Psychology

In many cultures around this world, there is the view that humans have a soul that exists independently of the physical body. For Greek philosophers, the soul was also viewed as the seat of our reasoning abilities - what we would call our minds today. While Aristotle...

The natural sciences (physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and geology) developed out of philosophical speculations about the nature of reality. However, it wasn’t till the late nineteenth century that a systematic study of human thought emerged. One reason for...

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, medical science turned its attention to disorders of the central nervous system. Early neuroscientists, including Jean-Martin Charcot, examined and documented conditions, such as multiple scleroses, prompting research into...

Throughout history, mental health issues have been treated with suspicion, sometimes leading to fear. Some conditions, including depression and schizophrenia, have been blamed on supernatural forces; others, such as anxiety, have been associated with certain bodily...

In the late eighteenth century, Austrian doctor Franz Anton Mesmer developed an approach to treating illness based on the idea that disease could be caused by a disturbance in the body's natural energy flow and cured by restoring the correct flow. He believed he could...

One of the most eminent figures in the emergence of psychology as a separate discipline was the German physiologist, Wilhelm Wundt. Through his research into how people perceive sensations, Wundt developed the first psychological laboratories and became influential in...

One of the fundamental theories in the history of psychology was made by a physiologist, not a psychological experimenter. In the early 1890s, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, studying the physical workings of the stomachs of dogs, devised a way of collecting and...

During the twentieth century, psychology developed into a broad field of study. Social and Developmental Psychology, Individual Differences, and Clinical Psychology became important areas of research. In the United States, a new generation of Psychologists, inspired...

Neuroscience — the study of the structure and function of the nervous system — emerged as a separate discipline at about the same time as psychology became a recognized science. At the same time, developments in the physical sciences (including physics) and biology...

Although the heart has been traditionally viewed as the ‘seat of the soul’, the ancient Egyptians recognized that the brain is the home of the mind. Even for mind-body dualists, who believe the immaterial mind and physical body to be quite separate, the brain is where...