SPEAKER: Renowned German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus once stated, "Psychology has a long past, but a short history." At first glance, this sounds like a contradictory statement. How can something be so old, yet relatively new at the same time? 

Ebbinghaus intended to make clear that philosophers have been studying the human mind for thousands of years and can trace its roots to India, China, the Middle East, and Europe, but that psychology as we know it today, as a scientific discipline, is a relatively new phenomenon. 

I know psychology is not a history course, per se, but it's important that we examine its historical roots to help shed light on where the field is today. What are its pre-scientific origins? What major events, people, and studies over the past 2,000 years led to the development of the subject of psychology? In this "PSYCHademia" episode, I recount psychology's roots from a mere discussion of the mind and body to a modern-day science. 

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To better understand how psychology emerged from its pre-scientific roots, it's important that we go all the way back in time to ancient Greece. Psychology's pre-scientific roots began with asking fundamental questions about the human mind like, how does it work? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? Is knowledge derived from experience or something we are born with? 

In ancient Greece, the most curious thinkers like Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates were asking similar questions. Socrates and his prospective student Plato, for instance, argued that knowledge is innate, or something we are born with, kind of like a spider instinctively knowing how to spin a web. 

Plato's student Aristotle, on the other hand, argued that knowledge is learned, acquired through observation and everyday experiences, like learning how to read and write. 

Holding similar beliefs, in the late 17th century, British philosopher John Locke argued that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa, or blank slate, that what we know comes from our experience. This idea would pave the way for modern empiricism, a theory that all knowledge is derived from our senses. You could almost say that philosophy, which studies the fundamental nature of knowledge, and science, which studies the world through observation and experiment, got married, had a baby, and named it "psychology." 

It was not until the late 19th century when psychology began to emerge as a scientific discipline. We owe this honor to a man by the name of Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt opened up a laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, and designed an experiment to test how quickly people reacted to hearing a noise. While a simple experiment, the implications were immense. 

You see, by many accounts, this is considered the first psychology experiment to bring objectivity and measurement to psychology. In other words, examining the human mind became coupled with scientific principles. 

Wundt's work was just the beginning. His ideas sparked other thinkers to examine the human mind as well. The only problem was, not everyone agreed on what to study. Two of the earliest schools to emerge from Boone's work were structuralism and functionalism. One of Boone's students, Edward Tichener, described his theory of studying basic cognitive structures as structuralism. 

Both Tichener and Wundt used a technique known as introspection, or looking inward, to study people's conscious thoughts and emotions. Introspection was a form of self-observation where participants were asked to describe their mental experiences while holding or smelling different stimuli. 

William James, on the other hand, didn't care about the location of basic cognitive structures. Rather, he cared about the purpose of evolved function of these structures, hence, functionalism. He approached psychology from the evolutionary perspective, like Charles Darwin. James was interested in how these structures were advantageous for survival. 

To better make sense of these two schools, let's take a look at an iPhone. A follower of structuralism would study each part of the iPhone, like the processor, battery, flash memory, and Wi-Fi module, and what properties they're made from. A follower of functionalism, on the other hand, wouldn't care to study each disconnected part. Rather, they would question why each part was built in the first place. What purpose does it serve? How would the iPhone function differently without it? 

Tichener and James are just two influential figures in the field of psychology. Ever hear the phrase, "We all stand on the shoulders of giants"? Well, these are some of psychology's giants, figures like Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, the first woman to receive her psychology PhD, Margaret Washburn, or the first woman to be President of the American Psychological Association, Mary Calkins, Max Wertheimer, John B. Watson, Abraham Maslow, and B. F. Skinner, just to name a few. These giants paved the way for early psychological approaches. These represented different ways to study human in thought and behavior. 

Freud, for instance, developed his psychoanalytic theory. He ultimately argued that psychology should focus on the unconscious mind, a part of our mind we cannot control or see, but yet guides our behavior. Watson would later argue that psychologists should only study observable behavior, not the human mind, which is hidden from view. His theory would become behaviorism. 

Maslow developed the humanistic perspective, an approach that emerged as a result of the pessimism of psychoanalysis and behaviorism, each arguing that the human mind and behavior is predetermined. In his mind, psychology should study the positive aspects of behavior, like individual choice and human potential. I will discuss these theories and many more in later "PSYCHademia" episodes. 

Psychology has come a long way since Aristotle and Plato asked fundamental questions about the human mind and the origins of knowledge. The history of psychology is a story of intersecting disciplines and competing theories. Today, psychology is considered both an academic discipline and an applied science. Its popularity has grown so much that general psychology is the second most popular college major in the US, according to "USA Today," behind business administration and management.