Don’t worry, that’s not as deep as it seems.

It just means that today was my first day in the other Intro to Psych course I am taking, Introduction to Psychology : Basic processes. It basically covers the first half of the mondo huge and expensive textbook while the other one, Introduction to Psychology : Areas and Applications, covers the second half.

So they are kind of one course split into two. I thought it was odd that the system let me take both at the same time, and at first I wondered if it was some sort of mistake, but nope.

The questionnaire at the end of the other one even asked if I was taking both. So I guess I’m allowed.

Anyhow, this is definitely my fave prof of the group because she’s a total nerd girl. (Nerd lady?) She loves science fiction, she geeks out about psychology, and she’s a big fan of podcasts, including one I like called Radiolab.

In other words, she really seems like my kind of people.

One thing I learned from her today was something I didn’t know about a fellow by the name of William James. I had heard his name connected with psychology before but I knew nothing about him.

My professor calls him the Great Pontificator, and said he would go around expressing theories about the mind and how it works, but never actually tested them himself. And yet, and this is the crucial part, people are still proving him right to this very day, and he died in 1910.

He was also a philosopher, and a heavy hitter in the annals of pragmatism.

To sum up, he went through life thinking, talking, and defending pragmatism.

In other words he is my brand new hero. I want that kind of life. If I could have any lifestyle I wanted, carte blanche, I would choose that one. I would be able to spend all my time doing the things I am best at and happiest doing without any need to do the other boring stuff, like research and experiments.

I’m with Freud. The truth of what I say is in my reasoning and my observations about myself and others. You either agree with it or think it faulty. It is not the sort of thing that lends itself to testing.

So yeah. I wanna be like THAT guy.

What else… I learned from my prof that there is a real shattering firestorm going on in clinical research psychology right now. A small but very vocal group of thinkers are casting doubt as to whether psychology can be considered a science at all. They point to how hard it is reproduce the results of any psychological study because there are so many other variables lurking out there that you can’t control for, so merely the fact that it’s a different group of subjects makes the results no longer comparable. And then there’s the problem I have known about for a while, which is that so much of psychological research is done entirely on us people from WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) cultures, and then applied to all of humanity, which is both Eurocentric and just plain ignorant.

And so the question is wide open as to whether psychology is, in any sense, a science.

This is not new. In fact, psychology has been attacked like this since it was born. The very idea that there were things going on in people’s heads that had no direct correlation to something of the body was mocked for being nothing but fairy tales until Freud started getting results. And since then, psychology has been very defensive about its legitimacy versus things like physics and chemistry. In many ways, I see Skinner and the atrocities of behaviourism as a direct result of this animosity.

In other words, basically, psychology has been desperate to prove itself since the day it was born and apparently this era is having its own paroxysm of self-doubt and conflict. I am neither surprised nor disappointed. This has to happen.

And as much as I love psychology and therefore feel the need to defend it against all comers, the truth is that I have never been entirely comfortable with it as a science. To me, it has always lain somewhere between hard science and applied philosophy. I consider a lot of psychological research to be akin to trying to nail Jello to the wall. It is an attempt to make quantifiable and predictable things which are far too complex and dense for the job.

The human brain is the most complex object in the universe as far as we know. Ergo, using the straightforward methods that work for things like gravitation or biochemistry is going to be am exercise in futility.

But possibly not any more, now that fMRI allows us to monitor brain activity in realtime. Granted, that does not solve the problem entirely, but at least we have direct observations to go on now. And there have been some astounding advances in recording and interpreting neural activity.

In a way, though, that doesn’t matter because whether or not psychology is a “real science” or not, we will continue to study it. We cannot stop. There is no way we will stop trying to figure out what the hell is going on in that blob of goo between our ears, and if science is not the right word for it according to some people’s narrow definition of it, then we will simply have to come up with a new word for it.

Because the thing is, amidst all the fuzziness of hard psychological research, there emerges useful information that can be beneficially applied to actual human beings. Reliably.

And if that is not science, then I am curious as to what the detractors call it. It is beyond improbable, to put it mildly, to suppose that all forms of applied psychology have succeeded purely by chance.

And if you think it’s all the Placebo Effect, then I have to ask : what kind of research lead to the discovery of that effect?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.