History of Psychology
mixingmemory | June 28, 2006Jonah, over at Frontal Cortex, has a post titled "Neglected Psychologists," in which he asks:
What other great scientists of mind are modern neuroscientists neglecting?
The same could be asked of all cognitive scientists. Jonah gives two names: William James and John Dewey. If you've been reading this blog for long, you know that I'm a huge James fan, and Dewey is an excellent choice as well. In coments, I added Frederic Bartlett, whose book Remembering should be read by anyone interested in cognitive or social psychology, and Kurt Lewin, who has already been profoundly influential, but who…
mixingmemory | June 27, 2006In a response to my defense of Freud, Jonah Lehrer states that, with Harold Bloom (ewww!), he sees Freud as "one of the great artists of the 20th century." In my view, how we read Freud today -- as literature, philosophy, or science -- is largely a matter of choice, as is the case for most early psychologists. We don't even need to pick just one. I myself tend to see his work as both philosophy and science, though not as literature. In this post, I'm going to briefly make the case for my own perception of him, as a way of extending my defense of his work as relevant to psychology today.
Two…
mixingmemory | June 23, 2006A couple Science Bloggers have been giving Freud a hard time lately. In a post on Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex wrote:
So why was Blink less than satisfying for me? Becase Gladwell ended up lumping together all sorts of research, from Damasio's Iowa Gambling Task to Ekman's cartography of facial muscles to brain scans of autistic people, that, at least from a neurological perspective, were totally unrelated. They all involved different brain regions that are activated by different stimuli. Gladwell got around this slight problem by never discussing the actual…