselves from its domination so to sum up while Freud argued that the unconscious which includes collected memories traumas suppressed emotions from our childhood determine most of our behavior and experiences in life Yung went a step further saying that it's not just our own individual unconscious memories but also the collective unconscious Memories We inherit from our ancestors so the unconscious is is not just our own but also those who came before us just as flud and Yung were active before the second world war the landscape changed quite a bit after the war with the invention of crucial piece of technology in fact this technology was invented precisely to be used in the war to break the German intelligence it was a computer with computer schem rationality and cognitive ability so far I have discussed psychological tools and approaches and trying to understand the human mind but in the next segment I'll look at the solutions to psychological problems two distinctive approaches emerged as a way to combat psychological problems in the German speaking World Psychotherapy emerged as a talking cure and cathartic expressions and the Anglo-Saxon World cognitive psychology emerged as a way to make people more empowered through intellectual stimulation so in the next segment I'll discuss Psychotherapy and in the following segment I'll talk about cognitive psychology or cognitive Psychotherapy six Psychotherapy how to cure modern suffering previously I discussed Freud and Y who focused on the unconscious while Freud took an individualistic approach to the person's own unconscious developed in their own lifetime Yung took a more Collective approach approach the unconscious developed in our lifetime but also inherited from thousands of years of evolutionary wiring while both Freud and you try to explain the unconscious mind in this segment I'll talk about a few approaches to psychotherapy or how to solve psychological problems or how to cure the suffering of the Mind three distinct approaches emerged in how to cure modern psychological illness gal Psychotherapy took a more masculine approach by emphasizing rationality therefore putting the responsibility on each individual to grow up and take accountability in other words it's better to be cruel than to be kind humanistic Psychotherapy on the other hand took a more softer feminine approach by emphasizing human needs for fulfillment a lonely and disconnected World a third approach called existential Psychotherapy which emerged from literature and storytelling emphasized life's purpose and meaning as an antidote to Modern suffering before I explain different schools of psychotherapy I should give you a brief philosophical context one of the most fundamental questions that has puzzled philosophers and psychologists has been the problem of perception how do we know reality how do we get knowledge of the world so before we can cure modern suffering we ought to know what causes this suffering so perception is at the heart of suffering for thousands of years philosophers believe that knowledge is in need in us most likely given by God or Gods however in the 17 and 18th centuries two opposing philosophical approaches emerged in Europe on the one hand rationalism argues we have an innate knowledge of the world it is given to us at Birth the outside world just helps us or triggers us to unfold this innate knowledge why innate well it's god-given or you could say it's a new DNA the British philosopher suggest John Lock and David hum didn't buy this rationalist explanation instead they argue that our knowledge comes from outside as babies we know nothing as we grow up we learn things through our senses and slowly we build a more sophisticated understanding of the world and ourselves so rationalists think knowledge is innate and empiricist think knowledge comes from our experiences with the outside world then the German philosopher Emmanuel KH came to bring these two schools together he argued that neither rationalism nor empiricism has the full answer the real answer is somewhere in the middle first Kant argued that we can never fully know the world so our knowledge is always partial biased and limited why because we're not sponges that absorbs everything rather we are extremely picky and selective in our understanding of the world our knowledge of the world comes from outside but we are not passive rather we're extremely selective in receiving the knowledge he argued that we humans in fact impose our own structure to the world so our knowledge comes to us organized categorized and easy to understand how do we do it he said we have an innate mental structure that we impose onto the outside world however despite Khan's reconciliation of empiricism and rationalism Science in general favored empiricism and it was more evidence-based the empirical approach broke things down into a smaller part so we can analyze them separately this approach gave science the ability to study matter in its smaller parts like atoms cells particles and so forth so in Germany in 1880s when w opened his lab at the University of lii he was a scientist and naturally he explained the psyche through empirical experiments he studied the Mind as a structure that can be broken down into smaller parts thus his psychology is termed as structuralist approach which is very much an imperious approach to the human psyche so a structuralism and psychology saw the human mind as a structure that can be broken down into smaller parts and each part can be studied separately wound for example studied humans reaction to certain triggers and thus divided human consciousness into three parts representation willingness and feeling the next generation of german-speaking psychologists responded to structuralism by arguing that it is a mistake to look at the Mind as a structure one of the first psychological approaches that question structuralism was gal psychology gal psychology we are rational responsible individuals Galt and German means form or pattern so instead of looking at the Mind as a structure that can be broken down into smaller components like one studies living organism as atoms or cells gestal psychology looks at the Mind as a whole therefore it's a holistic approach much closer to kant's rationalist philosophy as well as Plato's idealism but who are gastl psychologists Fritz pearls who lived between 1893 and 1970 a German born psychologist agreed with Kant that we see reality through a human lens or a funnel therefore our perception of reality is not the entire reality but a limited perspective of reality for example when we see smell hear or touch something we only get a partial understanding of what that thing really is as KH said we can never fully know the real world as it is but only know the phenomenal world as we see and experience it so Fritz pearls alongside his wife Laura s focused on the perception itself not the object of perception according to structuralism you can study Consciousness through the its reaction to the outside world events you can trigger someone through sounds lights as William want carried out his experiments pearls however argue that perception cannot be broken down our knowledge of reality is highly subjective depending on factors such as proximity similarity prior exposure connection between objects and change as a result studying perception or Consciousness should not be based on some unified or rigid structure that can be fully understood instead is very much changeable and we each have a somewhat control on how we perceive things in other words we are responsible for how we see the world we cannot hide behind the blind will or unconscious mind controlling us at the end of the day we are free to see the world I should also point out that Fred pearls was of Jewish descent therefore he lived when Nazism took over Germany and had to flee at the time many Germans saw no problem with Nazism and later some people blame their actions on following orders today a lot of people blame society or the system for their behaviors or mistakes so Fred's pearls wanted accountability for our actions pearls also had an issue with psychon analysis which argued that most of our behaviors were the result of the UN conscious mind this means we cannot be held responsible for a lot of what we do because we do them unconsciously but putting the blame squarely on the unconscious mind also had another danger it meant that patients had to be rescued for the unconscious hell who could rescue them of course psychotherapists this gave the psychotherapists an immense power over their patients so Fred's pearls wanted autonomy and responsibility which became the foundation of gestal psychology gestal psychology emphasizes personal autonomy and control over our perception actions and emotions for example you're capable to learn how to understand the world either follow others or carve a path for yourself you're also responsible for your actions not only that you're also responsible for how you feel in other words nobody can make you feel angry only only you can if something doesn't go your way you have a choice either find a solution or get angry or cry about it you can't blame the world for how you feel to understand Pearl's idea it's helpful to compare it to the Buddhist doctrine of conscious living and now and here and the impermanence of things we are responsible to be aware of ourselves and the world but also aware that everything is constantly changing just as your feelings are changing so it's your job to be aware of an everchanging World guest ad is a very individualistic approach that gives the individual full autonomy and responsibility so one cannot blame the world unconscious fate or anything you can only blame yourself nobody can victimize you but yourself everything is a choice gal psychology is a very masculine approach to life which guy CaRu who was born in 195 one further emphasized the role of a strong masculine father as a role model for a strong robust children the absence of a strong father leads to soft children this idea is beautifully depicted in one of the most profound Russian novels written in 1859 oov by Ivan goncharov is about the laziest character in literature who refuses to get out of bed for his entire adult life now interesting his friend is a total opposite a discipline responsible hardworking man why is that the lazy man has a Russian father while his hardworking friend has a German father goncharov of course pokes fun at Russian Society compar it to how hardworking the Germans are so gal psychology emerged from that German psyche of hard work and responsibility G psychology had a huge influence in the field of empowering the individuals you make or break your own fate nobody can help you if you cannot help yourself some criticize it for being a bit cold and less cozy for not relying on others being in the presence of people who take care of you can also be extremely important for one's mental well-being which according to gestal might make you too soft so to sum up Pearl's Pioneer G all Psychology by arguing that how we perceive reality is far more important than the reality itself it's not what you see but rather how you see is your cup half empty or half full do you take responsibility or do you blame others he also emphasized that individuals take responsibility for their thoughts actions and feelings nobody can force you to think act or feel the way you do except yourself reason meets emotions while gal psychology takes a very rational approach to human psychology therefore it neglects the human emotions that often overpower our rational thought it's all good and well to be rational all the time but when we get emotional which we often do rationality is thrown out of the window and with throw a tantrum like babies so how do we rationally explain and understand and tame emotions this task of reconciling rationality with emotion fell to the American psychologist Albert Ellis Albert Ellis who was born in 1913 and died in 2007 developed a psychological theory that is somewhat similar to gestal arguing that experiences do not cause emotional reaction in us but our belief system does his theory is called rational emotive behavior therapy he argued that our irrational thoughts causes emotional issues we often call some people overthinkers anxious or neurotic if two people lose their jobs an overthinker who suffer from irrational beliefs may find it a lot harder to deal with it while the rational thinker might look for a solution by simply trying to find another job or one blames other for his Misfortune while the other May blame themselves or nobody instead focuses on finding the answer Ellis says the best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own you realize that you control your own destiny rational thinkers accept reality and try to find new ways to adapt to it rather than wishing reality was different so how we emotionally respond to a difficult experience has a lot to do with ourselves our belief system and less so with the outside world if someone jumps in the queue in front of you you have a choice how you react get angry simply accept or calmly tell the person the irrational response would be anger the rational response would be either acceptance or tell the person to move back back if there is no danger in doing so so how we think for the most part affects how we feel religious Aesthetics are often very humble they rarely get angry or emotional why because they are very strong in their beliefs they have a firm anchor that nothing can sway them so our belief has a lot to do with how we feel when faced a problems of Life the idea that your belief can impact your behavior can be seen through What's called the placebo effect when patients are given medication and they get better perhaps because they believe that the medicine would cure them Dr Bruce Lipton in his 2005 book titled the biology of belief unleashing The Power Of Consciousness matter and miracles goes so far as to claim that our beliefs impact our DNA rather than the other way around the science of epigenetic suggest that our Bel leaves have influence over our genes especially in the protein culture as I discussed earlier while talking about Carl yung's theory of the collective unconsciousness that our beliefs are closely tied to our stories the better stories we can tell ourselves the stronger our core beliefs become there's also a claim that certain diseases are more prevalent in certain cultures due to their cultural beliefs the mainstream science however holds that we inherit most of our biology from our DNA Ellis also observed that irrational thoughts tend to be black and white fixed and absolute while rational thoughts tend to change depending on the environment so to sum up Ellis argued that our emotional reactions to an external event is tied to our irrational beliefs which holds us back while Gest all psychology and Psychotherapy emphasize rationality and accountability which is a very masculine and mature approach approach for some psychologists reason alone couldn't solve our modern suffering no matter how rational we are our anxiety and suffering can only be cured through fulfillment and meaning so here come humanistic Psychotherapy and existential Psychotherapy humanistic psychology social justice and love while guest and rational emotive psychology focused on the rationalistic side of the human Psy I.E individualism as it promoted autonomy and responsibility some psychologists on the left felt this was a bit too individual centered even selfish in essence and also this was very Western but there was also a more Eastern philosophy influenced approach that focused more on fulfillment and self-actualization so this new psychological approach took a more humanistic approach which was more communitarian and less individual istic less rigidly rational but more Humane and softer approach that saw Life as a spiritual journey of fulfillment one of the earliest humanistic psychologists was Eric from who United Marxist social justice with Freudian unconscious mind from was born in 1900 and died in 1980 was a German psychologist who combined Marx's philosophy with Freud's psychoanalysis to develop what is called humanistic psychology KL Marx influenced by European humanism developed a socialist philosophy in which inequality was seen as the root cause of human pain Freud influenced by Hindu philosophy thought that most of our life suffering is caused not by economic inequality but by the unconscious from agreed with both that life for the most part is full of physical pain and emotional suffering why from took a communitarian approach and argued that our suffering is caused by our separation anxiety as humans we first became separate from nature when we developed rational thoughts we saw ourselves to be different from other animals this made the human species the loneliest species on the planet because we were the only species who had this sophisticated language culture and built Empires that run for Generations all thanks to our ability to have rational thoughts so to cope with the anxiety caused by our separation from nature we relied on our families tribes communities and religions and of course God however with the arrival of modernity those communal bonds slowly crumbled so modernity caused our second separation anxiety modernity gave us a lot of choices as well as freedom from religion Dogma tradition and even and family however this Freedom instead of making us happy caused us more loneliness just as sh and kot said our anxiety is the dizziness of Freedom so what's the answer FR offers love as the best antidot to suffering just like the Persian Sufi poet roomi love is the only path that unites us with others the theme of love as the greatest antidote to suffering is also present in the works of the Russian novelist doovi doski saw love as the only way we can truly be fulfilled room's love is more mystical and divine Do's love is more Orthodox Christian as well as the Simplicity of Life seen Through The Eyes of the Russian peasants fr's love is different it's not the love of someone or something but it is a creative capacity to Encompass The Whole World In other words through love we reconnect with nature as well as other people through creative freedom a good example is Art and artistic creativity creative artists capture people's imagination through their art why because they cultivate the capacity to reunite with nature just like n from Saw art as an Avenue to see the world in new interesting ways while many artists lack the ability to love or be loved by those around them yet they cultivate a greater capacity to create art that is loved by many people so to sum up from Saw modern anxiety caused by our separation from nature and Community as a result the antidote to suffering is