Who Needs Psychology?

Psychology is often derided as being a soft non-science, mere common sense glorified, and less consequential than other disciplines in accounting for the order of things. One common argument holds that the mind—psychology’s chief domain—is but the product of biological brain processes, and therefore secondary or even redundant to them. A second common critique argues that the facts don’t care if you believe in them, which means that physical reality on some level trumps psychological processes. If the train runs over you, you will die, regardless of what you feel, think, believe, or expect.

Both arguments are not useless. Biological processes do indeed underlie psychology. Biological changes in the brain will often produce psychological changes. A stroke will affect your memory and mood. Likewise, matter often trumps the mind. Should it hit you, the train will indeed kill you, regardless of your feelings and thoughts.

Yet these arguments also leak badly in several places.

First, while we know with fair assurance that both biological and psychological phenomena exist and tend to go together, we know little about the mechanisms of connection between them. As the psychologist Gregory Miller of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign notes: “Relevant science abounds with demonstrations that we take to imply causal relationships between psychology and biology. The 'how' of those causal relationships—the mechanisms—remains a mystery, yet we often write as if we know the mechanisms in scholarly literature and in popular media.” Moreover, existing evidence suggests strongly that the brain-mind link is reciprocal. That is, while brain changes can alter mind processes, changes we might think of as happening "in the mind" (for example, during talk therapy) can alter the brain.

Second, even if we accept that biology produces psychology, we still cannot equate the two or reduce the latter to the former. The tree is a product of the seed, but the properties and qualities of the tree cannot be equated with, or reduced to, the properties and qualities of the seed. One useful way to think about this, offered by psychologist Tania Lombroso of UC Berkeley, employs the metaphor of baking: “A theory of baking wouldn't be especially useful if it were formulated in terms of molecules and atoms. As bakers, we want to understand the relationship between—for example—mixing and texture, not between kinetic energy and protein hydration. The relationships between the variables we can tweak and the outcomes that we care about happen to be mediated by chemistry and physics, but it would be a mistake to adopt 'cake reductionism' and replace the study of baking with the study of physical and chemical interactions among cake components.” #shorts, #facts, #psychology, #psychologyfacts, #psycholology, #mndmap, #mindcontrol, #brain,