history of psychology

I ran across a heavily used quote by William James -- the "blooming, buzzing confusion," which he describes as a baby's first experience of the world.

A quick Google check seemed to show that nobody ever gives any of the context around the quote. Heck, about one time in three, they don't even get the three word excerpt right. So, I went to James' Principles of Psychology (1890) to see what might be useful to know.

The passage in question comes in the middle of James' chapter titled, "Discrimination and comparison." James began the chapter with a massive direct quote from John Locke, and used it to dive into a discussion of how a mind can make parts out of the wholeness of the world. The problem of how to break of the world was a serious drawback to the ideas of those thinkers like Hume and Locke, who supposed that the mind operated by recording associations between concepts and perceptions:

The truth is that Experience is trained by both association and dissociation, and that psychology must be writ both in synthetic and in analytic terms. Our original sensible totals are, on the one hand, subdivided by discriminative attention, and, on the other, united with other totals, -- either through the agency of our own movements, carrying our senses from one part of space to another, or because new objects come successively and replace those by which we were at first impressed. The 'simple impression' of Hume, the 'simple idea' of Locke are both abstractions, never realized in experience (487, emphases in original).

This is a recurring idea in psychology, and of course later became one of the thrusts of Chomsky's critique of behaviorism. How can these discriminations be made? -- particularly, given the "poverty" of information about how to make them? That is the problem James takes up. Continuing:

Experience, from the very first, presents us with concretized objects, vaguely continuous with the rest of the world which envelops them in space and time, and potentially divisible into inward elements and parts. These objects we break asunder and reunite. We must treat them in both ways for our knowledge of them to grow; and it is hard to say, on the whole, which way preponderates. But since the elements with which the traditional associationism performs its constructions -- 'simple sensations,' namely -- are all products of discrimination carried to a high pitch, it seems as if we ought to discuss the subject of analytic attention and discrimination first (ibid).

I rather like that point -- that what we think of as "simple sensations" actually involve "discrimination carried to a high pitch." It reminds me of information-theoretic analyses of the processing potential of the retina and optic nerve, which take gigabits of information per second and discard most of it so that the signal can squeeze through a rather narrow bandwidth to the brain. That's "discrimination carried to a high pitch" indeed, totally upstream of the brain's access to the resulting signal.

James' disadvantage, from the perspective of today, is that he framed the problem as one essentially of making out the parts of real objects. How can the mind make out parts that really are there composing things in the world? This frame had a long pedigree -- back to Plato's forms -- but depends on assumptions about the nature of things and concepts that most of us probably wouldn't want to be stuck defending.

The noticing of any part whatever of our objects is an act of discrimination.

You see, it's a very rigid idea of what objects are game for us to notice, and how we come to be aware of them. He is led, through considering things like the effect of chloroform on sensation and perception, to a "law" about the operation of concepts of part and whole in the mind:

[A]ny number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mind which has not yet experienced them separately, will fuse into a single undivided object for that mind. The law is that all things fuse that can fuse, and nothing separates except what must. What makes impressions separate we have to study in this chapter. Although they separate easier if they come in through distinct nerves, yet distinct nerves are not an unconditional ground of their discrimination, as we shall presently see. The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space. There is no other reason than this why "the hand I touch and see coincides spatially with the hand I immediately feel" (488, emphases in original).

So there you see -- the "blooming, buzzing" quote is there putting a pretty bow on what, by itself, seems to be a nonsensical "law". No wonder nobody ever bothers to give its context!

I think James has attended very carefully to the prosody of this passage -- it has the rhythm of blank verse. Consider:

Although they separate easier if
they come in through distinct nerves, yet distinct
nerves are not an unconditional ground
of their discrimination, as we shall
presently see. The baby, assailèd
by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once,
feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing
confusion; and to the very end of life,
our location of all things in one space
is due to the fact that the original
extents or bignesses of all the
sensations which came to our notice at once
coalescèd together into one
and the same space.

Very interesting. As I read through it, it reminded me of The Tempest. The main problem is that line with "sensations", which really is metered like two blank verse lines run together, but with no good way to divide them. I, for one, find it amusing to think of William James adding the voiced "-ed" to his prose!

