The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  The connectionist model is strongly analogous to actual brain structure and function. The late Francis Crick, who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA and then did neuroscience research at the Salk Institute, said that the concept of the brain as a complex hierarchy of largely parallel processors “is almost certainly along the right lines.”111 Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland—each a philosopher of cognitive science—have said that the brain is indeed a parallel machine “in the sense that signals are processed in millions of different pathways simultaneously.” Each aggregation of neurons sends millions of signals to other aggregations and receives return signals from them that modify its output in one way or another. It is these recurrent patterns of connection that “make the brain a genuine dynamical system whose continuing behavior is both highly complex and to some degree independent of its peripheral stimuli.”112 Thus could Descartes, lying abed all morning, think about his own thoughts, as has many a psychologist since.

  Possibly the most remarkable development of all is, as noted above, the change in the relationship between computer and mind. A generation ago, it seemed that the computer was the model by which the reasoning mind could be understood. Now the order has been reversed: The reasoning mind is the model by which a more intelligent computer can be built. Artificial intelligence researchers have been writing programs that simulate the parallel processing of small neural networks, their aim being to create AI programs that are more nearly intelligent than those based on serial processing, and to create programs that simulate hypothesized mental processes so that they can be tested on a computer.

  A wonderful irony: The brain that makes mind possible turns out to be the best model for the machine that had been thought vastly superior to it, a model so complex and intricate that it is all the computer can do, for now, to replicate a few of its multitude of functions and make only symbolic simulations of a handful of others.

  As David, the greatest of psalmists, sang twenty-five centuries before the cognitive revolution and the computer age, “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

  And the Winner Is—

  We have followed the revolutionary development of cognitive psychology and the later but equally revolutionary development of cognitive neuroscience, which currently coexist, overlapping and infiltrating each other. But will they continue to do so or is one likely to dominate and absorb the other, becoming the psychology of the future? The answer would seem to depend on which discipline offers the better scientific explanation of mental processes and behavior.

  Cognitive psychology, as we have seen, has compiled a remarkable record over the past six decades. Escaping from the severe limitations of behaviorist theory, it rediscovered the mind and found innumerable ways to investigate the unseen processes, among them perception, learning, memory, emotion, personality development, and social behavior, that take place in it. Cognitive psychologists were free to ask, once again, the great questions the Greek philosophers asked so long ago, summed up in the megaquestions “How do we know what we know, and why do we behave as we do?”

  As is the case with other sciences, the proliferation of hypotheses and collecting of empirical evidence by cognitive psychologists has often produced corrections and drastic revisions of theories, minitheories, and data, but seen in perspective, cognitive psychology has been a cumulative, self-correcting, self-transforming science.

  Its one great shortcoming has always been its lack of an adequate explanation of how the activity of billions of neurons in the brain can result in thoughts, emotions, and voluntary actions. As the neuropsychologist V. S. Ramachandran and science writer Sandra Blakeslee wrote a few years ago, “Many people find it disturbing that all the richness of our mental life—all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate selves—arise entirely from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain. How is this possible? How could something as deeply mysterious as consciousness emerge from a chunk of meat inside the skull?”113

  In an effort to answer this question, ever since the early days of the cognitive revolution many psychologists have reached beyond the classic boundaries of their field to explain what they were studying in terms of hormonal, genetic, and other physiological factors. And for the past two and a half decades, as we have seen throughout this chapter, many psychologists have turned to the methods of cognitive neuroscience, especially brain scanning, to help validate their psychological hypotheses. But valuable as all this is, it still does not tell us how a blizzard of neural impulses becomes thought or other mental processes.

  Cognitive neuroscience, especially since the advent of brain scans, has been compiling a record of advances in knowledge as impressive as that of cognitive psychology. The neuroscientists have traced neuronal pathways from sense receptors to various loci in the brain, located the areas where emotions are generated, shown that memories are stored in distributed network fashion, and in general extended their research deep into the territory of cognitive psychology, amassing a great deal of information about what areas of the brain are active in mental imagery, attention, speech, learning, voluntary and involuntary action, and other areas of classic psychological interest.

  All of which is impressive and almost certainly will be the foundation on which some day a fuller explanation of how the brain becomes mind may be forthcoming. But not yet. The authors of one impressive tome of neuroscience write, “In this book, we explore how the brain actually does enable mind”114—but by “enable” they seem to mean something less than explain how the synaptic events become mental events. I asked Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, if the problem were not akin to that of trying to account for the movement of a wave in terms of the movements of individual molecules of water; she laughed and said, “Fluid mechanics is independent of molecular physics. But cognition may not be describable without some details of neuronal function being in the picture.”

