Read The Story of Psychology Online
Authors: Morton Hunt
The Story of Psychology (126 page)
As with other fringe/alternative treatments, biofeedback has a huge literature, much of it unsubstantiated claims, some of it reasonably solid research. A credible up-to-date overall appraisal comes from the Blum Patient and Family Learning Center of the Massachusetts General Hospital:
Biofeedback training as a tool for relaxation and stress reduction enjoyed a brief surge of popularity following its inception in the late 1960s, but exaggerated claims based on poor-quality studies led to a reaction against it, and biofeedback largely slipped out of the public view during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, however, properly designed studies were performed, and biofeedback began to regain respect.
Currently, incomplete but encouraging evidence suggests that biofeedback may indeed offer at least modest benefits for a variety of medical conditions, including hypertension, anxiety, Raynaud’s syndrome, low-back pain, insomnia, fecal incontinence in children, irritable bowel syndrome, and migraine and tension headaches. Biofeedback does not appear to be effective for asthma.
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Parapsychology:
For many decades a number of committed parapsychologists—some are physicists, psychologists, and members of other scientific disciplines, many others laypersons—have been conducting experiments in such “psychic” phenomena as extrasensory perception (ESP), clairvoyance (seeing things that are out of sight), psychokinesis (the ability to move objects or influence machinery by mental power), telepathy, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and channeling. The American Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1885, has a substantial endowment fund, publishes a newsletter and a journal, and regularly holds lectures, symposia, and meetings. A Gallup poll in 2005 found that four out of ten Americans believe in ESP, nearly a third in telepathy, and over a quarter in clairvoyance.
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Nearly all parapsychological phenomena, if real, would have practical value (and indeed police and others sometimes pay psychics to try to locate missing persons). The National Research Council committee therefore visited parapsychology laboratories to witness demonstrations and experiments, discussed parapsychological experiments with a number of parapsychologists, and reviewed studies by both believers and skeptics.
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Of this mass of material, the two most positive findings were these:
—Of the vast number of reports of remote viewing achieved by telepathy, only nine were scientific studies, but eight of the nine had serious flaws (the “senders” had unintentionally provided the “receivers” with clues in between trials), and the ninth had a different
but equally serious flaw. A later and more rigorous study did produce some results, but below the level of statistical significance.
—Of 332 reports of psychokinetic influence over random number generators, 188 had some claim to scientific status; of these, 58 reported statistically significant results. The two most careful and extensive of these experiments used random number generators that turned out either 0’s or 1’s, averaging 50 percent of each over the long term. Subjects who tried to influence the machines by psychokinesis were able to produce 50.5 percent of 1’s in one laboratory and 50.02 percent in the other, that is, one extra 1 per hundred trials in one laboratory, two extra 1’s in every twenty-five hundred trials in the other laboratory. In view of the large number of trials, these results are statistically significant but they indicate “an extremely weak effect.”
That being the most impressive evidence of parapsychological phenomena, the committee’s conclusion was categorical:
The committee finds no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena.
In the committee’s view, the best scientific evidence does not justify the conclusion that ESP—that is, gathering information about objects or thoughts without the intervention of known sensory mechanisms— exists.
Nor does scientific evidence offer support for the existence of psychokinesis—that is, the influence of thoughts upon objects without the intervention of known physical processes.
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The parapsychological community was, of course, unshaken in its beliefs by the committee’s summary of the evidence. But that was to be expected; you will recall that Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter, in their study of a cult that expected the world to be destroyed by a flood, ruefully reported that when an individual with a commitment to a belief, who has acted upon that belief, is presented with evidence that it is wrong, he “will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.”
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The human mind, that most wonderful and powerful apparatus for making sense of the world, seems equally apt at justifying its own nonsense.
If you will surf the Web for an hour or two for documents on parapsychology
, you will see that in 2007, a time when our culture is perfused by scientific psychology, and particularly the twin revolutions of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, a very sizable part of our population believes fervently in many of the phenomena of parapsychology. For some of these the believers think they have evidence, although it never meets the reasonable criterion that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” A recent meta-analysis of 380 research studies of psychokinesis would indeed have been extraordinary evidence—had the results been positive; in fact, the net effect was so minuscule and meaningless that the authors suggest it was an artifact of publication bias (a result of papers with positive results getting published and those with none or negative results being rejected).
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But many believers are unconcerned about research evidence; they believe because they experience things best explained by parapsychology. They’re right about one aspect of the matter: Their experience is real—it’s an actual event in the brain. They’re wrong only in thinking that the subject of their experience was real. If a person sees the face of Jesus in a wet, oil-slicked street, it’s a reality—that is, the experience is; what’s in the street is something else altogether.
As for the vast mass of papers, books, speeches, journal articles, and other forms of communication that purport to present evidence—
Enough! This book is a history of psychology, the science of the mind; parapsychology is not psychology and not science. We have strayed off course. Let us abandon the subject and return to our story, of which there is only one more chapter.
Psychology
Today
Portrait of a Psychologist
A
lthough most thoughtful people consider the use of stereotypes small-minded and prejudiced, we all rely on generalizations about others to enable us to behave appropriately toward them. If we are seated at dinner next to a woman we have never met and learn that she is a Presbyterian minister, we speak to her somewhat differently from the way we would if we learn she is the author of scandal-mongering unauthorized celebrity biographies. Generalized expectations, though often oversimplified and inaccurate, are necessary hypotheses about people; without them we would function no better at the dinner or in other social situations than a Korowai tribesman just arrived from the wilds of Papua New Guinea.
So, what would come to your mind if you heard that the stranger seated next to you at a dinner is a psychologist?