After this beginning, James built up a theory of the discrimination of parts of objects from sensation. He addresses at several points the theories of the spiritualists, who had held that a non-material element of being must explain many if not all aspects of mind. I don't want to expand this little post into a full consideration of James' theory -- which really should be carried out together with subsequent literature on the topic. But there is an interesting passage in which he explains how, by contrasting present experience with discriminations previously made, the mind might build a picture that seems more than the sum of simple experiences:

As our brains and minds are actually made, it is impossible to get certain [sensed experiences] m's and n's in immediate sequence and keep them pure. If kept pure, it would mean that they remained uncompared. With us, inevitably, by a mechanism which we as yet fail to understand, the shock of difference is felt between them, and the second object is not n pure, but n-as-different-from-m. It is no more a paradox that under these conditions this cognition of m and n in mutual relation should occur, than that under other conditions the cognition of m's or n's simple quality should occur. But as it has been treated as a paradox, and as a spiritual agent, not itself a portion of the stream, has been invoked to account for it, a word of further remark seems desirable.

...

The sensationalists and the spiritualists meanwhile (filled both of them with their notion that the mind must in some fashion contain what it knows) begin by giving a crooked account of the facts. Both admit that for m and n to be known in any way whatever, little rounded and finished off duplicates of each must be contained in the mind as separate entities. These pure ideas, so called, of m and n respectively, succeed each other there. And since they are distinct, say the sensationalists, they are eo ipso distinguished. "To have ideas different and ideas distinguished, are synonymous expressions; different and distinguished meaning exactly the same thing," says James Mill. "Distinguished!" say the spiritualists, "distinguished by what, forsooth? Truly the respective ideas of m and n in the mind are distinct. But for that very reason neither can distinguish itself from the other, for to do that it would have to be aware of the other, and thus for the time being become the other, and that would be to get mixed up with the other and lose its own distinctness. Distinctness of ideas and idea of distinctness, are not one thing, but two. This last is a relation. Only a relating principle, opposed in nature to all facts of feeling, an Ego, Soul, or Subject, is competent, by being present to both of the ideas alike, to hold them together and at the same time to keep them distinct" (499-500).

Thus, James described two opposing positions about the nature of discrimination. Then he shows that, in his account of events, why the conception of a binary comparator (for the spiritualists, a Subject) is multiplying entities beyond necessity:

But if the plain facts be admitted that the pure idea of 'n' is never in the mind at all, when 'm' has once gone before; and that the feeling 'n-different-from-m' is itself an absolutely unique pulse of thought, the bottom of this precious quarrel drops out and neitehr party is left with anything to fight about. Surely such a consummation ought to be welcomed, especially when brought about, as here, by a formulation of the facts which offers itself so naturally and unsophistically (500, emphasis in original).

There is much more, of course. I wanted to quote that later passage to contrast it directly with the "blooming, buzzing confusion" quote that lies a dozen pages before it.

James appears to adopt the position that a plenitude of temporal data is available to the unschooled mind, from which it may rapidly build up a rather complex set of contrasts to distinguish objects and experiences. The metaphor of an infant subjected to a "buzzing confusion" seems to deliberately omit the very large temporal contrasts that present themselves to the infant's senses.

Likewise, we probably don't need to know much about visual processing to imagine that the great contrasts naturally presented within the "blooming confusion" of the visual field might likewise lead to natural comparison and distinction.

In a world giving our senses gigabits per second, we will necessarily have a hard time showing a "poverty" of data from which the mind might make useful distinctions. The "blooming, buzzing confusion" is a pretty metaphor, but is easily refuted as a serious model of experience.

Fig. 20 from Darwin 1872. "Terror"

While I was out of town for the holidays, a news story by Jeanna Bryner reported on research that looked at the facial expressions of blind Paralympians:

The analyses showed sighted and blind individuals modified their expressions of emotion in the same way in accordance with the social context. For example, in the Paralympics, the athletes competed in a series of elimination rounds so that the final round of two athletes ended in the winner taking home a gold medal while the loser got a silver medal.

The blind silver medalists who lost their final matches tended to produce "social smiles" during the medal ceremonies. Social smiles use only the mouth muscles. True smiles, known as Duchenne smiles, cause the eyes to twinkle and narrow and the cheeks to rise.