  Thus, a mental process as simple as a word retrieved from memory cannot be equated with the firing of millions of neurons and the resultant billions of synaptic transmissions but is the product of the pattern or structure of those firings and transmissions. Mental phenomena such as speech, memory retrieval, and reasoning are governed not by the laws of neural activity but by those of cognitive psychology. The former logo of the journal Cognition is a striking example of this distinction:

  FIGURE 45

  Levels of reality: molecules, letters, words, impossible objects

  The design is made up of molecules of ink on paper, a reality that has nothing to do with its meaning. At a higher level of organization, the molecules make up letters, which individually are symbols without meaning but as here organized make up the word “cognition.” But we are not done. The design, though it looks real and three-dimensional, is an object that cannot exist in the real world; the paradoxical illusion is a mental epiphenomenon. Explain that, if you can, in terms of molecules of ink, letters, or bursts of energy in the neurons of the visual cortex.

  Whether or not there is ever a full and satisfying explanation of mental events in neural terms, the revolutions of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience have been successful side by side, overlapping, and in concert with each other.

  As for the title of this section, “And the Winner Is—,” we now seem to be at the top of the tenth (or eleventh? or twelfth?)—and still tied.

  * A bit, in information theory, is the smallest unit of information: it is equal to a simple yes or no. A digit or a letter of the alphabet is equal to several bits.

  * The comment, made in 2002, still holds true.

  * Lacking the toy, you can play the game with three or more coins of different sizes. Draw three squares on a sheet of paper, pile the coins in one of them, decide which square the pile is to end up in, and start. The three-coin game is easy, the four-coin game not so easy, and the five-coin game quite hard.

 
* The answer: PROBLEMS

  * The only correct deduction is that some of the chess players are not archaeologists.

  * Storage of information in the brain has long been thought to be the result of some kind of unexplained strengthening of the synapses involved in any learning experience. Recent neurophysiological research, too arcane to be fully spelled out here, has established that in any form of learning, a series of at least 15 steps involving 100 or more different molecules takes place, switching on certain genes. These make the post-synaptic neuron more easily activated by the presynaptic neuron’s release of various neurotransmitters (Marcus, 2004:100). In addition, the process induces the growth of additional synaptic connections on the presynaptic side (Kandel, 2006, chaps. 14, 17, 19). These changes, in effect, record information, although any elementary item in memory—a shape, say, or a sound—may require that a vast number of strengthened synapses, linked in a network, fire together.

  † The solution continues as follows:

  S must be either 8 or 9, depending on whether or not there is a carry. Substituting 1 for M, where S + 1 = O, we see that O can be only 0 or 1. But M is 1, so O must be 0; therefore S must be 9 and there is no carry.

  In the second column from the left, E + 0 would be E unless there is a carry; hence there must be a carry. So E + 1 = N.

  If E is odd, N is even, and vice versa. If E is odd, it can only be 3, 5, or 7 (1 and 9 are already assigned). Try 3. And so on.

  SEVENTEEN

  The

  Psychotherapists

  Growth Industry

  Let us indulge in a bit of fantasy. Wilhelm Wundt, invisible except to us, returns from Somewhere to see what has become of the science he launched more than a century ago.

  Stern and formal in his black lecture gown, the shade of the Herr Professor stares uncomprehendingly as some of his intellectual descendants, at a cognitive science conference, discuss the molecular basis of memory in the giant sea snail, while others speak of a computer program that simulates parallel distributing processing. Elsewhere, however, he permits himself an uncharacteristic beaming smile when he hears that six decades ago there were only about 4,000 psychologists in America but today there are some 180,000, (about half at the doctorate level, half at the master’s level), a nearly forty-five-fold growth.1

  When, however, the vaporous Dr. Wundt drifts into the offices of the American Psychological Association, his smile turns to a dark scowl. For here he learns that during the past several decades most new Ph.D.’s in psychology have become not researchers but industrial, educational, and—by far the largest number—clinical and counseling psychologists.2 Wundt had adamantly opposed educational psychology and similar practical applications of the science, but this— listening and talking to people about their personal problems—is the worst, a detestable degradation of psychology. And he is horrified when he hears that most Americans, these days, think of a psychologist as someone who treats patients with mental health problems.3 Schrecklich!

  Of all the ways in which psychology influenced Americans during the past three quarters of a century, none has been more pervasive than the change it brought about in how they think of and deal with emotional and mental disorders. Many miseries, failures, disabilities, dissatisfactions, and misbehaviors that their forefathers attributed to weakness of character, wickedness, or Fate came to be seen by most Americans as psychological disorders that could be treated by mental health practitioners.