returned to Nature through creative Endeavors that have love at its heart another psychologist who took a humanistic approach was the American psychologist Carl Rogers while from Place suffering and our separation anxiety offer love as an antidote Rogers argued we suffer because we are too rigid in our views so we ought to be more flexible to change Carl Rogers who was born in 1902 and died in 1987 saw mental illnesses or mental health not as something static that was fixed but as a process that was ongoing in other words not a stationary being but more dynamically moving or becoming like a shifting Target as nature said we are not human beings but human becomings as we go through changes and transformation throughout our lives Roger says quote what I'll be in the next moment and what I'll do grows out of the moment and cannot be predicted for Rogers even our personalities developed through our daily experiences it may seem solid but it's never solidified in fact he argues that a good life is only achieved through our openness to new experiences ideas and emotions as well as accepting to trust ourselves it's only in rigidity that we develop mental illnesses because we either bury hatred resentment inside or show them on the outside rigidity makes it difficult for us to accept reality as it is instead we want the reality to conform to our wishes this causes frustration anxiety and if challenged enough it causes mental illness he also demon that we take responsibility for our lives this accountability also makes our lives easier as we know what to do instead of blaming the world you cannot change the world but you can certainly change yourself one can see the influence of Eastern philosophy in Roger psychology in eastern philosophy instead of changing the world or environment the responsibili put on the individual to change themselves to adapt better in any environment this humanistic and person centered approach was taken up by another famous American psychologist Abraham maslo who was also influenced by the Indian philosophy of self-actualization and fulfillment in life Abraham maslo who was born in 1908 and died in 1970 whose hierarchy of needs is a well-known list of human motivation and the process of self-actualization maslo was interested to know how how we find meaning and fulfillment in life what motivates us to wake up every morning go to work and repeat the same until we retire or die maslo understood that humans achieve different states of Consciousness depending on their needs he divided into two main sections and each of those into separate four parts the first section he called deficiency needs as a living organism our basic needs are air food water sleep warmth and exercise but we also also need to be safe be in the company of others and get recognition from others so our basic needs are mere survival the second section he called growth needs which includes cognitive Aesthetics self-actualization and finally self Transcendence in other words we need to know the world appreciate its beauty showcase our personal potential and finally become greater than ourselves by helping others this is somewhat similar to the Eastern philosophy of achieving a higher level of Consciousness that gives you fulfillment of course in Hinduism and Buddhism Nirvana is escape from the cycle of birth and rebirth but maso's hierarchy of needs is achievable in this world so both Carl Rogers and Abraham maslo took a humanistic approach in which meaning and fulfillment were at the Forefront of human existence while gestal focused on individual responsibility therefore more outcome driven and success based based humanistic psychology however took a softer approach influenced by Eastern philosophy in which one must feel fulfilled this humanistic approach also hinted at another approach which is called existentialist psychology existential psychology existentialism in philosophy came about after the death of God it has its origin in literature in which the characters or heroes are thrown into difficult situations in order for them to struggle and come out triumphant as a philosophy existentialism argues that we are born first and then we can Define who we are according to Jean Paul S perhaps the most influential existentialist philosopher existence precedes essence which means we have no Essence at Birth and as we grow and mature we are able to Define ourselves new God has given us a purpose in life it's up to each individual ual to define a purpose for himself and herself in Psychology existential Psychotherapy is very similar to humanistic Psychotherapy and that both emphasizes Free Will and self-actualization it's up to each individual to find a purpose in life while humanistic Psychotherapy tries to alleviate suffering existential Psychotherapy says we can cope with suffering if we have meaning for our lives two of the most famous existential Psych ologists were Victor Frankle and Rolo M Victor Frankle born in 1905 died 97 was a German psychologist whose three years of horrific experience in the Nazi concentration camp had a lasting impact on him he developed an existential Psychotherapy in which meaning was the most important element in someone's life it famous book Man's Search for meaning published in 194 six details two important human qualities that endure hardship decision-making capacity and freedom he argued that if someone has a solid meaning for their life they can endure any hardship in other words if you have a solid story for your life you can overcome any challenge a story gives you purpose and therefore it anchors you he treated patients who are suffering from grief by trying to find meaning for their suffering he says quote suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds meaning but how do you find meaning Frankle argued that meaning is not created but discovered we discover through work through creativity and through loving others R who was born in 1909 and died in 1994 was another existential psychologist who wrote an influential book the meaning of anxiety in 1950 in which he drew upon philosophers such as sain kard Frederick Niche and Martin heiger to argue that instead of categorizing life's experiences as good or bad we should follow the Buddhist view that all human experiences should be accepted equally why because once we accept all experiences as equally important in our lives we open the door to growth everything we do during the day are significant in the overall story just as every brick is important in holding a building stable so is every little thing we do once we recognize that all of our actions are important we also accept that negative feelings are as important as positive ones in our lives so to conclude this segment and Psychotherapy two distinct approaches emerged guest Al has a distinctly Western individualistic approach while humanistic existential has an Eastern flavor gestal emphasize rationality while humanistic and existential Psychotherapy emphasized meaning gestal psychology grew in response to structuralism and psychoanalysis to put the responsibility on the individual rather than the outside events or the internal unconscious Fred's pearls demanded that individuals take accountability for their thoughts actions and emotions Albert Ellis echoed this in his rational emotive psychology in which he emphasized that our irrational beliefs often cause us emotional suffering and even physical pain instead we should react to outside events rationally Eric from developed what is termed humanistic Psychotherapy in which he argued that our anxiety is because of our separation from nature and other people so he emphasized we developed our creative capacity for love that can reconnect does with nature as well as other people Carl Rogers also took a humanistic approach to mental illness not as something static but rather changeable and impermanent just like the Buddhist notion of the World Rogers emphasized openness to new ideas experiences and feelings also living in the Here and Now maslo further developed it humanistic psychology in terms of human needs in his famous hierarchy of needs chart in which a human Journeys through life from meeting his own survival needs to achieving Transcendence by helping others and finally Victor Frankle and ROM May developed existential Psychotherapy arguing that meaning allows us to cope with life suffering instead of avoiding suffering we come to terms with it once we understand the meaning behind it of course the two World Wars devastated Europe so people felt lost so these psychologists try to find answers guest which takes a more Western rational individualistic approach ask people to take responsibility for their actions and not blame others humanistic psychology took a more communitarian approach that focused more on the meaning and fulfillment and less on productivity and success and finally existential Psychotherapy argues that if you have meaning you can cope with any suffering or challenges life throws at you however computers were invented during the second world war in order to break into the German intelligence so in the next segment I'll talk about cognitive psychology in which the Mind meets the computer unlike behaviorism and psychoanalysis cognitive psychology try to explain human perception memory and the power of intelligence yes we are conditioned by our environment and yes we are prisoners of our unconscious mind but despite all these limitations we are also capable of becoming more intelligent and more aware in other words the mind is not a hindrance but one of the most sophisticated computational machines out there seven cognitive psychology mind versus computer in the previous segment I discussed Psychotherapy starting with gestal approach that put the responsibility on the rational individual and humanist Psychotherapy focused on fulfillment while existential psychotherapy emphasized meaning in this segment first I'll discuss cognitive psychology that emerged after the second world war in which the focus shifted from Behavior to perception and memory and how the mind works especially in the light of the invention of computers cognitive psychology saw the limitations of behaviorism as well as psychoanalysis behaviorism focused on learning but it failed to adequately explain perception and memory but most crucially it failed to explain intelligence while psychoanalysis focused on the subconscious or unconscious it two failed to fully explain why some people like Sigman Freud and Carl Yung were able to have such Insight with others did not how is it possible for mind such as Alan churing to invent a computer that broke the German Enigma Cod while behaviorism psych analysis saw a uniformity and standard among individuals and that they all behave in the same way under certain conditions we all have the same unconscious mind but they failed to understand the differences in our cognitive abilities one of the biggest problems with both behaviorism and psychoanalysis was that they made the individual somewhat powerless in the face of their environmental conditioning or the unconscious Beast so cognitive psychology emerged to tell us that the human mind is one of the most sophisticated and Powerful machines out there instead of hindering us our mind is immensely empowering to fully understand cognitive psychology let's discuss its sociocultural context one of the characteristics of the modern condition is the prevalence of machines dominating society and determining our lives this is beautifully depicted in the novels of France CFA such as the trial and the metamorphosis in which the individual feel paralyzed under the weight of modern bureaucracy while novelist such as kfka and Aldos Huxley warned about machines sucking out or Humanity psychologists instead of pushing back against technology try to use science to align humans with machines so a new School of Psychology was born cognitive psychology tries to look at the human brain in the light of advancement in the machine and especially computers to understand how to empower individual rather than complain cognitive psychology has its origin and gestal psychology as I discussed before gestal psychology focused on perception and how the mind organizes perception but most crucially rationality is the best tool we have as a result cognitive psychology expanded on our perception how it becomes memory and how memory in turn influences perception therefore we are able to utilize it to improve our lives in short cognitive psychology wanted to understand the connection among attention memory and intelligence before I go any further let me Define a few important terms used in cognitive psychology the main focus of cognitive psychology is the perception and memory when we deal with the outside world or even our own internal experiences like feelings and imaginations we have tools to perceive information like our sensory system philosophers especially those who came after Kant argued that we cannot fully know reality but we only have partial perception of reality so what is perception simply put perception is sensory signals we receive through our bodily senses such as sight hearing smell touch and taste perception also includes how the mind interprets those signals our senses perceive information from the outside as well as from inside but we're are not fully aware of most of the sensory data we receive what we are aware of is called attention which is a more focused perception so perception includes all sensory signals while attention is what we are aware of also interesting to note that cognitive psychology primarily interested in attention and memory so that individuals can utilize them for more creativity and productivity how about memory as we receive sensory data we are only attentive to some of it and most of it ends up in our memory but there are two kinds of memories short-term memory and long-term memory short-term memory which is is also known as working memories accessible to us immediately while long-term memory tends to be buried in our deeper Consciousness like the unconscious but also influences our behavior in ways we are not aware of so short-term memory is somewhat similar to random access memory or Ram in the computer that deals with the ongoing tasks long-term memory on the other hand is somewhat similar to hard disk storage and that everything that is not needed right now goes in there for future access while we can choose what to put in in our computer hard drive we have no conscious Choice when it comes to our own long-term memory we cannot delete it therefore good or bad memories stay with us as I discussed earlier flud and Yung argue that those memories stay in our unconscious that from time to time come back to haunt us when triggered or on a positive side they become involuntary memories that transport us into our past as it was depi picted and marshel pu's novel In Search of Lost time now that we established working definitions for perception memory and attention let's talk about some of the leading cognitive psychologists first I'll look at psychological studies of perception then move on to discuss memory and finally I'll deal with cognitive therapy as a solution to our cognitive issues in the modern world which is how to take control of the mind to enhance Our Lives perception Wolf Gang ker who lived between 1887 and 1967 was a German psychologist in the gestal branch he questioned behaviorism as being too simplistic an approach that limited learning to environmental conditioning ker instead argued that learning is a complex and dynamic process and behavior psychology failed to credit intelligence and insight When Animals interact with the environment they're not passive Learners who only take what the condition allows them instead they are also inventors problem solvers and insightful Learners by focusing too much on the outside environmental conditions Behavior psychology failed to understand how an animal's mental structure organizes perception it's neither passive nor one-way Street and that everything originates on the outside and animal only reacts but rather the animal has a robust mind of its own that influences reality to some degree this is similar to K's philosophical argument that we impose our mental structure on the world while callers argument that humans are insightful Learners and proactive in shaping reality his arguments remain somewhat philosophically abstract but our next cognitive psychologists Made Concrete cases for proactive perception and how the human mind is a powerful machine that impacts real reality Leon finger who was born in 1919 and died in 1989 was a Russian American psychologist who also drawn to gastal psychology further cemented the argument that we are not passive absorbers of information but rather we have our own filter in other words our mind is very selective in what information to take in and what to ignore you might ask what this filter is called festinger gave the example of our beliefs and convictions in how we see the world in other words we have biases beliefs convictions that allow us to see the world in a very particular way we are not objective when it comes to reality while our bias lens is commonly accepted by many but how do you scientifically study human convictions shaping reality festinger looked at how individuals deal with the contradictions between belief and reality f Stinger coined the term cognitive dissonance which means that when the evidence contradicts our strong belief we feel discomfort due to our internal inconsistency he studied a cult whose leader had received a message from aliens that the world would end on a certain date however when it didn't happen instead of the cult members acknowledging their mistake they became even more stronger in their conviction and found loopholes to justify their beliefs this study Oak Park as it's known showed that the Human animals are not passive to reality or evidence but rather proactive to change reality or the environment based on their beliefs in other words we're not just conditioned by our environmental evidence but we also condition our environment through our cognitive beliefs first we are shaped by reality but we also shape reality in return we are agents shape by change but we are also agents that bring about change while festing us show that our belief and conviction narrow our perception of reality it also helps us to create reality in some way but the question remained as to how our mind decides what external evidence to accept and what evidence to reject this question was answered by our next cognitive psychologist Roger Shephard who was born in 1929 and died in 2022 developed a theory that our mind not only interprets data coming through our sensory organs but the mind also actively makes conclusions based on its own internal 3D