Science Forums: PhDwannabe - Viewing Profile - Science Forums

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...nobody is even claiming... it's not even about...

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...no...

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...these proteins aren't even important. That's not what's going on here. I think I'm going to cry.

Ricardo:

I think you're a little bit confused, here. These researchers are not "using a sea snail (aplysia is usually called a "sea slug," by the way) to help with memory" in the sense of some sort of supplementation--nobody's grinding up marine gastropods and serving them up to people with memory deficits. Aplysia is simply a common, well-known model lab animal, like the white rat. It's very common in neuroscience and what frequently used to be called comparative psychology (which uses animal models to study basic processes in humans). It's got a simple nervous system which we more or less have mapped, so it's used to test all kinds of hypotheses about learning in particular, both in terms of its functionality and its physiology. (In addition to being relatively few in number, the neurons of aplysia and some related species are actually really big, so it was easy to insert probes directly into them to record the firing of individual cells within the network, allowing a researcher an unusually fine-grained look at the propagation of activation between and among neurons.) Kandel's work on the cellular and molecular physiology of learning made it very well-known.

The brief snippet you found is just a press release from a university describing very loosely what some researchers are working on. It has nothing to do with anything special about the proteins in this creature being able to "help us with our memory" directly. It'll just help us because it's a useful subject species that allows us to advance scientific understanding of memory and learning. I hope that makes some sense.

Beats me. That's a really narrow-sounding area, and I'm a PTSD researcher. I can speak in generalities about the workings of the field as a whole, but there's no reason for me to be familiar with specific findings. I think my breadth of knowledge is enough for me to say that you're not going to find a ton on some general, quasi-emotional thing like "pride" as some kind of overarching, unitary construct. It's just not usually the way we study stuff. Trawl the databases for that term and you'll probably find little bits of tangentially-related stuff like "Ethnic pride and experiences of discrimination in elderly migrant laborers" or something. It's just the way we work. We don't sit around and ask "what's pride?"

...nonetheless, you can always count on the psychophys people to do something cute.

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I live to give.

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This is not really what psychology is, or how psychology works. Let me try to clear a few things up:

1) Psychology, the science, is empirical. Science is empirical. That means that we, you know, gather evidence for stuff. So this statement "reducing all phenomena to the empirical" is sort of neither here nor there. We "examine phenomena empirically," like any other science does. We observe, record, make theory, test hypotheses.

2) "Reducing all phenomena to the areas of the brain" is another issue entirely, and it does not proceed necessarily from the empiricism of psychology or science. Most of us are not neuro-reductionists. I, even more than most, tend to be extremely skeptical about many of the current "findings" of neuroscience and the apparent specificity of their attempts to localize function. That's a completely different story. If you think "being scientific" in psychology means being a neuro-reductionist, you're just incorrect. You're forgiven for being incorrect, of course--this is a deduction someone "on the outside" might often make, it just doesn't happen to be true.

3) "According the the current empirical psychology pride is something which originated from evolutionary psychology and we are hard-wired to think that way?" Again: no. To be perfectly honest, most of us in psych sort of snicker at evo psych. It does some interesting things, but there are many, many limits upon the certainty of its inferences. The phrase "hard-wired" is a sort of a weasel word that doesn't really tell us anything or state anything rigorously.

4) In general, it's not really the task of psychology to tell us what something "is." No psychological researcher really sits around and asks, "what is pride," because you're asking about the "meaning" of a construct, which (depending on how meaning is construed here) not really something that the scientific method can really access all that well. If anything, we might seek to operationalize pride, to test which behaviors evoke it, to assess what personality types more commonly experience it, to vary social contingencies which might have bearing on its expression... those sorts of things. We might even attempt to delineate its characteristics--cognitive, affective, and behavioral--factor analyze them or subject them to other sorts of statistical machinery, see how they hang together. None of those things tell us what pride "is." Nor do we really need to know what it is, in many ways, in order to find out interesting things about it. It's just not what we do, or can do.

5) "Old eastern psychology" (whatever you mean by that, exactly, but I can guess) is not psychology. Alchemy was not chemistry. This is not to say that there was not (indeed, is not) value in these things. But they're not the sciences they're related to, or would influence or become--the differences between them are substantial and qualitative.