  Acting on this conviction, in recent years some 10 million Americans made 86 million visits to psychotherapists annually, and in-patients in mental hospitals and psychiatric wards of general hospitals accounted for another several million sessions. Cumulatively, nearly one out of three persons—80 or 90 million—have had some experience with psychotherapy.4

  About a third of these “consumers” of psychotherapy were treated by psychologists, about a third by physicians (but probably more of the total visits were made to psychologists than to physicians, since many users visited a physician only once to receive medication rather than talk therapy). The rest of the visits were made to clinical social workers, clinical mental health counselors, lay (nonmedical) analysts, and pastoral counselors. (Dr. Abe Wolf, current president of Division 29—psychotherapy—of the American Psychological Association, ruefully says in a recent online message from his division, “Psychologists struggle to maintain a distinct identity, competing with other professionals who all practice psychotherapy.”) Most of the above professionals (except for the physicians dispensing medication), despite their dissimilar backgrounds and allegiance, practice therapies that are psychological, as distinguished from such other approaches to mental illness as the physiological, social, and religious.5

  The rise in the use of medication, however, has been notable; the nonmedical therapists now often refer their clients to a physician for medication (to be taken along with talk therapy), and many emotionally or mentally ailing people ask their own family physicians for mood-influencing medications. Some psychotherapists believe that medication has somewhat reduced the practice of psychotherapy, though they have no hard data on the issue. But Dr. Mark Olfson, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and the lead author of the latest survey of psychotherapy usage, recently told Erica Goode of the New York Times, “With all the attention given to antidepressants and other medications, the role of psychotherapy can be easily overshadowed… but [it is] clear that psychotherapy continues to play an important role in the mental health care of many Americans.”6

  Psychology was not originally an applied science, and its training centers produced not “health care providers” but researchers and theorists. The discipline grew rapidly after World War II, as did all the sciences, with the number of science Ph.D.’s granted yearly increasing more than tenfold between 1945 and 1970. But then the baby boom of undergraduates ebbed, new degree holders had difficulty finding teaching positions, and doctorate production declined steeply in all the sciences—except psychology, which kept growing.

  By the 1970s, however, psychology was growing not as a pure science but as several forms of applied science, of which health care was far and away the largest. The total output of Ph.D.s in psychology grew steadily from 1966 to 2000, with only a slight drop off to 2004, but the percentage of research psychologists fell off sharply after the mid-1970s while the output of health care providers (clinical, counseling, and school psychologists) continued to increase. Although the absolute number of research psychologists has grown since 1970, it has steadily shrunk as a percentage of the discipline and now comprises a small minority of all doctoral and master’s level psychologists. Clinical and counseling psychologists, most of whom practice psychotherapy (the rest do primarily testing and assessment), now make up about half.7

  Despite the growing numbers of clinical psychologists, about two thirds of the demand for psychotherapy is, as already mentioned, met by others: two thirds of the nation’s 45,000 psychiatrists who spend much of their time in private practice; 96,000 clinical social workers, most of whom practice some psychotherapy in agency and hospital settings but some of whom do so in private practice; 80,000 certified clinical mental health counselors; 3,000 pastoral counselors; and an unknown number of other people who call themselves psychotherapists—the use of the term is not controlled by law in most states—and who have anywhere from a fair amount of training to none at all.8

  Psychotherapists in all these disciplines now treat a far broader spectrum of patients than ever. (“Patients” is the term used by psychiatrists and psychologists; many other therapists call them “clients” to avoid the medical connotations of the word “patient.” The terms in this context are synonymous.)

  Formerly, psychotherapy was used chiefly with people whose contact with reality was unimpaired but who suffered from anxiety, phobias, obsessions and compulsions, hysteria, hypochondriasis, physical problems of psychological origin—in short, all those said to have neuroses.* Today, many people seek psy
chotherapeutic help for marital conflict, parent-child problems, job-related troubles, loneliness, shyness, failure to succeed, and indeed anything that comes under the general heading of “problems of living.”

  In addition, psychotics, who used to be treated by prolonged soaking in tepid water, insulin or electroconvulsive shocks, and even lobotomy but rarely by psychotherapy—which often couldn’t reach them—are now brought back to reality or lifted out of the depths of depression by psychoactive drugs and thereby enabled to benefit from psychotherapy. In the 1950s, well over half a million people were locked away in the nation’s state mental hospitals; since the introduction of chlorpromazine and other psychoactive drugs in the middle of that decade, the number has declined radically, to fewer than 44,000.9 A majority of the kinds of patients who formerly were confined now live in the community, and their mental disorders are treated in community mental health centers by means of medication and psychotherapy.

  Although psychotherapy has thus grown vastly in influence and acceptability, it has long been assailed both by those who regard psychology as a spurious science and those who regard psychotherapy as a spurious healing art.

  One line of attack has stressed that clinical psychologists and other psychotherapists themselves admit that what they do is more intuitive than rational, more an art than a science. Many academic and research psychologists have therefore long held that psychotherapy is unworthy to be called a part of their science. In 1956, a psychologist, David Bakan, wrote in American Psychologist, a publication of the American Psychological Association:

  There is a prevailing sense of the scientific untenability of clinical psychology [i.e., psychotherapy] among many psychologists. Frequently, clinical psychology is envisaged as an art; or if the critic is inclined to be more critical, it may be conceived of as an attempt to obtain knowledge mystically and effect changes magically.10