The "social smile" is interesting because it seems like a way of concealing emotions from others. The conclusion was that visual learning could not account for the socially correct use of these expressions, since people blind from birth follow the same rules.

When I read this story, I couldn't help but reflect on Darwin's description of facial expressions, in The expression of the emotions in man and animals. By taking up this topic, Darwin set out on new mode of psychological investigation, distinct in many ways from the experimental psychology tradition. In fact, the major figures in German experimental physiology, such as Wundt, are never mentioned in Expression. This clean separation may have been Darwin's deliberate attempt to establish psychological inquiry on new ground; his intent was marked in the last section of the Origin:

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history (Darwin 577-578).

Darwin was not alone in pursuing a comparative approach and insisting on continuities between humans and other animals. In some details he followed Herbert Spencer's psychology. George Romanes picked up Darwin's own notes on animal behavior as he began to systematize the field; his Animal Intelligence ranged in its examples from invertebrates to man's best friend, the dog.

Darwin also spends substantial parts of Expression on the expressions of dogs. His analysis, like his description of sexual selection in The descent of man presages later work on signaling. But Darwin's human examples are some of the most interesting in the book. The picture at the top of this post was drawn "from a photograph by Duchenne" -- the same Duchenne (Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand de Boulogne) whose name is commemorated by the "Duchenne smile" as well as the eponymous muscular dystrophy. Duchenne was an experimental physiologist, who among other things used electrical stimuli to contort the facial muscles into their characteristic expressions.

Darwin used the photograph above in Expression, along with others of the same experimental subject. The experimenter at right is Duchenne.

Darwin had other means of obtaining information that the current researchers of Paralympians lack. For instance:

Dr. W. Ogle observed for me in one of the London hospitals about twenty patients, just before they were put under the influence of chloroform for operations. They exhibited some trepidation, but no great terror. In only four of the cases was the platysma visibly contracted; and it did not begin to contract until the patients began to cry. The muscle seemed to contract at the moment of each deep-drawn inspiration; so that it is very doubtful whether the contraction depended at all on the emotion of fear. In a fifth case, the patient, who was not chloroformed, was much terrified; and his platysma was more forcibly and persistently contracted than in the other cases. But even here there is room for doubt, for the muscle which appeared to be unusually developed, was seen by Dr. Ogle to contract as the man moved his head from the pillow, after the operation was over. (Darwin 1872:300-301).

His subsequent discussion is interesting, begun with a characteristic Darwin question: "...I felt much perplexed why, in any case, a superficial muscle on the neck should be especially affected by fear...."

Darwin particularly sought to distinguish the unconscious signs of emotions from the deliberate, and the culturally variable from the universal. In a time when the study of cultural variability was just beginning, Darwin does an admirable job.

His explanations of unconscious expressions presage some of the writings of behaviorists, notably John Watson:

Through steps such as these we can understand how it is, that as soon as some melancholy thought passes through the brain, there occurs a just perceptible drawing down of the corners of the mouth, or a slight raising up of the inner ends of the eyebrows, or both movements combined, and immediately afterwards a slight suffusion of tears. A thrill of nerve-force is transmitted along several habitual channels, and produces an effect on any point where the will has not acquired through long habit much power of interference. The above actions may be considered as rudimental vestiges of the screaming-fits, which are so frequent and prolonged during infancy.

In this case, as well as in many others, the links are indeed wonderful which connect cause and effect in giving rise to various expressions on the human countenance; and they explain to us the meaning of certain movements, which we involuntarily and unconsciously perform, whenever certain transitory emotions pass through our minds.

Darwin did discuss the issue of Duchenne smiles and false smiles in Expression. Here is a redacted section from pages 203-204:

Dr. Duchenne has given a large photograph of an old man (reduced on Plate III. fig 4), in his usual passive condition, and another of the same man (fig. 5), naturally smiling. The latter was instantly recognised by every one to whom it was shown as true to nature. He has also given, as an example of an unnatural or false smile, another photograph (fig. 6) of the same old man, with the corners of his mouth strongly retracted by the galvanization of the great zygomatic muscles. That the expression is not natural is clear, for I showed this photograph to twenty-four persons, of whom three could not in the least tell what was meant, whilst the others, though they perceived that the expression was of the nature of a smile, answered in such words as "a wicked joke," "trying to laugh," "grinning laughter," "half-amazed laughter," &c. Dr. Duchenne attributes the falseness of the expression altogether to the orbicular muscles of the lower eyelids not being sufficiently contracted; for he justly lays great stress on their contraction in the expression of joy.