model of the outside world in other words there is the outside world who receive sensory signals but the mind doesn't just sit still instead it tries to make sense of the data but actually rationalizes theories and come up with SNAP happy conclusions this happens so quickly for us to fully register why the simple answer is pattern recognition when we eat something delicious like a cherry our mind quickly registers as a good food we can eat again so next time we come across Cherry it's easy this became known as the law of generalization we are wired to generalize all cherries as delicious so animals are programmed to recognize patterns and generalize in his experiment he showed his subjects optical illusions and the subjects were able to see through the illusion or rotate objects and their mind since you cannot fool people with some Illusions he concluded that the mind has an internal map of the external objects what we perceive in our mind doesn't exist in our mind but on the outside but our mind thinks that the internal model is as real as the one on the outside he famously said that the perception is externally guided hallucination what we perceive to be real only exists on the outside yet our mind thinks it does exist on the inside too therefore he called externally guided hallucination dreams or actual hallucinations on the other hand are internally stimulated perception he argued in other words when we dream or hallucinate the thing doesn't exist on the outside but entire on the inside perception however does exist on the outside but not on the inside so sheart concluded that our mind is able to rotate objects in the real world not physically but imaginatively because the mind has a 3D model of the outside world on a more philosophical level many philosophers believed that the Mind contains everything in the universe or the universe is an actually a mental reality ity for example schopenhauer says all ostensible Minds can be attributed to matter but all matter can likewise be attributed to mind to sum up while behaviorists ignore the capability of the human mind to shape reality cognitive psychologist such as Coler festinger and Shephard were able to see our perception as a very active agent in shaping reality now let's shift our attention to attention what is attention and how does it work is it a funnel or more like an ocean attention Donald Broadband who was born in 1926 and died in 1993 was a British psychologist and active around the same time as Alan Turing whose computer was instrumental in hacking into the German Enigma machine while working as a fighter pilot Broadband observed that a lot of man-made accidents happened because Pilots mistook a lever for one thing for something else when they were bombarded with too much information since information overload can overwhelm us he came to the conclusion that our attention has a limit so he concluded that the human mind process information in somewhat similar fashion to a computer his study which is known as diotic listening experiment was carried out among air traffic controllers where he noticed that they did the most effective job when they were dealing with one message at a time this selective attention to a particular voice was somewhat akin to a filtering system in which the subject had to silence other voices to solely focus on one voice at a time he used a y-shaped tube as an analogy when two separate messages enter the bottleneck the flap only open for one message at a time time which is known as the Broadband filter model for example when two voices came through at the same time the brain has to make a snap decision which one should come first it's all done in the short-term memory stage quote one of the two voices is selected for a response without reference to its correctness and the other is ignored but how does the mind make that decision as to what message to store first he argues that filtering depends as much on the content or message of the information as it depends on other factors such as Clarity of voice prior expectations prior experiences and memories in other words the short-term memory is sometimes open to new information but most of the time it simply selectively listens to Things based on other factors Broadband used cocktail party as an analogy in which people hear many voices but only listen to one not the others so to sum up Broadband argue that there's a clear limit to our attention and realistically we can only listen to one message at a time and we choose which message based on the content of the message but also prior memories or expectations so just like other cognitive psychologists he argued that the human mind is an active agent in shaping reality not a passive agent that only absorbs reality our attention is pretty instrumental and proactive and how it selects what to listen and what not to listen now that we have established that perception is not oneway street or slave to the outside world the fact that the Mind itself has an intention of its own is very selective we move on to the second topic of cognitive psychology which is memory how does perception turns into memory memory the pioneer of memory studies was Herman eing house whom I discussed in a previous segment he tested his own memory by trying to memorize meaningful words and then a bunch of nonsensical syllables he concluded our memory favors things that are meaningful to us as well as how long we expose ourselves to them and how long after we want to retrieve them so we remember things that have certain use to us the longer we spend time dealing with those things and finally how soon we need those things so unlike a computer human memor is purpose driven and time sensitive to understand human memory let's discuss how the human brain makes decisions as Shakespeare's Hamlet holding a human skull and asking what to remember and what not to remember then once it has decided what to remember how does it do it baluma zarik who was born in 1901 and died in 1988 was a Russian psychologist who studied how the brain is biased towards unfinished tasks when researching she found that when a task was incomplete due to an interruption the participants were more likely to remember the task for example waiters were more likely to remember customers who hadn't paid than those who had paid and other was the memory's biased towards a task that is yet to be completed the brain forgets the task that is done this phenomena is now known as zonic effect which means our memory retains more when we have regular breaks so the brain prioritized things to be done this is also called The Working memory because the task is not complete and needs our attention now that we understand that our memory favors an incomplete task rather than completed tasks how does he do it George Miller who was born in 1920 and died in 2012 was an American psychologist who took up William James distinction between short-term and long-term memory by focusing on how short-term memory really worked incidentally he also worked at MIT with Nom Chomsky whose theory of universal grammar sits at the heart of linguistics and also co-founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive studies Miller used the data processing of a computer as a model to study how the human mind handles short-term memory in his famous paper with a mouthful title the magical number seven plus or minus two some limits on our capacity for processing information in 1956 he argued that memory is not one giant storage space but rather divided and organized like an efficient system somewhat similar to a channel that information flows through when we perceive information it goes through our shortterm or working memory but since our short-term memory has limited storage capacity and has to deal with information overload how does it do it it organizes information into categories or meaningful chunks just like any large processing system once those meaningful chunks are created they are easier to store in long-term memory a good analogy will be how a library stores its endless books it divides them into categories and subcategories Miller realized that there was a certain limit to our working memory it's like our digestive system the food goes through our mouth where larger ones are crushed into sizable chunks because our esophagus has limited capacity of course when it comes to information it's not a physical phenomena but a mental one so you don't need teeth to crush information so the limit is not physical but rather a mental processing limit he settled on number seven in many studies prior he observed that the human mind could generally keep up or hold attention for up to seven elements or chunks of information once we are bombarded by more than seven the memory prioritize some and ignores the other a water dam is perhaps a good analogy as it channels water into streams but since water is a physical matter the dam bursts when overloaded the human mind however might ignore it first but if it cannot it becomes stressed and we might have emotional outbursts when overloaded with too many voices or or too many things to remember but one of the best mechanism of dealing with information overload is perhaps our long-term memory where we store things we don't need right now so the question is how do we retrieve information once in stored in our long-term memory Elvin tulving who was born in 1927 and Estonia born Canadian psychologist who instead of studying how the memory stores information focused on how we retrieve the stored memory just like Ean house tuling used words to test how memory worked he used his students as subjects and read a list of words to them then he asked them to recall those words most of his students were able to recall about 50% then to see if there was any difference he gave them hints or organized those words into categories like color animals food tools transport Etc his students were able to recall more he concluded that memory works much better when information is organized or compartmentalized into need categories not only that tulving also discovered that there was a distinction between two types of long-term memory semantic memory where you store factual information like data and episodic memory where you store experiential information like an event or conversation as a result he made a distinction as to to how we remember and retrieve those memories facts and figures are recalled based on meaningful categories like Words related to certain group but episodic memories retrieved not So Much by their categories but by the time and often place because those memories are often emotional ones so we so he called the retrieval of this kind of memory more akin to time travel to a particular event like a birthday or a party Etc this episodic memories beautifully depicted in Marshal pruce novel In Search of Lost Time in which he used sensory triggers like smell sound taste touch that can involuntarily transport us to the Past event or people we have forgotten so time and place are extremely crucial when it comes to episodic memory with semantic or knowledge-based memory prce called it voluntary memory and that we can voluntarily recall them tulving also said that besides semantic and episodic memories there was a third type of long-term memory which he called procedural memory where we store skills for example skills such as driving cooking riding bike or set in craft or even playing sports are part of this procedural memory so to sum up tolven used unorthodox techniques to observe long-term memory and divided into two factual knowledge or emotional experience while we can retrieve factual information by organizing them into category stories will retrieve emotional experiences through time and place emotional memory now that we have understand how human memory Works let's tackle the other elephant in the room human emotions how is memory tied to our emotions are they related at all Gordon Bower born in 1932 died in 2020 was an American psychologist and he argued that memory and emotions work and tandem when in a happy mood we are more likely to store happy memories and when unhappy we tend to store more negative memories in other words our mood influences what we remember and our memory simply obeys our mood it is the same when we recall when happy we recall happy memories and when in bad mood we tend to recall unhappy memories better quote people who are happy during the initial experience learn the happy events better angry people learn anger provoking events better so it turns out what we remember depends on how we feel at the time in other words happy people tend to remember the positive things while unhappy people tend to remember and recall the negative ones so power's research found that our emotional state affects our memory since our memory is closely tie to our emotions it also means that what we remember is not necessarily the TR truth we all know that our emotions Cloud our judgment when it comes to the truth but do we also remember things that are not true Elizabeth lofas who was born in 1944 is an American psychologist who argued that what we remember is not always the truth the reason for that is that our memory is closely tied to our emotions as Gorden bow argued earlier and what we remember depends on our mood love does carried our steud in which she showed her subjects a traffic accident how she described a crash her choices of word influenced the subject determining the speed of the cars if you use works like bump most subjects thought the cars were moving slow and when she used the word smash they thought the cars were moving faster according to loftas our memory of a particular event can be distorted by four distinct factors one our current emotions and beliefs two subsequent experiences after the event three other people we trust and four depending on the type of the questions we are asked in other words what we think is the truth can be influenced by how we felt at the time what happened later other people will love and shape by a leading question her research was influential in criminal trial procedures where witness testimonies are extremely important in determining the truth of what happened so sometimes our mood distorts the truth because it makes us feel better if the truth or untruth favored our mood we create our own stories in our head when we are emotionally invested in an experience which may not reflect reality lofas carried out another study in which she collected the stories about her subjects passed from their relatives among the four stories one was false in which the subject was supposed they lost in a shopping mall While most participants were vague about the mall experience some accepted it as true when told that one of the four stories was false the majority singled out the M story as false but what's crucial is that about 20% of the participants chose another story a true story to be false lofter says in real life as well as in experiments people can come to believe things that never really happened of course this is harmless when it comes to daily lives but that 20% thinking a false story to be true can have huge legal implications during a trial LOF has called it false memory syndrome where some people are able to invent stories that are not true yet they vehemently believe it in their head so to sum up Elizabeth lofter research showed that our memory is not as reliable as we think it is since our memory is closely tied to our emotions it can easily be distorted by other factors such as mood time people including who's asking while harmless in most situations it can have dire consequences during a legal process this also proved that human memory is not like a computer because our emotions influence what we remember and what we forget since we are pretty selective in what to remember are we also selective in what we forget Daniel shakar who was born in 1952 an American psychologist further questioned our memories reliability not only do we forget things we also get confused and on some occasions we really want to forget while memory is an amazing evolutionary tool we have shakar focused his attention more on the negative side of memory while the positives are many it can also be extremely unreliable he came up with seven sin of memory one it's fleeting two we are absent minded three we block certain things four we Mis attribute sources five we are susceptible to suggestions and six we are inherently biased and finally bad or traumatic memories always persist despite us trying to forget them in his studies shakor concluded that it's a good thing that our memories unreliable otherwise we would be overwhelmed with so much useless information so our brain works because it has to be very selective quote we don't want to memorize every bit of every experience we would be overwhelmed with clutter of useless trivia so to sum up cognitive psychology saw how behaviorism simplified the human mind to some behaviors conditioned by the environment according to cognitive psychology the mind has a mind of its own that affects the environment through intelligence as well as deeper insights as a result our perception of reality is not a passive oneway street that we only receive information randomly but rather we ask for specific information and even put a structure to all the information we receive it's like a postal system that not only sorts things out but also asks for certain information to be stored and retrieved based on our beliefs convictions but most crucially based on how we feel since our attention is very limited we have to be selective in how we absorb the information it's like a data going through a funnel which sorts things out useful information is retain and useless information is either discarded or thrown into the unconscious mind where it stays until it's useful or triggered later on cognitive psychologist saw memory as the most effective tool of the human mind we gather information and categorize and organize them for immediate use through our short-term memory or later use through through retrieval from long-term memory we also learned that remembering and retrieving memories is also tied to our emotions our mood determines what sort of memories are kept also our memory despite being a great help also can be unreliable and susceptible to false information so all these studies lead us to one fundamental question is the human brain a powerful computer while most scientists describe the human brain as a computational and how it deals with with information in recent years there's a theory that the human brain might be Quantum and Essence one of the key proponents of quantum brain is the Nobel prizewinning physicist Roger Penrose the basic idea is that since the human mind develops and Leaps and Bounds it cannot be computational consciences cannot be computational