psychology

psychology The word ‘psychology’, from the Greek psyche, meaning mind or soul, describes an academic and clinical subject concerned with reason and emotion, conscious and unconscious mental processes. It has become an umbrella term for such a wide variety of ‘disciplines’, paradigms, and cults that it is not clearly definable. The caring professions, especially for mental problems, are important activities under this rubric. Perhaps most intellectually respectable is experimental psychology, concerned especially with learning, memory, perception, attention, and emotions — with explicit links to physiological processes of the brain and body. These are of practical importance for understanding the consequences of brain damage and mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Although the scientific aspects of psychology are increasingly seen as falling within the broad remit of neuroscience, the conceptual association of physical brain to mental mind raises philosophical questions which remain controversial after thousands of years of debate. Current accounts of the mind, created by brain processes, generally refer to an analogy to the hardware–software distinction for computers. Computers, though physical, are ‘cognitive’ in that they carry symbols and meaning. But, so far as we know, computers are not conscious: the explanation of consciousness remains a great challenge for both psychology and brain sciene.

Richard L. Gregory