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1600 BCE
Edwin Smith Papyrus
First written description of the brain and it's control over the body. -
Period: 753 BCE to 730 BCE
Ancient Rome
Believed in optimal happiness ("self-help") and to live the best life. Happiness was achieved through quiet acceptance and belief in fate. -
Period: 690 BCE to 510 BCE
Parmenides
Note that dates of life are not specific. Believed that: change is illusion; don't trust the senses; if it can be thought of, it exists; and thinking is introspection -
Period: 620 BCE to 546 BCE
Thales
Believed in natural principles; water makes up everything; began critical tradition of questioning everything -
Period: 570 BCE to 495 BCE
Pythagorus
Believed in: Mathematical thinking and the relationship between phenomena; rationalism and the belief that natural phenomena followed patterns and laws (ratio) -
Period: 490 BCE to 420 BCE
The Sophists/Protagoras
Subjective nature of reality; cognition (all experiences of reality are different) -
Period: 469 BCE to 399 BCE
Socrates
Believed in: questioning everything; "know thyself" (psychodynamic psychology) -
Period: 460 BCE to 370 BCE
Democritus
Believed: everything made of small items that cannot be divided (atoms); reductionism, materialism, and determinism; and deductionism. -
Period: 450 BCE to 380 BCE
Hippocrates
Recognized importance of physical well-being and health. Proposed relationship of the state of the body on behavior. Created the theory of four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. -
Period: 427 BCE to 347 BCE
Plato
Student of Socrates. Recorded all of Socrates ideas. Believed in subjectivity of reality and the personality of "The Golden Chariot" -
Period: 384 BCE to 322 BCE
Aristotle
Student of Plato. First scientist in Greece. Believed in expericism, memory (law of contiguity, law of contrast, similarity, and frequency); behaviorism (human nature); emotions (changing perceptions); and dreams (pure memories without control of the logical mind). -
Period: Jan 28, 1225 to Mar 7, 1274
St. Thomas Aquinas
Believed in scientific investigation of the natural world and "knowing God". -
Period: Apr 25, 1300 to
Reannaisance Era
Return of Questioning and Technological Advances and Marked Cultural Change -
Period: to
Rene Descartes
Believed: the senses were flawed and to doubt everything until you reached information beyond doubt. He even doubted himself until he realized he did exist because he was a thinking thing. -
Period: to
Thomas Willis
Recognized difference between white vs. gray matter in the brain and spinal cord. Established anatomy of blood vessels to the brain. Also recognized that injuries that cut off the blood flow to the brain caused seizures. -
Period: to
John Locke
Believed contents of mind built from sensory experience and everyone begins in a blank state. -
Rene Descartes Quote
"I think, therefore I am." -
Thomas Willis Published First Brain Anatomy Atlas
First visual anatomy of the brain -
Period: to
Immanuel Kant
Created the foundation for the establishment of experimental psychology. Viewed differences in our experiences as a "creative mind agent". Believed differences could be studied and the mind uses more raw data that it gets from senses to create perceptions. -
Period: to
Johann Joseph Gassner
Treated ailments with exorcisms. Ordered demons to create symptoms in various body parts and established control over the demons. -
Period: to
Franz Mesmer
Believed in animal gravitational-ism. Also believed in magnetism. Made the baquet. Because of his studies, social contagion and facilitation was discovered. -
Period: to
William Paley
Believed all species were so complex, they must've been created by God. -
Period: to
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Proposed that species evolve on the use or disuse of specific organs. -
Period: to
Marquis de Puysegur
Discovered artificial somnambulism (hypnotism) and post hypnotic suggestibility. -
Period: to
Abbe Faria
investigated why mesmerism didn't work on every patient. Discovered lucid sleep. -
Period: to
Franz Josef Gall
Found that hemispheres were connected by white matter bundles and that there was crossovers of nerve fibers from right to left in the spinal cord. Higher abilities were the result of larger and more developed brains. Larger substructures in the brain correlated to better, specific abilities. "Physiognomy" and "Phrenology" -
Period: to
Charles Bell
Law of specific nerve energies were sensory neurons that conveyed information that was relevant to that sensory system. The cells in the eye could only transmit visual information to the mind. -
Period: to
Jean Pierre Flourens
Opposed Gall's phrenology and conducted ablation studies on animals, which suggested that the brain's cortex function was a unified whole. -
Period: to
James Braid
Tested mesmerism and made it scientific. Coined the term hypnotism. -
Period: to
John Stevens Henslow
Charles Darwin's professor. Recommended Darwin to serve as the head naturalist on the Beagle voyage. -
Period: to
Jean Baptiste Bouillaud
Language localized to region in left frontal lobe. -
Period: to
Charles Lyell
Geologist that promoted the idea of uniformitarianism in explaining how the Earth was developed. -
Period: to
Gustav Fechner
Created quantified relationships between stimulus like intensity and subjective experience. -
