Psychology is the study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.
A professional practitioner or researcher involved in the discipline is called a psychologist. Some psychologists can also be classified as behavioral or cognitive scientists. Some psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior. Others explore the physiological and neurobiological processes that underlie cognitive functions and behaviors.
The brain is the central organ of the human nervous system, and with the spinal cord makes up the central nervous system. The brain consists of the cerebrum, the brainstem and the cerebellum. It controls most of the activities of the body, processing, integrating, and coordinating the information it receives from the sense organs, and making decisions as to the instructions sent to the rest of the body. The brain is contained in, and protected by, the skull bones of the head.
Cat portraits showing increased abstraction, by Louis Wain, who, while an inmate at a mental hospital, may not have painted them in this order, thus the question of whether they document a deterioration in condition remains unanswered. It is also not certain if he suffered from schizophrenia, though the images have been used extensively as examples of schizophrenic outsider art.
"The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man." — B. F. Skinner
He has used both classical lesion methods and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques to better understand neural architecture and its relationship to intelligence. Barbey used lesion mapping to study Vietnam veterans who had suffered brain trauma. He was able to record diagnostic images of their brains and relate this anatomical data to their documented problems, creating a "brain atlas" linking cognitive functions to neural organization.
He has suggested a framework called “structured event complex theory” that describes the inferential architecture of the prefrontal cortex. (Full article...)
