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Psychology and Neuroscience

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MetaXIII

MetaXIII

Rising Star
I've created this topic hoping to get a little help from the members of our community. You see for the past 2 or so years I've been a computer major, but I spent more time researching psychedelics than being a code monkey. Finally I dropped out and reapplied into a psychology major.

I did this right after I sat in a fourth year psychology class that my friend is in. I was surprised to see how much I knew. So having reapplied and hoping to get into psychology this coming September, I wanted to learn as much as possible before then. The area of psychology that interests me is of course consciousness.

So here is what I hoped the Nexus could help me with. I have started to write down names of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists that I could read up on or who are currently working in the field so that I would know what research is going on and maybe work with them in the far future. I know that some members of our community are psychologists and was hoping they would know more about that. Here are some of the few people I found.

Alan Watts - philosopher
Burrhus Frederic Skinner - psychologist
Carl Jung - psychologist
Carlos Castaneda - anthropologist
Christof Koch - neuroscientist
Daniel Dennett - philosopher
Francis Crick - neuroscientist
James Hillman - psychologist
Jeff Hawkins - neuroscientist
Ken Wilber - psychologist
Milton Hyland Erickson - psychiatrist
Patricia Smith Churchland - philosopher
Richard Bandler - psychologist
Sigmund Frued - neurologist
Stanislav Grof - psychiatrist
Stanley Milgram - psychologist
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran - neurologist

Also if you notice I have Richard Bandler on that list. He is the co-founder of NLP. I was hoping that members familiar with it could tell me if NLP is a scam or not, because a lot of people say it works while a lot of psychologists say it was discredited. Strangely I myself have found the small amount of NLP I have learned to work.

Finally I want to say that any information provided is immensely valued and I would like to thank the members of the Nexus for their help.
 
The people who are neuroscientists or neurologists on that list are:

Christof Koch
Francis Crick
Jeff Hawkins
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
 
Thank you benzyme. I don't even know what the voltage-clamp and patch-clamp techniques are but it's making me very excited to find out. Once again many thanks.
 
I can tell you who I don't like on that list:

Alan Watts - philosopher
Carl Jung - psychologist
Carlos Castaneda - anthropologist
Stanislav Grof - psychiatrist

I can't take most of the work of these people seriously. But thats just me. I like most of the rest of the people you posted though.

Steven Pinker has also done some interesting stuff with psychology language and evolution. Might be worth checking out. Also Sam Harris has some interesting things to say about ethics, mystical experiences and neurology.
 
burnt said:
I can't take most of the work of these people seriously. But thats just me.
Click to expand...

no, it's not just you
their theories are essentially psychobabble, a reason I don't take Leary very seriously anymore upon further review.
interesting theories (or not), but not exactly testable.

we're trained to look at things in terms of testable hypotheses, to draw correlations between evidence and imagination. that's science.
 
The issue is that so little is known of the human mind that the 'psychobabble' is all we have to draw from. Personally I am a big fan of Carl Jung.
 
vovin said:
The issue is that so little is known of the human mind that the 'psychobabble' is all we have to draw from.
Click to expand...


hence imagination.
it's a philosophy, which is all fun and good, entertaining and whatnot. people like that, because it's open-ended.
science is more precise and tangible, most people find it dull. it is pretty boring to read papers and interpret data, i'll admit

but it does present tangibility, or address intangibles.

"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." -Max Planck
 
MetaXIII, regarding NLP, the further I work with it the more effective I find it. The major fragmentation of the field of psychology leads to a major problem. Psychologists unfamiliar with work outside of, say, neuroscience, feel qualified to speak on social psychology. At my uni. department, professors would scoff at hypnosis research in class, completely ignorant of over a century of consistently reverified findings.

I think you may really enjoy Gregory Bateson. His classic Steps to an Ecology of Mind starts out slow, but what it builds, fascinating.
 
Thank you everyone for your suggestions. A quick search on the people mentioned has me intrigued. Can't wait to start some serious research.

@ragabr I had a discussion with a friend where we thought that maybe NLP is treated like hypnosis in the psychology circles, it works but many still won't accept it, but not knowing anything on the subject I was still skeptical. I'm kinda pleased that's the case with NLP. I'd rather have it be a positive working model that's not yet accepted rather than a smartly built scam.
 
..hi, i posted this link to one of the best neuroscience summary talks i've seen in the spiritual section ["Clear Light of the Void"], but i like having a foot in all camps..:)

Jeff Hawkins on Artifical Intelligence (pt1/5)

i apologise if many of you have already seen it..i think it's a great sum up of current trends in A.I. and neuroscience..tree-like hierarchical systems and pattern recognition (though no one has much to say about the 'top' level, the 'operator')
.
 
Michael A. Persinger (inventor of the god helmet) and Todd Murphy are currently one of my favourites. Tough concepts for me as a beginner but i have already learned a lot from them. Their ideas are also very scientifically verifiable.
 
benzyme said:
burnt said:
I can't take most of the work of these people seriously. But thats just me.
Click to expand...

no, it's not just you
their theories are essentially psychobabble, a reason I don't take Leary very seriously anymore upon further review.
interesting theories (or not), but not exactly testable.

we're trained to look at things in terms of testable hypotheses, to draw correlations between evidence and imagination. that's science.
Click to expand...


I am trained that way as well, but that doesn't mean I can't be open to truths that lie outside the realm
of testabe science. I try to find a balance that is certainly tilted towards science, but that remains open
to truths that appear to only be available via experience.

The world is very strange. Science (The art of questioning) is without a doubt the way forward.
When however, will the majority of scientists once again start to ask questions about things that
must be determined via experience and not via repeatable testable lab experiments?

Yoga,
Thai Chi,
Kun-fu,
Kabbalah

are just a few examples of scientific disciplines that have an emphasis on experience...and yes I do understand that many scientists
won't consider them a science. But science they are. Yoga specifically has alway's been referred to as the science of religion.

Personally I think the scientific method, in it's current form, should be replaced with this.

Believe Nothing - Hold no belief in such high regard that you aren't willing to change it.
Allow for anything - Ghosts, faries, goblins, Gods, Parallel Universes, etc. Never rule out an option because of ego.
Question Everything - Literally everything. What am I?, why am I?, were did that thought arise. And of course typical scientific question as well.


When those three things are balanced good science is done. I see WAY to many scientists that have put science on the pedestal of religion
and have essentially blinded themselves to a whole world of experiential truth that lies outside current experimental paradigms.

To each his own, but I much prefer a world filled with science and unbounded by mysticism.

Peace.
 
To me, psychology shouldn't be written off as psychobabble.

Psychology (and other theories related), are guesses at the high level functionality of the lower level implementation of the biological machine our brain is.

One does not need to know the low level magnetic/eletrical impulses needed to encode data on a hard drive to understand what a File is.

Psychology attempts to explain those high level abstract concepts that the low level neuroscience creates through physical implementation.

Edit: Of course abstract concepts, such as a "File", only exist because we call it such. If we discovered a computer before understanding it's components, and could not ask the creators, we would come up with our own explanations and theories on how things work on a lower level. That's all psychology is doing in my mind. High level theory/concepts to give the lower level mechanics meaning.

Opiod interactions in the brain would be relatively meaningless without an understanding of the high level concept of pleasure.
 
Only did a quick skim and didn't notice if he was on there or not... but if not definitely Rick Strassman.

Also, just going to throw my two cents in. Jung's theory of the archetypes of the subconscious is wonderful in my opinion.

Good luck in school!
 
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