therefore it might be Quantum but let's leave that debate here and move to how cognitive psychology helps us when it comes to therapy cognitive therapy cognitive psychology also gave rise to cognitive therapy and the cognitive behavioral therapy while Psychotherapy focused on the unconscious cognitive therapy is more focused on perception or the conscious mind illnesses such as OCD or paranoia has a lot to do with our perception therefore cognitive therapy involves recognition of the problem rational explanation and then some behavioral changes in which the patients are active participants Aon Beck born in 1921 and died in 2021 argued that while Psychotherapy relied on each patient account because the unconscious cannot be empirically studied cognitive therapy on the other hand can be studied empirically because it studies perception which is our Consciousness to treat a disorder one must understand it on the perception level he like and psychoanalysis religion because both functioned on faith rather than empirical data to treat his patients Beck asked them to assess their perception against reality and other words when One Compares their thoughts and ideas against the objective reality one can easily see if their perception of reality is distorted or not we often make things up in our mind for example the world is not as terrifying as some would make up in their mind or the world is not as beautiful as some would imagine it to be a good example is what is called Paris syndrome in which the Japanese tourists visiting Paris have a distorted perception of the city as a kind of romantic heaven on Earth when they come face to face with the reality of Parisian people often cold and rude their expectations are crushed and then and when they return to Japan they go through a therapy in special clinics set up to treat this syndrome another example is the old saying that some people see the glass as half empty While others see it as half full so our perception of reality has a lot to do how we feel about reality so cognitive therapy relies on bridging patients perception with this objective reality Beck famously said don't trust me test me so to Summer be had a problem with Psychotherapy as a relied on something you couldn't test so his cognitive therapy was based on perception and how you see the objective reality to cure such disorders one brings them back to reality and bridges perception with the objective reality fun fact Aron Beck lived to be 100 years old so positive thinking in living in reality or surrounding yourself with positive people can influence someone and how they perceive the world and themselves another form of treatment has been mindfulness especially meditation techniques and yoga which have been trickling down from Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism and deism since Eastern religions emphasize being in the present fully aware and fully conscious which can bring us down from our Cloud9 world we have created inside our head Mii chick sent Mei born in 1934 and died in 2021 was a Hungarian American psychologist who emphasized what he called flow somewhat akin to the Chinese philosophy of taism when we are absorbed in activities we enjoy we tend to forget time not just that we feel a Serenity that gives us Clarity of mind since we are extremely focused we also tend to forget our own existence this he called the state of ecstasy he wasn't saying that you get this state through drugs but through work you enjoy the most fiction writers artists athletes musicians and monks experience this when they are fully absorbed in what they do in other words they almost transcend from their own body and move into a different realm of reality where mind is neither focused on the past or future but solely focused on the present activity how do you achieve this state of flow one way to achieve it when you challenge yourself for example when you are engaged in an activity that matches your level skill but the task is slightly more challenging if something is just too hard where your skill is nowhere near it it would make you anxious also if something is extremely easy you get bored so the perfect balance is when the task is just slightly above your skill that demands your best effort or eagerness to learn this matches how we perceive purpose in storytelling a hero must face challenges and his or her true character comes out and how he or she overcomes problems so to put it simply cognitive psychology is mostly focused on attention and memory so our body gives us sensation through our senses and our mind gives us perception in other words how we perceive reality can impact how you see the world and your own capability so cognitive psychology is a more positive approach compared to behaviorism and psychoanalysis why because for cognitive psychology productivity was an important application of their work while behaviorism blamed conditioning and psych analysis blame the unconscious cognitive psychologists were interested in how to improve the mental productivity of an individual and make people more competent it's no coincidence that cognitive psychology came about during the Cold War when the capitalist West wanted to show the Socialist East that they had a more Superior system of production so far I've discussed Psychology from an individual perspective that we have each a psyche of our own and somewhat operates independent of others in the next segment I'll discuss social psychology and how Society culture history and other people influence our mind humans are one of the most social species on [Music] Earth eight social psychology previously I discussed the relation between reality perception and memory within cognitive psychology the focus of cognitive psychology is on the mental processes psychoanalysis on the subconscious or unconscious and behavioral psychology on empirical observation of behavior all these approaches in Psychology mainly study the human psyche from an individual perspective but a lot of what we do experience on the outside is experience with other people so social psychology tries to answer how much of our psyche is shaped by societ soety and how much of society psyche is shaped by us this seems to be a push and pull a kind of tension between individual seeking freedom and choices while Society pushing you to conform as we saw behaviorist explain our Behavior partly conditioned by the environment psychoanalysis blamed our psychological issues on the dark andc conscious as a response cognitive psychology puts the blame squarely on the individual arguing that ultimately in individuals have the rational capacity to take responsibility now social psychologist s things from a social perspective that we individuals are under the rule of society therefore subject to group pressure so fundamentally social psychologists want to know the influence of society over the individual which causes Conformity another important question social psychologists ask is how the individual push back against Society to cause change historical context one of the biggest developments of the 20th century was group thought either through fascism or socialism two quite opposing projects to put it very crudely fascism promoted survival of the fittest ideology while socialism promoted survival of the weakest fascism wanted to call the weak to make space for the strong while socialism wanted to call the strong to uplift the dispossessed fascism was a more masculine approach that the fittest should survive while socialism was a more feminine approach that everyone was equal but both ideologies tapped into our social psychology or tribal thinking always psychologically wired to be tribal and conform with others as we saw Fascism and socialism United and mobilized a huge number of people in Europe and Asia or are we really freeth thinkers and autonomous individuals as seen with democracies it turns out there's a push and pull between the individual and societal Force which results in social change origin of social psychology the German philosopher George Hegel argued that the self depends on the existence of others in other words a solid idea of the self cannot exist without the existence of other selves within a group or Society he famously argued that we are the product of history for example an ancient Greek person is far different compared to an 18th century German in their Outlook sensibilities and preferences which make up his historical identity so the root of social psychology can be Trace to Hegel which trickled through Marx and later French School of deconstructionism and postmodernism Ja laon born in 1901 and died in 1981 a French psychologist further argued that the IND visual is created through the language of the other in other words a solid self doesn't exist outside the other so the self can only exist within a group setting let's imagine you're the only person in the world nobody give birth to you and nobody came in contact with you it would be very hard to have a sense of self identity a single God in the universe perhaps experiences the same identity crisis we know ourselves in relations to others we develop characters because we constantly rub against other people the first group we encounter is our own family Virginia CER who was born in 1916 and died in 1988 was an American psychologist who argued that family is where we develop personality and role therefore it's like a factory that makes us within a family we grow as we bump into each other and so we shape each other's personality by feedback criticism collusion and so forth until we establish a solid self it's like a pebble that is crushed in the waves and after years and centuries it loses all its rough edges and becomes smooth and we call it Pebble the same is true about us a totally unruly animal baby turns into a law-abiding citizen after years of education and socialization but at the heart of it is a push and pull what is pull Conformity after second world war there was a thirst among psychologists to explain why so many Germans complied with the Nazis and never questioned their terrible policies this was particularly a pertinent question among Jewish and those psychologist with some family roots in Eastern Europe three of the most famous ones were the Poland born Solomon Ash Staley mgram of Hungarian descent and his classmate Philip Zim of Italian descent They carried out experiments to explain how much we conform to society in other words we're not as independent thinkers as we believe to be Solomon Ash was born in 1907 and died in 1996 was a Poland boor Jewish American psychologist who in 1955 wanted to find out how strong is our urge to conform with Society of course in the light of Nazism in Germany many social scientists were Keen to know why so many Germans didn't question Hitler's policies prior to him in 1935 a Turkish psychologist mfer Sheriff Whose study showed that individuals tend to conform when there is no Clarity of an answer in a black and white situation we are less likely to conform with bad policies or accept an erroneous claim but when there's confusion we side with the group you could say that we are inherently lazy if you are faced with a clear path and treacherous Trail we choose the easy route but when we face with two dangerous roads we look to our leaders to tell us what to do today in consumerism people buy products worn by celebrities because we are overwhelmed by the number of choices available the same is true for YouTube we watch videos that have more views but Ash wanted to find out if individuals can form knowing that the group had the wrong answer his exper expent involved 123 male subjects the subjects were shown two cards on one one line on the other three lines each line marked as a b and c they were asked to answer which line a b or c was the same length as the line on the other card Ash wanted to know if the subjects would give the answer that conformed with a group to do this he always put each anywhere Target subject within a group of five to seven people who were aware of the experiment he would ask each person to give an answer the unaware Target subjects would always give their answers last or close to last in the group to test whether the subjects would go against the group by giving the correct answer or conform with the group despite knowing the answer is wrong in the first stage there was no group pressure so only three out of 720 gave the wrong answer but when they were put within a group more than 30% conformed and give the wrong answer Ash saw a clear pattern those who went against the grain and stuck with the correct answer consistently did so and those who were prone to Conformity also consistently did so Ash concluded that the group has a huge influence on some individuals if the test is done in private people stick with the right answer however in groups the pressure of Conformity is strong enough that people give the wrong answer despite knowing the correct answer from this we can conclude that the group has a power to bend the truth we might go against the truth in order to conform with our group we often do not tell the truth out of politeness or fear of consequences Stanley mgram who was born in 1933 and died in 1984 was another Jewish American psychologist who worked alongside Solomon Ash to study how individuals can for woman Society after the second world war na SE leaders were put on trial and they claimed that they were following orders mgram argued that we tend to comply despite our own personal values because we are taught to obey rules at an early age to prove that people do what they are told to do in 1961 in yil University he set up an experiment in which Ordinary People would inflict electric shocks when they were ordered by those above them the subjects were told that the experiment was to find whether punishment helped learning or not the subjects were told to inflict electric shock of varying degrees on Learners who give the wrong answers mgram found that all participants applied shocks of up to 300 volts on the Learners who would scream in pain 65% of participants obeyed orders to apply a maximum shock of 450 bolts only 35% of participants refused to obey when the Learners screamed in pain however mgram also found that the participants showed discomfort and distress while obeying orders which shows that the pressure of Conformity is so high that the participants were enduring a huge discomfort while obeying orders quote Ordinary People simply doing their jobs and without any particular hostility on their part they can become agents in a terrible destru Ive process some people criticize it saying that because the study was conducted in a university environment where participants were paid to take part therefore they were more willing to obey however the experiment was replicated in 2006 by male Slater using vertical reality and the results were pretty much the same Stanley mgram concluded that obedience is not inherent in one culture but in all cultures humans have evolved in tribal settings since the dawn of time so aligning oneself with the tribe or the authority is a survival tactic we're all evolved with since Stanley milgram's experiment involved obeying orders from Authority his colleague Philip zimo was born in 1933 wanted to know if the participants would inflict pain without an authority telling them to do so in his famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment he selected 24 ordinary students and and randomly gave some the role of prisoners and some the role of guards the guards were to arrest the prisoners and keep them in the basement of the university for a period of time the guards also wore military uniforms and had to strip search the prisoners and had complete power over the prisoners and their job was to keep order the results were as shocking as milgram's experiment and performing their duties the guards quickly became a abusive denying prisoners food or toilet and even use them to amuse themselves and their boredom the situation became so terrible that after 6 days the experiment had to be stopped Zim concluded that any good person and the right condition or wrong condition can turn nasty and do Terrible Things once we assume a role under some given rules we tend to take it too far if pushed so far we have seen that individuals are pushed by soci Society they have the capacity to conform in some cases much to the detriment of their own psychological State these can be seen among soldiers who after a brutal War suffer immensely for what they did or witnessed so how do you liberate individuals from the tyranny of social Conformity or how to enhance our ability to make the right moral choices in life or how to go against the normalization of society if psychological trauma affects the individual it can also affect an entire group creative freedom or push Eric from the German psychologist argued that the problem most modern people face is loneliness due to our separation first from nature due to our ability to reason and secondly our separation from others due to Modern disintegration of community family and groups his antidote was love not in the usual sense this freedom is the capacity to Encompass the world and reconnect with nature as well as other people through imaginative art creative artists do not seek Conformity but rather choose loneliness in order to capture something deeper so creative freedom is an antidote to Conformity but artists are a minority in society if we are subject to Conformity we can also suffer as a community so the question is how do you heal an entire group ignasio Martin Barrow born in 1942 and died in 1989 was born in Spain but spent most of his life in Latin America through his research he came to the conclusion that trauma was more a community issue rather than individual for him while mental problems could happen under normal circumstances some other mental illnesses were the results of a harsh man-made environment such as brutal oppression of some regime his solution was Liberation psychology in which he Focus was on improving the lives of those marginalized in society many traumatic experiences among people particularly in Al Salvador Argentina Chile and other Latin American countries he studed were caused by dictatorship Wars and violence in general his conclusion was that psychological problems are often context driven and reflects the history and politics of the place involved while Martin Bar's antidote to social trauma was Liberation and self-governance another psychologist offered the choice to be part of the community as an antidote to loneliness and suffering as it empowered us to take responsibility William Glasser born in 1925 and died in 2013 was an American psychologist in 1956 he developed what is called Choice Theory which is a kind of utilitarian approach in which