Here’s my psych notes. They suck

Aristotle’s Laws of Association: 

Law of Contiguity: When you think of one thing you then think of things that go along with it.simy

Laws of Similarity: You think one thing then things similar to it.

Law of Contrast: You think one thing and then think something opposite of it.

Law of Frequency: Essentially just what happened to Pavlov’s dogs.

Dualism, an idea pioneered by Rene Descartes, proposes that the physical body being a part of physical reality functions like a machine and produces involuntary reflexive responses, such as blinking or breathing, while the mind has free will such as my decision to continue writing these notes.

According to Descartes all things originate in the brain as that is where the mind and body meet.

Reflex Action Theory, also proposed by Descartes states that an external object can bring an involuntary response (such as a hammer hitting my knee causing it go bounce up).

Descartes also proposed that there are two types of ideas:

Innate and Derived Ideas.

Innate ideas are essentially the abstract. These ideas are things like god, the self, perfection and infinity. He also said that mathematical principles were an innate idea.

Derived ideas are essentially just the senses. 

Another contribution Descartes was Mechanism: The philosophical idea that the universe was a great machine and that all things in it could be explained via the power of physic and chemistry’s and that all things were mechanistic.

Determinism states that all things in the psyche are determined or caused by past events.

Reductionism focuses on breaking the psyche down to its base components.

Materialism states that all things can be described through physical term and explained through the property of matter and energy. Through the physical world using anatomy and physiology you can study the mind.

Empiricism simply states that all knowledge derives from sensory experiences. John Locke, a well known and respected empiricist started that all human beings are born as blank slates that knowledge is then written on. Simple ideas are received passively but are combined to slowly form more and more complex ideas. He dubbed this process association, setting the seed for the idea of associative learning. Another Empiricist David Hume dubbed three laws:

The Law of Resemblance, which states one thought flows into a similiar thought.

The law of contiguity which stated we linked together events in time to create associations.

The Law of Cause and Effect: which states that when we think of events we think of the events that led to that event.

Psychology was arguably born in Germany with the first psychological labatory being founded in Leipzig, Germany by Wilheim Wundt. He popularized introspection, the examination of one’s mental state and dubbed the term apperception, which was that pleasure/displeasure, tension/relaxation, and excitement/depression served as three dimensions of emotions that created the sense of unity and wholeness.

Hermann Ebbinghaus introduced the scientific sturdy of memory, using nonsense syllables, sounds that were non sensical in order to determine the rate of recall. It was found that 40% of information is forgotten within 19 minutes, within an hour it becomes 50%, within a day it becomes 60%, and it bottoms out at around 70% forgotten over the course of a month.

In 1912 a new form of psychology called gestalt psychology merged which sought to oppose the then dominant idea of reductionism. It focused on wholes or looking on the conscious itself and not the elements of it.

A prominent contributor Wolfgang Kohler dubbed the term of insight learning or the spontaneous understanding of relationships between objects and ideas.