He goes on to examine the muscles involved in the expression with more detail. Darwin's concern was to connect the smiles of humans with expressions of other primates, and to connect the actions of the facial muscles in a rational way. For example, Darwin suggested that the zygomatic muscles contract during pleasurable emotions, and attempted to relate the characteristic expressions of mental patients having delusions of grandeur to that pattern. Elsewhere, he examines the "grins" of dogs and their relation to play, as well as various reports of smiles in non-human primates.

So, I doubt Darwin would have been surprised by the research on blind athletes.

References:

Darwin CR. 1872. The expression of the emotions in man and animals. John Murray, London.

Darwin CR. 1869. On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. John Murray, London. 5 ed.

It is hard to find a better discussion of how anthropology relates to culture than the first chapter of Robert Lowie's 1917 book, Culture and Ethnology. For instance:

[S]ince there is a persistent tendency to associate with culture the more impressive phenomena of art, science, and technology, it is well to insist at the outset that these loftier phases are by no means necessary to the concept of culture. The fact that your boy plays 'button, button, who has the button?' is just as much an element of our culture as the fact that a room is lighted by electricity. So is the baseball enthusiasm of our grown-up population, so are moving picture shows, thés dansants, Thanksgiving Day masquerades, bar-rooms, Ziegfeld Midnight Follies, evening schools, the Hearst papers, woman suffrage clubs, the single-tax movement, Riker drug stores, touring-sedans, and Tammany Hall (6-7).

I think that's a great example mainly because of how many of those things are gone! Plus, I was watching Citizen Kane last night, so the reference to the Hearst papers seems especially timely.

Then there is this:

These, then, represent the type of phenomena comprised under the caption of culture. They exist, and science, as a complete view of reality, cannot ignore them. But a question ominous for the worker who derives his bread and butter from ethnological investigation arises. All the phenomena mentioned and the rest of the same order relate to man, and they relate to man not as an animal but as an organism endowed with a higher mentality...

A quick interruption here to point out that this is no longer the only conception of cultural behavior, which extends quite broadly into the animals. Still, the examples Lowie raises are all symbolic or linguistic in their basis --- they are not so broad a compendium of human "cultural" behaviors as to include unconscious and nonverbal cultural variability...

Tylor's definition expressly speaks of 'capabilities and habits'. But there is a science that deals with capabilities and habits, to wit, psychology. Is it, then, necessary to have a distinct branch of knowledge, or can we not simply merge the cultural phenomena in those of the older science of psychology?

...another interruption: Not very much older was the science of psychology at this point in history; at best Wundtian, and so to the 1850's. Wundt's Principles of Physiological Psychology was 1874, comparing to Tylor's Primitive Culture in 1871, or Louis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society in 1877. We can point to earlier psychological thinkers, and even experimenters, but the clear tradition of psychology as a discipline independent from philosophy was late.

It is this question [why not psychology?] that concerns us here. On the answer must depend our conception of culture and our attitude towards a science purporting to deal with cultural phenomena as something distinct from other data of reality (7).

I love Lowie's example:

One of the striking characteristics of our civilization, a trait of our material culture that is nevertheless as invaluable, nay indepensible, means for the propagation of knowledge under modern conditions, is the existence of paper, that is, of a cheap, readily manufactured material for writing and printing. The obvious problem that develops from this fact is, How did we get the art of paper-manufacture? Now we shall search in vain our psychological literature in quest of an explanation. Höffding and James, Wundt and Titchener have no answer to offer. An answer, nevertheless, exists. Europe learnt the art of paper-making from the Arabs, who as early as 795 A.D. had established a paper factory in Bagdad [sic]. These in turn got their knowledge from the Chinese, who must be regarded as the originators of the technique. The answer is a perfectly satisfactory one, but it is obviously not couched in psychological terms: its nature is purely historical (8, emphasis in original).