Period: to
Johannes Peter Muller
First experiments on sensation and perception. Studies discovered lawful relationships between newly measurable energy and subjective reactions of the mind and body. This was the first step to psychology being genuine science. -
Period: to
James Esdaile
Did over three hundred and more surgeries on mesmerized patients. -
Period: to
Charles Darwin
Brought idea of natural selection and believed in monogenesis. -
Period: to
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Discovered electrochemical pattern of neuron communication. Body transforms energy from the environment into a "message" that causes changes to the body/brain. Viewed the mind as something mechanical. Developed the theory of color. -
Period: to
Hermann von Helmholtz
First experiments on sensation and perception. Studies discovered lawful relationships between newly measurable energy and subjective reactions of the mind and body. This was the first step to psychology being genuine science. -
Period: to
Ambroise-Auguste Liebeault
First hypnotherapist. Studied role of individual differences in response to hypnotism. -
Period: to
Paul Broca
Found evidence that localization of one function affected one are in the brain. -
Period: to
Jean-Martin Charcot
Neurologist and Directior of Salpatriere Hospital in Paris. Discovered hysteria and hypnotizable suggestibility. -
Period: to
Wilhelm Wundt
Founder of modern psychology. Labeled the science of psychology and distinguished it from natural sciences and physiology. -
Period: to
David Ferrier
Recognized the primary somatosensory cortex, visual cortex, auditory cortex process, and association cortex. -
Period: to
Carl Wernicke
Had patients with fluent speech, but no comprehension. He named this Wernicke's area. He recognized complex functions were the result of an interaction of multiple brain functions, known as the "association cortex". These complex functions didn't exist in isolation from other simple functions. -
Period: to
Ivan Pavlov
Began the behaviorist movement. Creator of classical conditioning and higher order conditioning. -
Period: to
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Discovered a higher mental process. Investigated learning and memory. Changed the way association is studied. -
Paul Broca met "Ton"
Man had aphasia or "lack of words" -
The Nancy School
Devoted to training of the scientific investigation into hypnotism. -
Period: to
Edward B. Titchener
Studied structuralism and discovered the key the to conscious mind is understanding the individual structures. Also had progressive views on female scientists. -
Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig
Created electrical stimulation studies on the brain. Discovered the primary motor cortex caused the body to move. -
Period: to
Stepherd Ivory Franz
Combined memory studies with ablation studies. Did selective ablation on cortex and figured any ablation of damage on the frontal cortex damaged memory but ablations elsewhere didn't. With more damage, there was more memory impairment. After damage, people can relearn. -
Period: to
John Watson
Studied behavior and defined it as an objective science. Rejected introspection. Discovered that most human reactions result from conditioning of neutral stimuli paired with three innate, unconditional reactions like fear, rage, and love. -
Period: to
Karl Spencer Lashley
Combined memory studies with ablation studies. Did selective ablation on cortex and figured any ablation of damage on the frontal cortex damaged memory but ablations elsewhere didn't. With more damage, there was more memory impairment. After damage, people can relearn. -
Period: to
Wilder Penfield
Found there was always a warning before seizures. Found that stimulation of areas next to primary areas (somatosensory, visual, and auditory) elicited more complex experiences and response. Also discovered the hippocampus. -
Period: to
Mary Cover Jones
Conducted first study using counter conditioning as a procedure for removing fear. -
Period: to
B. F. Skinner
Invented the operant chamber and studied operant conditioning. -
Psychology Becoming More Dominant in America
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Period: to
Eleanor J. Gibson
Devised the "visual cliff" studies, which resulted in the idea that depth perception occurs innately or extremely early in development without prior learning. -
Gestalt Psychology
Focuses on ways the mind organizes experiences and perceptions into organized wholes that are more than the sums of their separate parts. -
Period: to
Jerome S. Bruner
Studied "nonobjective influences on behavior", perception, and how it was influenced by mental processes. -
Period: to
Brenda Milner
Student of Penfield. Discovered temporal lobe damage. Discovered different types of memory like episodic, procedural, and semantic. Also discovered that without the hippocampus, people cannot have procedural memory. -
Period: to
George Miller
Was interested in speech processing and perception. -
Period: to
Noam Chomsky
Developed more "mentalistic" theory of language learning. Believed in linguistics and that language learning is fast and natural. Emphasized the importance of mental processes in the ability to learn language. -
Period: to
Ulric Neisser
Conducted research on information processing, cognition, intelligence, and memory.
