One of the most influential people during this period was Rene Descartes. He proposed the mind/body problem (also referred to as dualism or the mind-body dichotomy), which makes a distinction between the physical body and the nonmaterial mind. Today this debate examines the relationship between consciousness and the brain. For example, it is easy to imagine your arm and what might happen if it gets cut. You would likely start bleeding, you could see layers of your skin, and so forth. What about this morning's breakfast? Can you remember or describe what you ate? Clearly something is going on in your brain when you have a thought, but can you tangibly create a thought? While this is an extremely interesting question, we will leave the philosophers to ponder the problem (although advances in neuroscience, covered more in Lesson 2, are shedding light on the answer.

 

Other philosophers entered the arena as well. John Locke revisited the debate of Plato and Aristotle and proposed tabula rasa—the idea that we enter the world with a "blank slate" (imagine a clean chalkboard) and only gain knowledge and abilities through our experiences with the world.  According to Locke, nothing exists in the mind until we directly experience the world around us (filling our chalkboards with our experiences). Locke's ideas formed the basis for the behaviorist approach of the early 20th century.

 

 

 

As many leading philosophers weighed in on psychology, around the same time, scientific theories and methods developed throughout the modern world. For example, Charles Darwin was developing his theory of evolution. During the 1800s, many people believed that it was not possible to study the mind. Since the mind couldn’t be seen, many people believed that examining its contents was a fruitless effort compared to the scientific advances made in fields like biology, chemistry, and physics. However, Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner developed methods to examine the relationship between mental events and environmental stimuli. In fact, they were among the first to demonstrate that it was possible to study mental representations of external stimuli.