individual are driven by increasing their pleasure and avoiding pain but the best way we can achieve these goals is within a social Community since we are by Nature social beings or a bunch of social animals as Aristotle has said 2500 years ago therefore our natural or instinctive urge to belong to community is as strong as our urge to find food or find partner the only way we feel fulfilled is through Society while society allows us fulfillment but on the flip side most of our psychological problems are also caused by our relationships with others including family friends colleagues and Society in general Glasser offered what he called reality therapy which is based on taking responsibility for the choices we make this is very similar to existentialist philosopher John Paul S as well as s and kot in other words we understand and accept the reality of our lives and take responsibility for our actions but this can only be achieved if individuals are free to make choices if you're forced to conform one cannot have the options to make choices while some societies allow us to make certain choices it all varies from country to country or culture to culture one of the deepest psychological and freedom is what's called this process of normalization every society has certain norms and anyone who deviates from those Norms or either punished or ostracized as crazy Eliot aonan born in 1932 and his 1972 book The Social Animal argued that we are all crazy in some way and given the right time in place we may act in a crazy way those who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy he said he looked at a shooting that happened in 1970 when an armed officer shot dead some anti-war protesters Aon son studied the reaction of the people in town who wanted to spread rumors that the protesters were bad people in order to prove that the officers did nothing wrong those false rumors were the results of cognitive dissonance when two contradictory beliefs force you to change the narrative we somehow justify some acts of Cruelty simply to avoid the emotional conflict it causes us if we accept the truth for example the discomfort a family of a criminal feels when helping the police to capture the culprit change versus familiarity while Society prefers clear norms and pushes individuals to conform some individuals do not follow these Norms so this battle between norm and Rebellion will continue as long as we live and this struggle is an important factor in social change so there's a tension between social norms and individual freedom Martin Selman born in 1942 is an American psychologist who argued that we are the happiest when in good social relationships quote good social relationships are like food and Thermo regulation universally put to human mood during his research he noticed that the happiest people were those who were good with other people but being good is one thing changing a society for the good is a whole different thing Robert zong born in 1923 and died in 2008 was a Polish American psychologist who wanted to understand the relation between feeling and thought he carried out studies which became known as the mere exposure effect he read an article about a student who attended his class in a black bag at first other students were hostile towards him but as time went on they became familiar with the site and slowly accepted his bizarre clothing item in 1968 eight zong developed a series of experiments in which he showed his participants a series of images and some Chinese symbols he observed that the longer the subjects were exposed to those images and symbols the more close they felt towards those images the participants claimed that these images were their own which led zong to conclude that the more you see it the more you like it a good example might be a security blanket among babies the more you spend time with someone one or something the higher likelihood of you being attached to them this led zong to conclude that our preferences are not always rational but deeply emotional he also argued that while thoughts and feelings are separate all thoughts are somehow attached to feelings today advertisers Target people precisely because the more you see their products the more we accept them perhaps not on a rational level but on an emotional level another example is when animals are exposed to something at first they show fear and aggression but when they realize nothing happens they accept it we tend to be fearful and hostile towards new people new experiences and changes but the more we spend time with them we come to accept them zong also studied couples and long-term relationships he noticed the bizarre effect which seems unbelievable he looked at their wedding photographs and then compared those photos with their photographs after 25 years of living together he found that the couples look more alike after 25 years than when they first met in other words they looked very different when they got married but after spending 25 years together even their physiology had changed to conform to each other he argues that the more you spend time with someone the more you develop empathy for others and as a result your facial expressions mimic one another perhaps we all have seen couples who look like one another then they are different another explanation could be that we choose our mate who is more similar to us than different in order to ensure our similar genes survive so perhaps a couple mimicking each other's facial expression is in a way to mimic that we are from the same gene pool or tribe but when it comes to society nothing is written in stone we change as we evolve biologically and socially but this changes also subtle that we do not clearly see the forces at play while Hegel and Marx talked about the force of History what is that invisible force that changes society and [Music] individuals Kurt Levan who was born in 1890 and died in 1947 a German American psychologist is often credited as the father of social psychology who was active in the 1940s when three dominant ideologies socialism Fascism and liberalism were battling one another according to behavior psychology individuals are mostly at the mercy of the environment why 11 wanted to know whether the individual can also affect the environment in return in his field theory he argues that one cannot understand a system or environment unless one tries to change it by changing a system one realizes the forces that are at play it's like you want to uproot a tree then you realize the roots and how deep they are or you cannot understand the force of a river until you try to change its course the same is true about Society the Russian novelist Leo tosto argue that historical events are not caused by leaders but by variety of forces from the soldiers to the cooks to the ordinary peasants Levan's theory is based on the interdependence of individuals within a group any social change is often met with resistance but once people see a rational behind the move they can see it he studied Dy Tre change during World War II and found that once the participants knew the benefits of such change they came on board change is terrifying at first until proven safe or necessary social psychology has mainly focused on two fronts how the individual is influenced by the group studies in the 60s and 70s showed that the group or authority has a huge influence on how we behave in extreme situations we do things that are horrible in order to conform with others or comply with authority or simply play a role we're given other social psychologists focus on the choices we make and how Society is the source of our happiness fulfillment and meaning in life yet our social relations are also the cause of many of our mental problems in the next segment I'll look at child psychology nine child psychology in the previous segment I I discuss the influence of society over the individual and how we are wired to conform to group pressure and how we also have the capacity to rebel and change society through individual Freedom another important factor in human psychology is age so in this segment I'll discuss some of those differences by shedding lights on child psychology as we saw in earlier segments behavior is mainly focused on the behavioral aspect of learning while psych analysis Freud in particular focused on the unconscious aspect of learning process despite acknowledging child psychology to be slightly different from adults however the conventional wisdom was that a child was simply a yet to be adult therefore had the same psychology as adults but lacked maturity or experience however in the 1930s and 40s because cognitive psychology emerged as a dominant approach The View shifted from a child being a small adult to child psychology being different and children going through distinct psychological changes as they grow up this is especially true in children's cognitive abilities and learning for example language learning is far easier for children than adults children go through distinct psychological phases as they grow up another area of child psychology has been attachment and separation anxiety for example children have the capacity to be attached to an adult and a younger age but as they grow they appear to lose that ability which is perhaps an evolutionary survival tactic when we are most vulnerable and need an adult to look after them some psychologists also studied how children learn morality and also the prevalence of autism in recent decades especially among boys nature versus nurture the debate of nature versus nurture is an old one this is particularly pertinent in child psychology how much of our psychology is determined by our genetic makeup and how much of it is due to a culture one of the most important question about children is language learning which shows how it is wired in nature and nurtured in culture so our linguistic ability has one tentacles in nature and one in culture as we learn the language of our community n chsky was born in 1928 wanted to know how children learn a language human's ability to verbally communicate complex idea is unique in the animal Kingdom while behaviorist psychologists believe that we learn a language like any other skills as a direct result of our environment through trial and error we throw a rock and see what happens we utter a word and see how others react often parents correct or say another word so children learn by imitating as well as getting feedback from their parents and others chumsky however disagreed with behaviorists he says that the ability to learn a language is innate humans why is it that almost all children learn to talk precisely at relatively same age in the same way that children go through puberty at around the same age babies start walking by the ages of one and talking by two Chomsky says the language organ grows like any other body organ his theory of universal grammar states that children innately know the basic structure of a language without being taught those linguistic rules not just that the human anatomy including the vocal organ brain and auditory system is geared towards verbal communication While most psychologists and linguists agree with Chomsky that our linguistic abili instinctive and hardwired on our biology some criticize it for being too rigid and ignoring environmental adoptive social and other cognitive factors in shaping our linguistic ability while our linguistic ability is innate the environment can enhance or limit its development just as a seed without water doesn't grow into a tree there are a few examples of feral children grown up in the wild who never fully Master the ability to speak a language properly another example is language learning among adults most adults cannot compete with most children in their ability to learn language even if adults can masterer the language they cannot mimic the accent as successfully as children this suggests that language learning has a Time Clock after which it becomes harder if children have an advantage when it comes to language learning do they have an advantage when it comes to General cognitive abilities too Jean P who was born in 1899 and died in 1980 was a Swiss psychologist he was interested in how children's intelligence or cognitive ability changes as they grow While most Behavior psychologists focused on environmental conditioning as an external Factor P wanted to study the inner workings of a child's inner or innate cognitive transformation he devised interview techniques in which he would let the children answer questions in their own way he didn't have a multiple choice or predetermined answers or even questions instead he wanted to know if children's thought process was different from adult he would often follow a child's line of thought he observed that the child's mind is fundamentally different from that of an adult he noticed that adults have more capacity for reflection while children are prone to acting while studying babies before they could speak he noticed they act out a lot this continues as children grow up and act out their ideas through play acting we have all seen how children love playing and play acting perhaps they don't have the capacity for reflection simply because they are too busy acting things out or perhaps because adults are too lazy to act things out so they prioritize thinking instruction and reflection rather than the energy intensive execution of many things or action as we grow up we plan things before executing while children act out first before planning if ever P concluded that children primarily learn by doing so their cognitive process and how they think is not so much tied to verbal instructions from others but more so by their own action they don't listen to social cues as much as they listen to the consequences of their actions quote intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do PJ came up with four stages of cognitive development the first stage is sensory motor in which babies of under two years of age learn by touch taste and other senses the first reaction of a baby to something is to touch and put it in their mouth in other words pick it up and taste it the second stage called pre-operational starts when babies are self-aware during this stage children can arrange and categorize objects put them in the order of size color and so forth the third stage is concrete operational when children understand quantities differentiates objects by several factors such as color size and shape the fourth stage is formal operational when a child is capable of abstract thoughts hypothetical situations and imaginary scenarios P believe children not only have an innate ability to learn they also have a thirst for learning in other words children are biologically hard wor to learn and be curious and learn not by listening to others but by doing through their own actions this is especially true among boys boys today we hear a lot about schools failing boys the argument made is that boys are more prone to action than listening so boys are not evolved to sit behind a desk for hours without some physical work the argument is that modern education system favors girls simply because girls are evolved to rely Less on their physical capacity but more on their social skills which includes the ability to listen to instructions modern education system made for girls so to speak this also seems to benefit asian-americans in America as they make up almost 20% of Harvard's student body while the community only represents 5% of the country's population your physical size can handicap you but it forces you to pursue Academia while very few women can compete with men in sports they are outperforming men in schools and universities this same is true for asian-americans very little representation in sports but very high representation in universities to the point that universities like Harvard actively try to reduce the number of Asians from entering as their pass rate is much higher compared to other races today universities are changing as more and more girls fill the classes so in the future universities will be filled with Asians and women I'm only joking P's Active Learning approach was adopted in education especially in montauri schools in which the focus was on learning by doing one of the criticisms of P's work has been that he minimized the role of adult in a child's education because he solely attributed learning and thinking as innate and biological neglecting the social side of learning and thought process in contrast to P's too naturalistic approach the Russian psychologist Lev vigotsky born in 1899 and died in 1934 ARG AR that a child's cognitive development or learning is tied to their Social Circle I.E parents teachers and peers he argued that not only our knowledge is in essence social so is our thought process how we think is influenced by the culture we grow up in the people who we interact with and our own individual experiences with the physical world while P emphasized the child's innate proclivity towards learning by doing vigotsky argued that Society can also facilitate learning another study that confirmed the role of Social Circle on learning was done by Bruno bleheim born in 1903 died in 1990 who studied children growing up in Israeli kibuts communities where children instead of living with their parents lived in communal houses instead of a nuclear family setting these children lived with other kids and were Cared by many many adults the results showed that these children grew up to be more accomplished adults emphasizing the role of the Social Circle in a child's learning and cognitive development to conclude the debate of nature versus nurture it's neither one or the other but a mixture of both at Birth we are pre-assembled with abilities to learn language develop complex cognitive abilities but with these can only happen or Blossom within a culture so nature and nurture are two signs of the same coin attachment theory if our linguistic and some cognitive abilities are age specific what other aspects of our development is age specific psychologists like Sigman Freud and Conrad Lawrence argued that infants are attached to the first caregiver or moving object they encounter in other words we are programmed to seek attachment to the person or object nearest to us but in reality is far more complicated than that John Balby born in 1907 died in 1990 was a British psychologist who wanted to study how babies bond with their mothers arguing that this might be an inate survival trait following Freud's assertion that children become attached to their caregivers because they fulfill their physiological needs like food Balby believed that this genetic bond is always with a female figure more than a male figure if this bond is broken the negative consequences would remain with a child throughout his