Chapter 3: People

Front 1

Dissected the brains of dead animals and humans, confirming the existence of both white and gray matter, nerve fibers connecting the sides of the brain to the spinal cord, and the fibers connecting the two sides to each other -- but he came to be considered a quack and a fraud after promoting cranioscopy.

Back 1

Franz Joseph Gall

Front 2

This German physiologist encouraged the discipline to become experientially oriented and presented the Theory of the Specific Energies of Nerves -- a theory that the stimulation of a particular nerve always leads to a characteristic sensation because each sensory nerve has its own specific energy.

Back 2

Johannes Muller

Front 3

A Scottish physician who observed that decapitated animals continued to move and concluded that different levels of behavior arise from different parts of the brain and the nervous system.

Back 3

Marshall Hall

Front 4

A professor of natural history who's research involved systematically destroying parts of the brain and the spinal cord in pigeons and observing consequences -- the related findings are less important than the methods.

Back 4

Pierre Flourens

Front 5

This French surgeon developed the Clinical method in 1861 -- he was performing an autopsy on a man who had been unable to speak intelligibly for some time and discovered a lesion in the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex, which he labeled the speech center.

Back 5

Paul Broca

Front 6

This German astronomer was interested in errors in measurement and provided data from a hard science to support the ideas of the empirical philosophers forcing scientists to focus on the role of the human observer in experiments – in other words, drawing attention to individual differences.

Back 6

Fredrich Wilhelm Bessel

Front 7

Primarily interested in physiology of sense organs, this German applied physiology’s experimental methods to problems of a psychological nature -- including experimental determination of the accuracy of the two-point discrimination of the skin

Back 7

Ernst Weber

Front 8

This German was a prolific researcher in physics and physiology. His investigations on speed of neural impulse and research on vision and hearing were important to psychology.

Back 8

Hermann von Helmholtz

Front 9

Had a flash of insight about the mind-body connection – a quantitative relationship between a mental sensation and a material stimulus. Promoted the study if Psychophysics; developed one and systematized two of the three fundamental methods currently used in psychophysics research.

Back 9

Gustav Theodor Fechner