It is a great example because (a) it emphasizes that the material element of culture separates it from purely mental explanation, (b) it focuses on the transfer of information, not only its generation, and (c) the historical element separates it from purely individual explanation. Lowie describes anthropology at once as an ideational and historical science. The weakness of the example as Lowie presents it, is that it does not go further: Why did the Chinese originate paper manufacture? What technical prerequisites permitted it, and what economic and cultural factors encouraged it?

Lowie immediately turns to another difficulty of the explanation, which turns out to be the reason why I went looking for this passage. In this instance, the transfer of paper-making art from China to Europe by way of the Arabs, there was a transfer not only of material (the paper as a commodity), but a transfer of instructions for producing the material. Old-style cultural anthropologists had a name for this kind of transfer: cultural diffusion. Lowie addresses this as a category of problem: How do we explain diffusion of this technique, when in many other cases people trade material objects over long distances without the information it took to produce them?

Cultural diffusion, therefore, cannot be taken for granted. We cannot take one people, place it alongside of another, and effect a cultural osmosis in the same way in which we produce a chemical reaction when two substances are brought together under proper conditions of temperature. We are face to face with a selective, with a psychological condition. But when we turn once more to our text-books of psychology, we again find nothing that fits the case.

Lowie then turns to address the first problem; how did the Chinese invent paper in the first place? Here, he expands in an interesting direction on the idea that anthropology is a historical science. Lowie appears to argue that psychological explanation is undesirably general, in that it examines and explains the general tendencies of people to respond to various situations. In contrast, the anthropological explanation is particular, in that it examines the exact circumstances surrounding human decisions. In the example of paper-making, he proposes that a psychological explanation would fall back on the concept of invention generally, as applied to any kind of situation. In contrast, the anthropological explanation focuses on the unique historical circumstances that led to this particular event.

We, however, do not want to know merely what ultimate psychological processes the invention of paper-making shares with all other inventions whatsoever, but also the differential conditions that produced this one and unique result under the given circumstances....When we inquire why Newton closes his treatise on optics with a statement as to the vanity of human things, our curiosity is satisfied when this expression appears as only one instance of the blending of theological and scientific thought current in his day. It is nonsense to say that these explanations are purely historical; they are psychological, for they take fully into account the subjective attitudes involved in the phenomena studied; and it is hopeless to expect this sort of explanation from psychological science, which deals with a quite distinct and far more generalized form of mental activity (12-13).

After this, and a discussion of cultural taboos as further examples of the importance of particular circumstances, Lowie returns to Tylor's definition of culture. This is an interesting passage, because he distills the Tylor definition right down to a social transmission definition of culture:

It is clear that cultural phenomena contain elements that cannot be reduced to psychological principles. The reason for the insufficiency is already embodied in Tylor's definition of culture as embracing 'capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society' (16).

After all this, Lowie returns to the topic of psychology and its role as part of an anthropological explanation of cultural phenomena. Again, he has a great example: decorative styles:

The ethnologist notes in a purely descriptive way the decorative patterns employed by various tribes, the fact that curvilinear motives are prominent among the Maori of New Zealand while the rawhide bags of Plains Indians are covered with angular paintings. Here, once more, it is clear that many of the problems that arise are purely cultural. There are, nevertheless, psychological elements involved that may be misunderstood without psychological knowledge. Let us assume, e. g., that a certain tribe is artistically characterized by a fondness for squares. What does this predilection signify? It is a psychological commonplace that through an optical illusion we exaggerate the height as compared with the width of a rectangle; accordingly, the geometrical square does not coincide with the psychological square. This simple piece of information enables us to understand what we are actually dealing with in the case of a square pattern. At the same time it sharpens our observation regarding such patterns (21-22).

There is more; Lowie goes on to discuss shamanism and abnormal psychology. He concludes his essay on the principle that psychology is a field that can be recruited to explain anthropological phenomena just as does chemistry, but that it cannot explain them alone, any more than "gravitation [can] account for architectural styles." Seems fair enough, although today's conception of psychology is not quite so generalist in its aims than the 1917 version (just then coming under the spell of Watson's behaviorism).

In any event, I'll have to write more tomorrow on the reason I opened Lowie's book.

References:

Lowie RH. 1917. Culture and Ethnology. Douglas C. McMurtrie, New York.