or her life in the 1950s he studied children who were evacuated during World War II and raised in large institutions these kids didn't have a bond with any female figure like their mother so to speak he found that this experience negatively influen the children's intellectual social and emotional abilities and in extreme cases the maternal deprivation caused what he termed as affectionless psychopathy a lot of the children ended up becoming thieves or develop Juvenile delinquencies and antisocial behaviors a great rendition of this idea is depicted in a Hungarian novel The Notebook Trilogy by Agoda Kristoff in which during a war two boys were separated from their mother and did develop a sense of amoral Behavior Balby also argued that the role of the father was not as strong as a mother especially at a younger age as a father's role is more provisioning and protection he was however criticized for minimizing the role of the father later research found that a father is as good a parent as a mother so do s b be found that we are biologically programmed to be attached to a female figure why female figure well the simple answer according to FR is that our first source of food is a mother or a cupboard love as he called it so biologically speaking it makes sense to get attached to your first local restaurant that gives you free food for months through breastfeeding however this view is challenged by other psychologists Harry harlo born in 1905 died in 1981 was one of those psychologists Who challenged Freud's cupboard love Theory harlo studied machak infants separated from their mothers he set up an experiment in which he would give them fake surate mothers one with wire in which a bottle of milk was attached and the other just soft cuddly cloth if frud was correct the infants would only stay with the mother who gave them milk but it turned out the baby monkeys stayed with a cuddly cloth far more and used it as a shield to protect themselves when there was a terrifying noise it turned out the baby monkeys needed a mother not just for feeding them but also protecting them and giving them that soft cushiony environment that was safe so attachment went beyond the mere physiological need it is a base Foundation or platform upon which babies explore the world haro's 1957 to 1963 study had a huge influence on parenting in the decades that followed the role of the parents was to make sure children grow up in the most protected and softest environment possible you could say that the current generation of snowflakes are the children of the parents who grew up in the 1970s and 80s experiencing over parenting themselves joking aside parenting used to be more about providing in a food some centuries ago but in recent decades since food is so readily available that some parents thinking they were not doing enough and overcompensating in creating a safer space perhaps too cuddly space that some people never had the chance to grow up a thicker skin so much so that children cannot even play in Parks anymore in case their knees are skinned today universities have become a safe space where criticism or simple words are banned okay let me stop here before I offend someone so to conclude haro's monkey studies showed that attachment goes beyond just food but also security it makes sense babies need a lot of food and a lot of safe space today a lot of people in some rich countries are obese but also with a fragile personality I should really shut up but how do you balance between protection and Independence if babies grow up to attach they don't develop Independence and strong character so our next psychologist tackle this question heads on Mary eworth born in 1913 and died in 1999 who worked with John Balby wanted to find out how baby babies become independent from their attachment her research focused on baby and mother inactions during her study she placed the one-year-old baby and their mother in a room she observed their interaction before and after a stranger entered the room as well as a period in which the baby was alone with the stranger she specifically focused on how the baby reacted when the mother returned to the room she concluded three patterns which she termed as three attachment to types secure anxious avoidant and anxious resistant about 70% of babies had secure attachment meaning they were distressed when the mother left but still happily continued to play with the stranger about 15% of the babies didn't care when their mothers left so inworth called them anxious avoidant another 15% became very anxious in the presence of a stranger so she called them anxious resistant she concluded that how mother meets the needs of their children creates this attachment types however others have criticized her arguing that attachment is not permanent but always subject to change as babies develop so how do you grow up to become less dependent on your parents one way we develop autonomy is through expression G Stanley Hall born in 1844 and died in 1924 was an American psychologist he combined darwinian Evolution with Romanticism literature the 18th century STM and drank storm and stress is a collection of romanticist literature and music that emphasize romantic expression as young people experience love one of the most famous novels in this genre is the sorrow of young verta by the father of German literature Gerta in which love is seen as volcanic eruption especially in teenagers the design for sex is Nature's expression as love in young adult humans so Stanley Hall observed this individual expression during adolescence as an emotional turmoil and Rebellion between the age of 11 and 15 this is a period historically speaking a child was leaving the nest for a nest of their own so they would fall in love while pursuing a mate as well as seeking acceptance quot adolescent is when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for possession as a result of this Titanic emotional battle we develop a sense of autonomy for her early attachment so girls leave their father in search of a husband and boys leave their mother in search of a wife The Stereotype of men searching for a second mother and girls for a second father and their future partner seems apt this is beautifully depicted in the world's first novel written 1,000 years ago one of the most psychological novels of Japanese literature the tale of Genji in which the main character Prince Genji is searching for a perfect wife that resembles his own mother so we saw that some of our early childhood developments are innate for example we have an innate ability to learn language learn skills and even get attached a specific age but they do not happen in vacuum so just as culture is needed to grow bacteria we humans also need a cult culture to grow and develop in violence immorality since nature and culture play a dynamic role one of the most important topics of child psychology has been morality for example are children taught violence or are they prone to violence somewhat innately but more precisely how do children learn moral values Albert bandura born in 192 5 and died in 2021 was a Canadian psychologist who wanted to know whether aggression is learned or IGN the issue of violence on TV and in video games has been on our Consciousness ever since these devices were invented Behavior psychologists such as BF Skinner believed we learn through environmental conditioning of rewards and Punishment while frud argued that we tend to assimilate the behavior of others into our own mostly unconscious ly so in 1961 bandora devised a study known as the Bobo Doll Experiment to find how much of the child's aggression is learned by observing and imitating others and whether we model our behavior on other people's behaviors or not and whether we see others do it and then we copy it he chose 36 boys and 36 girls between the ages of three and six he then divided them into three groups of 24 with 12 boys and 12 girls the first group saw no adult role model so it was used as a control group the second group was shown an adult role model being aggressive physically and verbally towards a bobo doll kicking it throwing it on the floor hitting it with a mallet the third group was shown an adult model who was passive after the exposure each child was left alone in the room with the doll the results showed that children imitated the role model and and how they treated the doll children who had seen the aggressive adult model were more likely to be aggressive towards the doll bandora concluded that when we witness violence or aggression either in real life or on screen can influence us some believe that reading about or seeing aggression in books and movies allows us to let out those feelings is a kind of cathoic release bandora however disagrees quote exposure to aggressive modeling is hardly cathartic Sama bandor showed in his experiment that aggressive behavior is not only adaptive or due to environmental conditioning but is also socially learned and imitated from those around us aggressiveness might be innate but it can manifest more if we exposed more this bring us to the question of how children learn morality in 1956 Laurence Colberg born in 19 27 and died in 87 conducted a 20y year long study of how children learn morality involving 56 boys aged 10 to 16 who were tested every 3 years according to this study we humans go through three different stages of moral development first in the preconventional stage we associate good and bad with reward and punishment or caring stick so we learn morality by its outcome and in terms of rewards and Punishment parents or Society rewards good behavior and punish bad ones and the second level or conventional stage we understand the intention behind moral Behavior so not only we understand the outcome in terms of reward and punishment but we also know why an action is considered morally good or bad by the society at this point we set out our goals to maximize the good actions while minimizing the bad ones in order to conform to society and navigate the social conventions at this stage in some cases sometimes we take it to extreme level when young people become revolutionaries or join radical groups thinking they can bring about social justice the third level or postconventional stag is when we move Beyond Conformity it means we see an action while acceptable in society is not morally good for instance if you serve a repressing regime or a bad institution you stand stand up and raise your hand which might result in you being punished whistleblowers are an example another example is leaders like Gandhi who stood up to Injustice without resorting to violence so in essence morality is an evolutionary necessity that is socially learned and reinforced first good actions are rewarded and bad ones are punished second we understand the intention behind moral choices and that we transcend our self-interest in doing what morally right even if it means harm to ourselves this is beautifully depicted in Mark Twain's novel Huckleberry Finn in which the teenager protagonist despite his moral teaching from his church and Community Rebels to protect a slave from the authorities he experiences the typical moral dilemas of what is right inside him and what's right on the outside and ultimately decides saving a slave from recapture is the right thing even though the society doesn't think so life's purpose since we are born with certain innate genetic qualities but also influenced by the society we live in what is the purpose of it all in other words how do we navigate Life as we grow up is there a story or meaning behind a child's development when we plant a tomato we have a purpose in mind we want to eat some delicious Tomatoes at the end is there a psychological story for a child's growing up Eric Ericson born in 1902 died in 1994 a German American psychologist believed in the epigenetic principle that all living organism have a purpose to fulfill their lives he suggested the humans go through eight distinct stages in life in the pursuit of fulfilling their life's purpose in each stage we are faced with two opposite paths much like the hero's journey in all stories who must go through many trials to become a hero these stages according to Ericson are one helpless infant learn to trust or mistrust their parents depending on how they meet their needs two autonomy versus shame or doubt builds up in 2-year-olds as they judge their abilities through their own successes and failures and navigating things three initiative versus guilt takes place in age 326 when children's creativity blossoms or tamed through punishment as they explore things four industry versus inferiority takes place among those age 6 to 12 when children learn competency or lack of it five ego identity versus Ro confusion is when children are 12 to 18 during this stage children either learn who they are or experience an identity crisis stage six is between 18 to 30 when a person learns either intimacy or isolation and how they bond with a partner to build a solid relationship stage seven is between 35 and 60 when a person experiences generativity or stagnation and how they feel about their contribution to Society at large these last stages after the age of 60 when a person feels ego Integrity or despair in this stage people reflect on their life Journey as a whole and whether they feel satisfied or despair over their Prospect of death to sum up Ericson's Theory matches a neat little story for our lives we go through many Crossroads trials and tribulations and how we navigate those hurdles can send us in the right or wrong path this binary narrative fits in with more philosophical or even religious ideas that combine our natural proclivities with our environmental factors so development is always a mix of both nature and nurture so to conclude child psychology broke away from Behavior psychology stating that children's psyche is vastly different from an adult psyche we are genetically equipped with certain biological traits but they tend to be age specific like the ability to learn linguistic rules as Chomsky said and P's innate cognitive proclivity towards learning by action while grownups can learn by listening children learn learn faster by doing other psychologists try to highlight the social side of learning the influence of parents and teachers arguing that thought process and learning are inherently social other psychologists focus on how mother child attachment is wired in our genes for survival but also solid foundation which allows us to explore the world more confidently some psychologists looked at how we develop morality and Prejudice but the topic of autism which has been on the rise in recent decades posed a very different question why is autism predominantly a problem among boys this is a perfect segue for our next topic and next segment which is psychology of the Sexes how do males and females are different and how do they see each other in the world differently 10 sexual psychology in the previous segment I discussed how children are different from adults and some of our psychological traits are age related such as our linguistic and cognitive learning abilities we lose the ability to learn language successfully after a certain age I also discuss how children are wired to get attached to their provider and protectors in this segment I'll discuss the psychology of the Sexes are men and women different in their psyche sexual dimorphism one of the most important human behavior is meeting and reproduction after food insecurity sexual urges the strongest Instinct in animals including humans as animals our basic biological purpose in life is to survive in order to M and reproduce future Generations as a result a lot of what we do on a daily basis are directly or indirectly influenced by our urge to meate Homo sapiens are dimorphic which means male and female Sexes have to make to reproduce this also means that males and females are different in size reproduction cost and fertility window males are generally bigger than females another huge difference is the cost of mating for males there's little or no cost when mating but for females it means 9 months of pregnancy and a very painful birth and throughout history a high chance of death at child birth another major difference is fertility window men stay fertile much longer and more constantly while females have a shorter monthly window as well as shorter overall fertility window as females experience menopause due to these basic biological differences men and women have different mating strategies which influence our behaviors towards each other on a more physiological level men produce more testosterone than women which makes us more aggressive while women produce more estrogen which is more bonding chemical as a result the urge for sex differs between men and women in general men have a much stronger drive to have sex than women for women the urge for sex goes up and down during their monthly cycle peing during Ovation while for men the urge to have sex remains at a higher level throughout the month and throughout their lives research shows that men are more willing to have sex casually therefore they treat sex as a more physical act while women tend to treat sex as an emotional experience experience this is because biologically women take a far greater risk when in having sex due to pregnancy and birth in today's world due to contraceptives this risk is minimized but the psychological hard wiring in women still prevents them from having sex with anyone so they are still far more selective than men since men take no physiological risk during pregnancy there is little genetic hardwiring in us to avoid sex while for a man risk mainly comes from social legal or financial standpoints if he impregnates a woman but for woman the risk is physiological and in premodern time it also meant a huge survival risk for example historically for women it was a matter of life and death but for men's sex was just a great opportunity to pass on their genes so throughout history generally speaking men were seeking sex while women wanted commitment The Stereotype that men want sex and women want love love is somewhat true because women want the men to stick around after sex the Romantic archetypes Doo differ for women it's a strong Beast who can be tamed and for men it's the damsel and distress that can be rescued so the Beauty and the Beast are very different and what they really want men are more visual so Beauty plays an important role while women are more auditory so they prioritize the ability to tell good and interesting stories how do these differences emerge in boys and girls according to studies conducted by Masters and Johnson's in the 1950s and 60s boys and girls grew at a similar rate until puberty after puberty the differences start to show more drastically