To most people, it would mean that he or she has special insight into human nature and treats troubled people. But you, having read this far, are disabused of any such erroneous generalization. You know that “psychologist” denotes not one but a broad spectrum of occupations, many of which have nothing to do with insight into human nature, and that many psychologists are scientists, not healers. No generalization, no single image, can encompass the proficiencies and activities represented by the following handful of specimens of contemporary psychologists at work:
—In a laboratory, a young woman wearing headphones, her head inside a large scanning machine, hears a male voice uttering what she has been told are sentences; her task is to push any one of four buttons to indicate how “meaningful” each sentence is. Here are some samples of what she hears:
“the man on a vacation lost a bag and wallet”
“the freeway on a pie watched a house and window”
“on vacation lost then a and bag wallet man then a”
“a ball the a the spilled librarian in sign through fire”
“the solims on a sonting grilloted a yome and a sovier”
“rooned the sif into hlf the and the foig aurene to”
The so-called sentences, some of which sound like a bad simulation of Jabberwocky, range from the “semantically congruent” (they make sense) through the “semantically random” (the individual words make sense but the sentence does not) to the “pseudo-word list” (nonwords in no syntactical order).
The young woman’s choices of which buttons to push don’t actually matter; what the four researchers are interested in is what the fMRI scans show about her brain activity as she hears the spoken words. And in fact what they show is exciting, although the researchers, in their report, couch their findings in the usual impassive academese: “Syntactic and semantic processes engaged during sentence comprehension occur in distinct but overlapping parts of the temporal and parietal lobes. These regions make use of syntactic and semantic information in different ways.” The details, too recondite to repeat here, add up to an intriguing finding: The human brain has different specialized circuits for interpreting the semantics (meaning) and the syntax (sentence structure) of heard speech.
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—A white-coated man, scalpel in hand, bends over a laboratory table and, slowly laying open the body of a brown Australian marsupial mouse, searches for its tiny adrenal glands. The mouse, a male, had died after many hours of continuous copulation; all males of this species,
Antechinus stuartii
, expire after a nonstop bout of five to twelve hours of sexual activity, which they engage in only during a two-week period of the year. Examination of the adrenals of a number of such mice leads to an explanation: The length of daylight and average temperature during the reproductive season
induce extreme hyperactivity of the male mouse’s adrenals, which trigger the prolonged and stressful copulation that ends in death.
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The study adds to a growing body of knowledge of seasonal influences on the behavior of mice… and men.
—In a room designed to look like a cocktail lounge, a small group of volunteers meet, are served drinks (some get vodka and tonic, some only tonic, though what they are told they’re getting isn’t necessarily the truth). After fifteen minutes of drinking and chatting, they are shepherded into a back room where they watch a twenty-five-second video of two basketball teams passing balls back and forth, and are asked to count the number of times the white-shirted team passes the ball. During the action, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the screen, beats her chest, and walks off. When the video is over, the researchers interview each participant; they find, remarkably, that of the forty-six who took part in a dozen small sessions, only 18 percent of those who had a real drink had noticed the gorilla—and even more remarkably, that fewer than 50 percent of those who got a placebo (nonvodka) drink had noticed it. The two significant implications: Even mild intoxication strongly affects the ability to notice anything other than what one is paying attention to (passing the basketball), and even sober people are not likely to notice an unexpected and unusual object if they are paying attention to something else—a finding that could be of crucial importance to eyewitness testimony in court cases.
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—In a psychology lab, two student volunteers stand at opposite sides of a narrow table; a central curtain hangs between them, screening them from each other, and they have been instructed not to speak. Each grasps a handle of a crank that runs under the table from one to the other. On the table is a large, flat, blue disk, with two small marks at its edge, one on each side. From above, a target area (a small white oblong) is projected onto each side of the disk. The participants can rotate the disk by means of the crank handles, and when told, they try to move the mark on the disk into the target area as quickly as possible, then wait for a new target to appear. Since each student has a handle of the crank and no instructions as to how to proceed, the participants are as likely to inadvertently combat each other as to collaborate. But in fact after only a few trials they begin to work together, one partner speeding the disk
toward the target, the other slowing it down to avoid overshooting. They evidently communicate wordlessly by their handling of the crank—and do better as a team than volunteers who perform the task alone. The findings, a valuable addition to “motor control theory,” illuminate how people manage to wordlessly coordinate many kinds of movements with each other—everything from moving furniture to waltzing.
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—On a winter day, at the edge of a pond where ducks are paddling about, two bundled-up researchers stand thirty yards apart; one throws a chunk of bread into the water every five seconds, the other every ten seconds. After a few days of this feeding, twice as many ducks cluster near the five-second thrower as the other. But some days later the researchers introduce a change: The ten-second thrower tosses in chunks twice as large as the five-second thrower. At first the ducks continue to assemble as they have been doing, two to one in favor of the faster thrower, but within five minutes they have redistributed themselves and are divided equally between the two—evidence, the researchers believe, of a sophisticated innate foraging strategy in which the ducks take into account not only the rate at which edible items appear but their average size.
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The study adds to knowledge of how time and quantity are nonverbally represented in the brains of animals and humans.
—A team of researchers gingerly positions miniature microphones inside the ear canals of a volunteer seated in the center of a circular framework on which six loudspeakers are mounted at different heights. The researchers then send white noise (a broad-spectrum hiss) through one speaker after another, rotating the apparatus 15 degrees at a time, until they have sent sound from 144 locations. Each time the volunteer identifies the position of the speaker by giving its direction and elevation in degrees. Later, using recordings of what the microphones picked up, the researchers transmit sound to the volunteer through earphones instead of the loudspeakers; he identifies the apparent directions from which the noise is coming in virtually perfect agreement with where it had come from in the actual condition. The experiment adds to knowledge of how the mind determines the direction of a sound source from the difference in time at which the sound reaches the ears.
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