Tag Archives: mind

New Exhibit! Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology at London’s Science Museum

2013.12.13Events, GeneralBPS, CBT, ECT, glass harmonica, Mesmerism, mind, museum, PET scan, Science MuseumJacy Young

London’s Science Museum is now exhibiting Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology. Supported by the British Psychological Society (BPS), the exhibit is on display until August 12, 2014 and is free for all visitors. The video above provides a quick look behind the scenes of the exhibit and a number of items from the exhibit are further highlighted on the Science Museum’s website here. The exhibit, the brain child (pun intended) of the Science Museum’s BPS Curator of Psychology Phil Loring,

explores how mental health conditions have been diagnosed and treated over the past 250 years.

Divided into four episodes between 1780 and 2014, this exhibition looks at key breakthroughs in scientists’ understanding of the mind and the tools and methods of treatment that have been developed, from Mesmerism to Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) bringing visitors up to date with the latest cutting edge research and its applications.

Bringing together psychology, other related sciences, medicine and human stories, the exhibition is illustrated through a rich array of historical and contemporary objects, artworks and archive images.

Updated: Much more on the exhibit on both BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4, the latter featuring an interview by Claudia Hammond with curator Phil Loring and the music of the glass harmonica. Reviews of Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology can also be found at the Huffington Post and The Telegraph.

New Book: Roger Smith’s Between Mind and Nature: A History of Psychology

2013.11.28Books, PodcastsHenderikus Stam, mind, Nature, Roger Smith, Russia, Soviet UnionJacy Young

Historian of psychology Roger Smith‘s volume Between Mind and Nature: A History of Psychology is now in print. Smith, an accomplished historian of science, is Reader Emeritus in the History of Science at Lancaster University and an Associate of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Between Mind and Nature is a comprehensive history of psychology, that looks beyond the American context to developments in several European countries including the Soviet Union. The book recently received a glowing review in PsycCritiques from psychologist Henderikus Stam, who writes,

Smith has managed to achieve what the reviewer took to be an almost impossible task: to write a single comprehensive volume on the history of psychology while at the same time acknowledging that (a) there are many histories of psychology, (b) there is no single coherent discipline of psychology, and (c) there were multiple developments in the formation of this discipline across the globe.

Smith’s work is described on the publisher’s website as follows:

From William James to Ivan Pavlov, John Dewey to Sigmund Freud, the Würzburg School to the Chicago School, psychology has spanned centuries and continents. Today, the word is an all-encompassing name for a bewildering range of beliefs about what psychologists know and do, and this intrinsic interest in knowing how our own and other’s minds work has a story as fascinating and complex as humankind itself. In Between Mind and Nature, Roger Smith explores the history of psychology and its relation to religion, politics, the arts, social life, the natural sciences, and technology.

Considering the big questions bound up in the history of psychology, Smith investigates what human nature is, whether psychology can provide answers to human problems, and whether the notion of being an individual depends on social and historical conditions. He also asks whether a method of rational thinking exists outside the realm of natural science. Posing important questions about the value and direction of psychology today, Between Mind and Nature is a cogently written book for those wishing to know more about the quest for knowledge of the mind.

For those interested in more hearing more of Smith’s work, an hour-long lecture on “Being Human in Russia – Free Will and Psychology Under the Tsars” can be heard online here.

New Issue: History of the Human Sciences

2012.07.10Journalsanatomy, brain, Europe, European Association of Experimental Social Psychology, mindJacy Young

The July 2012 issue of History of the Human Sciences is now online. Included in this issue are a number of articles that may be of interest to AHP’s readers. The historical origins of the idea that the mind is an emergent property of the brain is explored in an article by Elfed Huw Price. In another piece, Sandra Schruijer describes the initial aims of the founding of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology. A series of commentaries follow the latter article. Full titles, authors, and abstracts follow below.

“Do brains think? Comparative anatomy and the end of the Great Chain of Being in 19th-century Britain,” by Elfed Huw Price. The abstract reads,

The nature of the relationship between mind and body is one of the greatest remaining mysteries. As such, the historical origin of the current dominant belief that mind is a function of the brain takes on especial significance. In this article I aim to explore and explain how and why this belief emerged in early 19th-century Britain. Between 1815 and 1819 two brain-based physiologies of mind were the subject of controversy and debate in Britain: the system of phrenology devised by Franz Joseph Gall, and William Lawrence’s lectures at the Royal College of Surgeons. Both owed a profound intellectual debt to continental comparative anatomy. In the final quarter of the 18th-century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Petrus Camper and Johann Gottfried von Herder had broken away from the traditional doctrine of the Great Chain of Being by allowing for a clear anatomical distinction between ‘man’ and beast based on the morphology of the skull. This reconceptualization of man as an anatomically distinct being gave Gall and Lawrence grounds to propose that the peculiarities of the human mind were dependent on mankind’s unique cerebral size and structure.

“Whatever happened to the ‘European’ in European social psychology? A study of the ambitions in founding the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology,” by Sandra G. L. Schruijer. The abstract reads,

This article studies the ambitions involved in founding the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology (EAESP) in the context of a differentiation between social psychology practised in Europe on the one hand and the United States on the other. To this end 8 key actors have been interviewed: 4 members of the very first Executive Committee (or Planning Committee as it was called then) as well as 4 key players of a second generation. Also the EAESP’s archives have been consulted. Moreover, data regarding the developments of EAESP’s membership and EAESP’s house journal, the European Journal of Social Psychology (EJSP), were used to assess to what extent the ambitions in developing a European social psychology have been realized. The conclusion is that, despite various successes, it remains questionable whether the founders’ aims have been fulfilled.

“‘Americanization’ of European Social Psychology,” by Ivana Marková. No abstract provided.

“An evaluation of the impact of the European Association of Social Psychology: A response to Schruijer (2012),” by Miles Hewstone, Karmela Liebkind, Maria Lewicka, János László, Alberto Voci, Alberta Contarello, Ángel Gómez, Alexandra Hantzi, Michal Bilewicz, Ana Guinote, Sylvie Graf, and Kristina Petkova. No abstract provided.

Advances in the History of Psychology

a current look at the history of psychology, with news, notes, and additional resources

Tag Archives: mind

New Exhibit! Mind Maps: Stories from Psychology at London’s Science Museum

New Book: Roger Smith’s Between Mind and Nature: A History of Psychology