boys tend to show more aggression due to high levels of testosterone while girls tend to show neuroticism due to high level of estrogen so boys Express themselves through physical confrontations like fights and sports while girls express themselves through gossip and storytelling according to the British biologist Lis walburn who was born in 1921 men are modified women he argues that male and female embryos are identical except the female has the XX chromosomes while the male has XY he speculates that we all conceived as female but male embryos change because instead of 2x chromosomes they have 1 x and one y this even plays in language we call Mother nature not father nature instead we have a father God or a sky father Le walart also argues that agriculture developed because of women's Gathering role within the human race men were Hunters therefore spent far more time away while the females stayed behind and gathered fruits and vegetables which led to the Agricultural Revolution this is not scientific but in agricultural civilizations like China and India they tend to be more feminine in fact Hinduism encourages vegetarianism with its religious teachings in a novel titled wolf totem by the Chinese author Jang wrong he relates his own observation of spending time among the Mongols and saw how different they were from the Chinese in terms of masculinity because Mongols were predominantly hunters and herders while the Chinese were predominantly farmers of course it's a work fiction but generally it's accepted among biologists that we are made of what we do and what we eat this is why Kenyans dominate longdistance running sports like Marathon so walart argues that agriculture allowed cities and civilization to flourish and this made men to be more like women staying in one place or attached to a piece of land as a result City walls and Country walls were built to defend against other wandering hungry men but going back to physiological differences the American new neuroscientist Paul Zach born in 1962 studied brain chemicals and found that women release more oxytocin oxytocin is a nurturing chemical in which you understand and sympathize with others and sometimes it's called the moral chemical because it's released when you do morally good things like helping and looking after someone else the reason for that is that estrogen which women have more of encourages the release of oxytocin as a result women are far better nurturers and more social women also have relatively larger hippocampus where we store long-term memory which helps them to store more emotional data this is why women notice subtle emotional differences on other people this emotional sensitivity when gone to the extreme leads to neuroticism Which is far more common among women than men Paul Zac also found that testosterone predominantly the male hormone blocks oxytocin this explains male aggression throughout history men were the soldiers and Fighters the physical beasts therefore had less necessity for understanding social cues meeting urges when it comes to meeting males and females have almost opposing strategies generally females want taller men while males want shorter females females want strong masculine men while males want soft feminine women but among the human species it's generally the females who are the selectors how do we know that when it comes to cognitive abilities the male Bill curve is far wider than female Paul Zac argues that since males fall on both sides of the IQ extremes the most intelligent as well as the least intelligent is because women are the selectors so they usually select the most intelligent as better candidates for meting in Security in other words the spectrum of intelligence is wide enough among men so females can have a choice if all men were of the same level of intelligence females would have a really hard time choosing the ability to be financially well off is generally tied to a man's level of intelligence in 1969 Hudson and hens conducted research in which they found that women found a man's Financial ability very important while for men it was merely desirable David borne in 1953 the American evolutionary psychologist in his popular book The Evolution of Desire explains males and females dating and mating strategies While most of the book deals with the studies done by other psychologists he also carried out some studies in the80s and later on and it was consistent that women generally prefer men who provideed financially this seem to be crosscultural and around the world females generally see Financial stability at the top of their MJ priority it makes sense since women go through pregnancy and child birth during which they need help with food and security there's an argument that technological advancement and modern Comfort have come about because women asked for it in other words women want a man who can build a safe and comfortable Nest I.E a place made of marbles therefore men have had the strongest urge to tame the world this is why men take risk when it comes to work for example more more than 90% of work related deaths are males because men take higher risk in the hope of finding or maintaining their Partners but in the premodern world maternal mortality was extremely high so women took a massive Risk by mating in general in meting with a weak man was a huge risk another important criteria by which women select their mates is based on a man's status the most desirable men are athletes singers CEOs anyone who respect within their Community women mostly young women flock to sleep with this High status men there's an argument that it is in fact other men who help females select their mate since males respect those who rise above them either through competence creativity or power this in turn allows females to choose those men who are respected by other men this is tied with security if other men respect a man he's more likely to be a safer bet than someone who who is not respected by other men when it comes to age bus also found that women prefer men older than themselves the reason is that the older men tend to have more excess resources and have acquired more status or are generally more mature ambition intelligence hard work height and strength or other selection criteria for women he concluded that females look for survival traits what is surprising is that when he studied women who are financially successful themselves they have an even stronger urge to find a mate who is financially on the same level or better this is often called female hypergamy which means females date across or up financially status Wise agewise height and strengthwise while males are more likely to date down in terms of status finances age physical strength and height this means men are okay with meeting with someone who is younger poorer shorter weaker and less famous generally speaking it shows that males and females meeting strategies are opposite but complimentary males look for things they themselves lack which is nurturing and soft feminine energy and Beauty females on the other hand look for someone who is physically stronger more experienced and better provider the urge to find a provider is so strong that women who are rich still want someone richer this study is consistent in many different countries David bus also looked at men it appears men generally want the opposite of what women want one of the biggest criteria by which men choose is youth research conducted by grammar in 1992 in Germany shows that as men gain more money and Status they tend to find partner who are younger of course not all men have the choice since among Homo sapiens the females are the selectors men have to build the nest and hope that females show up this this is why men strive to get rich and famous so females notice them this is why men used to carry big swords and Road big horses back in the days and today they buy sports cars which is peacocking to attract women but historically a small minority of men had all the women because they had all the resources and power so generally speaking most high status men have a younger partner which while men of lower status are more likely to meet with women who are older than them themselves of course culture and religion also have an important influence in how we M select so morality has curved some of our animalistic urges the second most important criteria for men is beauty according to evolutionary biology beauty is generally understood to be tied to healthy genes since we have no knowledge of someone's genetic makeup beauty is the best cue to judge if somebody's healthy who can produce healthy children as women have become become more financially independent in recent decades they also prioritize look and choosing a mate a third criteria by which men M select is Chastity in most animals their sexual organs are on the outside invisible for males to see when the females are ovulating in humans however it's concealed so human males do not know when a woman is fertile as a result human can have sex anytime so this opens up the possibility of paternity issues when a man and woman me the female knows the child is theirs but historically it was impossible for a man to prove the child was there so men had to rely on the woman's words or the physical features of the child but we know humans lie so one of the safest strategies for a men was to mate a virgin as a result chestday has been important for men throughout the world virginity was considered the ultimate sign of Chastity today thanks to DNA technology ology paternity tests exist to determine the father of a child of course these mating strategies are not always successful so neither male nor female find the part so if neither male nor female find the partner they want they choose the one that is available too reality is a lot harsher than an ideal partner so most of us we end up with the person we are able to get meeting practices David bus also also found some other differences among the Sexes men are far more prone to Casual Sex than women are again biology dictates their behavior as women have to deal with the consequences for men there are no negative biological consequences when they have sex of course the risk of STDs is one but for women the risks are far greater including physiological emotional and sexually transmitted diseases another reason is the size of men's testes men produce sperms on a daily basis es while women tend to have one egg during their monthly cycle research carried out by David Schmidt and 52 different countries found that men have far greater sex drive than women this is also because men take no biological risk in mating with a variety of women also men produce sperm every day which means they are ready all the time so to Su according to David bun women look for security value such as the ability to provide protect while men value Beauty and physical health the ability to have good-looking and healthy children as a result men strive to gain social status and money while women try to present themselves as beautiful and Youthful possible men compete for Financial Resources while women compete with makeup and plastic surgery men show off their fast cars with big butts and women show off their big boobs and so on we are animals After All one of the biggest difference that has emerged in recent dayc is the education system girls are outperforming in schools and universities once a male domain has become a female domain why Elanor makobe born in 1917 died in 2018 was an American psychologist who wanted to find out psychological differences among men and women the Orthodox psychologist tended to mainly focus on the similarities between men and women she looked at, 1600 studies and published her findings in 1974 in a book titled the psychology of sex differences despite the fact that many of these differences turned out to be superficial one major difference showed up in all the studies consistently it was that girls do better in schools and boys do worse this was particularly puzzling as the conventional wisdom was that boys tend to prioritize achievement more than girls do the common explanation given is that schools are based on instruction in which listening skills play a major role this favors girls more than boys because studies show that females are more agreeable this also translates into aggression as most people in prison are men so schools are Geared for girls simply because they listen better but there's another explanation that male and female brains are wir differently how do you know this the study of autism is an interesting one as it clearly shows that more often in boys than girls Simon Baron Cohen born in 1958 a British psychologist argues that the female brain is predominantly hardwired for empathy and male brain is hardwired for understanding systems the old saying that women prioritize feelings while men prioritize logic and reasoning his 2003 research looked at autism a condition in which children find it difficult to connect with others socially and emotionally but what's surprising about autism is that it's predominantly a male condition so most of autistic children or boys during his research he found that females showed more sympathy and greater sensitivity towards facial expressions and nonverbal cues the male brain however is more geared towards how systems work although women fall to the extremes of empathetic brains and men fall to the extremes of systematic brains there's also an overlap about 17% of males have an empathizing brain and 177% of females have a systematizing brain for Baron Coen autism is an extreme form of the male brain which lacks the ability to read other people's emotions autistic children tend to have an obsession with some kinds of system like mathematical number systems games computers etc why because these are problem solution solution based when you do maths it's mostly problems that needs an answer the same is true about games and computers so Baron Cohen argues that autism is simply the extreme of male brain and some male brain is wired for things and female brain is wi for people Jordan Peterson born in 1959 the Canadian psychologist also argues that female brain is wired to understand and empathize with children as the primary caregiver of children throughout history women are hardw to be more socially aware and read subtle emotional differences it makes sense as they have been the primary nurturers for children for millions of years of human evolution men on the other hand are evolved as problem solvers therefore their brain is wired to seek Solutions but since males and females have coexisted for millions of years it makes sense that they also have more in common than differences the Bel Cur shows men and women are more similar than different but it's the differences and extremes that exhibit a clear gender differences men are far more aggressive therefore the majority of prisons are filled with men but this aggression also helps men to rise up the career ladder as they are more risk tolerant so most of the CEOs are also men men are biological Hardware to compete as a result of male competition throughout history the majority of men never procreated for example 8,000 years ago for every one man 17 women procreated this means that only a minority of men were successful in meeting with the majority of women this male competition is also on a biological level a woman generally produces one egg per month to be fertilized but on the male side the competition is fierce among millions of sperm chasing one egg so males are evolutionary programmed to compete which inherently makes them more aggressive and risk-takers and socially it's males who pursue females and rarely the other way around throughout history the majority of men died in wars these mimics the sperm competition where millions of sperms compete for one egg but only one succeeds again Evolution favors that most men don't produce morality too reflects that protection of women is far more important than protection of men the media shows that there's far more moral outrage at the death of a woman than a man next time you watch the news pay attention in times of disasters too women are evacuated first our morality reflects our biological evolution hypothetically speaking a single man can have thousands or even millions of babies but a single woman is limited to a handful of children so from an EV evolutionary perspective who is more valuable the old saying that Society with one man and 100 women can prosper while a society with 100 men and one woman will die so Evolution says females are far more precious and important this is why throughout history men died in battles and rarely women were sent to Wars even today most dangerous jobs were taken by men hence 90% of work related debts occur among men today the human psyche has changed though more and more women have taken the male role of working and providing in the developed World therefore more women have chosen not to reproduce at all birth rates is its lowest and most affluent countries simply because women work long hours therefore no longer want to have babies in poor countries however the old gender roles means birth rate is still much higher than rich countries now this shift in rich countries has slowly shifted morality too when in the future spaceship sings In Space like the Titanic sank in the Atlantic Ocean you will not hear ladies first on the life boat you might hear Mr musk and Mr Bezos first and Mr Bronson lost one of the key factors in sexual psychology has been The Narrative of feminism that men and women are the same as a result many scholars are hesitant to contact research in the field that might show otherwise Jord Peterson has come under a lot of attack from feminists for saying that men and women are different I think the argument from the feminist side has been that by proving a sexual difference between men and women it perpetuates the oldest stereotype that only men can do certain things and vice versa however given our biological differences it takes a decade and centuries to equalize the differences but can we really fight Evolution it's a very touchy topic these days due to another development in rich countries transgenderism so the psychology of the sexist has become an ideological Battleground therefore it makes it hard to have an open and honest conversation on the left they minimize the differences while on the right they maximize the differences between men and women but there's no doubt that most societies are changing when it comes to gender roles perhaps there's another evolutionary process today a vast number of men lack the ability to meet which is similar to most of History only a minority of men have access to the majority of women we're animals and we are evolving so to sum up the psychology of the Sexes show that our biological differences translate themselves into our psychological differences the difference is more visible in our maing strategies males and females seek the Opposites for themselves this makes sense millions of years of evolution has created opposite sex that each sex desire it's not rocket science females value is strong masculine protectors while males seek kind nurturing mates but human civilization has tamed the world so while our psychology is stuck in the past our physical and social world is very different and very safe therefore a vast number of men feel no longer needed as protectors and providers because the police and military protect everyone and women earn their own money as a result more and more people leave alone as marriage and child birth rates have decreased as science becomes more powerful perhaps in some distant future there is no need for meeting at all as we can procreate babies and Labs like Aldos huxley's Brave New World but until then we have to chase each other in the next segment I'll discuss the problem of psychology itself mainly the psychological Paradox of personal it as well as the problems of [Music] Psychiatry 11 psychological Paradox while psychology has revolutionized our understanding of the human mind it has also come under criticism fundamentally the biggest Paradox of psychology is similar to zenos Paradox as soon as you measure today's psyche we humans react and change so no matter how apt to date psychology is it can never catch up with the latest human psyche it can never fully understand the human psyche through the human psyche in other words we are the tool of observation as well as the subject of observation it is akin to quantum physics the mere observation changes the subject if unobserved the subject behaves one way and as soon as it's under observation it behaves differently unaware we have one persona and as soon as we know someone is watching us we change our Persona according to Gordon alart born in 1897 and died in 1967 an American psychologist psychology is too stuck in the past and pays little attention to the future quote people are busy leading their lives into the future whereas psychology for the most part is busy tracing them into the past Psychology from early on had two distinct approach Roes behaviorism focused on how we learn to behave in the way we do and psychoanalysis focused on how the unconscious gives us our personality in other words behavior is bundled everyone as Behavior animals without any unique personality while psychoanalysis explain through just acquired personality through past memory baggage what was missing was the current personality and motivations so alart wanted to study the present not the past take an empirical and scientific approach after some research he settled on one specific topic language he gathered all the English words describing someone's traits he found 18,000 words and then narrowed it to 4, 500 Words that could be objectively studied he came up with three traits Cardinal common and secondary Cardinal traits are fundamental to a person that continues throughout their lives for instance explorers hikers poets artists are driven by a powerful force that motivates them to push on common traits on the other hand are general characteristics like someone is honest or aggressive while Cardinal traits tend to be rooted deeper in biology common traits are taught by others or nurtured in society secondary traits like preferences are less important and often invisible to most people how do we acquire such traits alport offers two forces that work in tandem biological and environmental the internal Force you call genotype like being creative and independent which help us survive the elements and the external Force he called phenotype like being kind rude afraid irritable Etc that help us navigate Society he famously studied the story of Robinson cruso who needed his genotype traits to survive on the island and phenotype traits once he met other characters so alport criticized psychology for being too stuck in the past while the individual was heing towards the future this is like Zeno's Paradox by the time a psychologist understands an individual psyche he or she has moved on so the study of the human psyche is a catchup process that is never fully up to date we are forward-looking creatures therefore our personality traits partly innate partly acquired determine our current motivations in future lives intelligence apart from personality differences intelligence is another area that differs among individuals Alfred Bennett born in 1857 died in 1911 was a French psychologist who while conducting research on human intelligence and learning learned that intelligence is not fixed as it was stated by scientist such as Francis Galton Charles Darwin's cousin or William W the German psychologist who also proposed intelligence quotient or IQ Bennett argued that intelligence is somewhat fixed at Birth but it has the potential to grow as a child develops just as personality is constantly changing our intelligence too is very Dynamic together with another French psychologist Theodore Simon he developed a skill called Benet Simon scale which is used in IQ tests and the basis of intelligent tests today just as personality psychologists were playing catchup with changes intelligence tests too have been playing catchup as we go through changes but this modified intelligence test suffer from the same problem as the IQ test JP Guilford born in 1897 died in 1987 had a problem with both the standard IQ test and Simon Bennett scale the IQ test he argued fails to measure creativity which by definition means there are more than one answer the core problem of IQ test is what he called convergent answers basically all roads lead to Rome one place which lacks values such as originality fluency flexibility and elaboration for Guilford intelligence is made of three components operation content and product in other words applied effort on the good project or idea leads to a new idea or product this standard IQ test neglects the creativity side of our intelligence If evolution wasn't creative birds would be walking on on the ground quote the person who is capable of producing a large number of ideas per unit of time has a greater chance of having significant ideas this idea that intelligence is not something solid but very Dynamic and fluid is also echoed by the English psychologist Raymond cattle born in 1905 died in 1998 who argued that there are two types of intelligence fluid and crystallized fluid intelligence allows us to reason and find connections without prior experience or knowledge crystallized intelligence on the other hand is from past experiences in knowledge learned fluid intelligence is a little like innate knowledge proposed by rationalist philosophers such as content Day cards crystallized intelligence is more like what emperis philosophers such as John Lock and David Hume would term as learned experiences personality meets in intelligence as we saw that there are personality types among individuals the same is true about intelligence level some extremely intelligent individuals whom we call Geniuses have a personality trait very similar to the temperaments of psychotics Hans J ien born in 1916 died in 1997 a german-born British biologist and psychologist wanted to find out whether genius and Madness had anything in common throughout history great Geniuses had bouts of insanity and a great example is Vincent Van go Dutch Master and his friend Paul Goan I sank particularly wanted to study temperament as I discussed before the Greek physician gin classify people into four temperamental types sanguin or cheerful caloric or hot tempered fmatic or lazy and melancholic or pessimistic I sang himself about biologist believed we were biologically wired to have certain temperament so he tried to put gallen's Theory to the test but he modified a bit by making a model that had neuroticism or emotional turmoil on one end of the spectrum and emotional calm stoicism on the other end he also added another dimension extroversion or outgoing temperament and introversion or shy temperament he carried out his test on a large number of people but it was his study of mental Asylum patience that prompted him to add another dimension which he called psychoticism or simply Insanity temperament in other words iank put Insanity on a spectrum not the usual sanity as normal and Insanity as abnormal his studies showed that those suffering from psychotic conditions had a lot in common with Geniuses as they both showed greater overinclusion iive thinking ability for example during the study the subjects were told certain words like hand and then asked the subjects to associate other words with the word hand for example finger glove clap etc those with a narrow range of answers could only associate one or two but those with a wide or inclusive set of answers could offer far more Associated words the results showed that psychotics and Geniuses showed greater aptitude towards originality and creativity in other words genius artists tend to have psychotic temperaments the over inclusive thinking ability but this doesn't mean there's a causal link between the two quote psychoticism and the absence of psychosis is the vital element in translating the trait of creativity originality from potential to actual achievement so to sum up is's research showed that Geniuses and PSY kric patients shared a common thinking style and psychotic temperament seems essential in creativity and originality while Isen explained personality traits through biological factors he failed to take environmental factors into consideration Walter michell born in 1930 died in 2018 an Austrian born American psychologist saw personality types to be two confusing and too widely inaccurate in 1968 he published the famous book personality and assessment in which he argued that it was absurd to believe that personality had nothing to do with the environment if you put the same person in two widely different settings he would show different personality types he later devised a study in which he gave children a marshmallow and told them they either eat one marshmallow or wait 20 minutes and have two he followed those kids as they grew up and found that those who waited did better in life today we know the term delayed gratification versus instant gratification which shows If a person is successful or not so to sum up Orthodox personality psychology mainly focus on how personality impacts Behavior Michelle's research however put personality psychology on its head arguing that it's behavior that reveals personality not the other way around in other words because of the psychological Paradox today's personality cannot predict future behaviors the human Psych is highly reactive therefore the most accurate way to study is through Behavior this makes psychology something akin to archaeology which means it can only draw conclusion retrospectively not prospectively in other words psychologist always looking back and never fully accurate looking ahead anti psychiatry in recent decades psychology in general and psychiatry in particular have come under attack for inventing illnesses one of the main reason is how many new diseases have been added to the list over the past few years and decades Psychiatry critics point that the difference between developing and developed world and how many different disorders are officially accepted in the developed world compared to the developing World another criticism has been the prescription of medicine now it is millions of people are on medication from which they find it difficult to come off this anti Psychiatry sentiment is not new some of the criticism have come from other psychologists David rosenal born in 1929 died in 2012 and American psychologist wanted to find out if psychiatrists were good a judging sane people from insane in 1973 he did a study in which he she sent healthy men and women of various ages and jobs to various Mental Hospitals they all pretended to be mentally ill so they were admitted to hospitals when describing their illness they would use vague terms like hearing noises after they were admitted to the hospital they acted and behaved normally without showing any signs or symptoms of any mental illness on average they all stayed in a mental hospital for nearly 20 days where they felt they were losing their sense of autonomy and power to be themselves they kept a journal of their experience at first they did it secretly but later openly which was seen by the hospital staff as somewhat odd behavior the staff didn't detect that they were fake however some of the other patients noticed that they might be fake rosenal repeated the experiment later but this time he told the staff that among the new patients there might be one impostor someone who pretends to be mentally ill the staff were asked rate the new patients to find the fake one out of 193 real patients 41 genuine patients were suspected as fake and 23 patients with real mental illnesses were flagged as fake by at least one psychiatrist so Rosen har showed that psychiatrists are just people who suffer from the same flaws their patients suffer that in a ability to be the best judge of other people as a result psychology and psychiatry in particular has come under attack in 1961 the Hungarian American psychiatrist Thomas S published a book titled the myth of mental illness in which he argued that mental illness is a way of labeling someone he argued that a lot of what is termed as mental illnesses is simply life being too tough at times so both Rosen ham study and Thomas S showed that mental illness is not as clear-cut abnormality as Psychiatry makes them so to some up psychology has a very tricky job of diagnosing the human mind while using the human mind this creates a paradx in which the Observer is also the observe since we can neither fully disconnect Consciousness from the subject nor from The Observer it's always an approximate science the other Paradox is of course the Paradox of change Zeno's Paradox deals with measuring space and time psychological Paradox is similar and that as soon as you understand the human personality it has changed or moved on therefore psychology is a catchup Endeavor without the ability to fully catch up another biggest Paradox of Psychiatry is the more we know the more disorders are diagnosed in other words the more psychological parameters shift the more illnesses is it [Music] finds conclusion to sum up this course in part one I discussed the philosophical origin of psychology for example the Greek psychology of humorism was akin to modern science of physiology in Ancient India the study of Consciousness was tied to religious experience the more conscious one is the more enlightened he or she is then in the Islamic world jeis of mind versus body influence Renaissance Europe with the invention of modern Sciences in Europe philosophy kep to physics to study physical world biology to study life and finally psychology to study the human mind with the invention of psychology the study of Consciousness became a scientific Endeavor then I looked at different branches of psychology and a brief history of its development in German speaking World psychology took an analytical approach which gave birth to psychoanalysis that divided Consciousness into two parts conscious and unconscious however in Russia behaviorism focused on the empirical study of behavior as the best predictor of the psyche while both psychon analysis and behavior psychology were more deterministic in the US cognitive psychology focused on empowering the individual in part two I looked at how psychology explains the human psyche on the one hand structuralism sees Consciousness as a structure that can be broken down into smaller parts and each analyzed separately however functionalism influenced by The evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin sees Consciousness as a whole much more like a stream rather than solid structure Behavior psychology however saw Consciousness as too subjective so they opted to observe Behavior which can be studied objectively so behaviorism took the cube that action speaks louder than words but psychoanalysis thought Behavior doesn't tell you the full picture so they return to Consciousness itself to discover a whole hidden unconscious world that determines a lot of our Behavior so according to psych analysis our Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg I discussed how Freud focused on the individual unconscious while Yung focused on the collective unconscious in part three I looked at how psychology cured modern suffering Psychotherapy took its cue from psychoanal is focused on the individual patients guest all Psychotherapy took a masculine approach of Tough Love Therefore emphasized responsibility while humanistic Psychotherapy took a more softer approach to fulfillment and existential Psychotherapy focused on meaning and purpose in life cognitive psychology and cognitive Psychotherapy shifted the focus on our cognitive abilities so perception attention memory and intelligence became the main focus of psychological studies since both behavior and psychoanalysis blame environmental conditioning and the unconscious cognitive psychology try to empower the individual through perception in other words how you see the world can have a massive influence on how you see yourself in part four I looked at other factors such as Society age gender and personality in social psychology we saw how individuals are pulled to conform through group pressure or obedience but also pushed by original creative thinking social change result when individual push boundaries in child psychology I discussed how some of the psyche is age specific for example our ability to learn language veins as we age the same is true about attachment as we grow up we feel less and less attached to others in sex psychology I discuss some of the major differences between males and females when it comes to mating habits and strategy males and females have evolved to complement each other in order to make a process of procreation easier and finally I also talked about the psychological Paradox that the Observer is also the observed in psychology of Personality that as soon as you observe personality it changes but despite his limitations psychology has immensely helped us understand the human mind on a deeper level but the mystery of Consciousness still unresolved if you have made it to this point well done so my question to you you which branch of psychology resonated with you the most or more interesting question is where do you see psychology heading do you think we can understand Consciousness soon as always I appreciate you accompanying me on this long journey thank you