The Relationship of Neuroscience and Psychology
Although different from one another neuroscience and psychology both have similarities too
There are strong links between neuroscience and psychology.
And in many ways, they are two sides of the same coin.
That coin explains the understanding of what the human mind is truly capable of and all humans truly want to know what that is.
At some level, we all want to improve in some way or another. Maybe not for ourselves but certainly for others around us at different times of life.
Cognitive neuroscience comes from two disciplines, namely psychology and neurobiology.
In psychology, cognitive neuroscience has meticulous methods for measuring cognition and behavior. In neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience attempts to establish the neuronal circuitry as well as the motor circuitry of the human brain.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the study of the human mind came from philosophy.
And this progressed as psychology began to study human memory, attention, perception, learning, and voluntary action.
Psychology asked questions about mental activity and became its own independent scientific discipline entity away from philosophy. Cognitive psychologists led people to believe that what they knew of the world and how they saw it is based on their perception of it.
In recent years the molecular biology of synaptic plasticity has arisen.
Before this cognitive psychologists looked at memory as having two major forms. Firstly it was declarative in that it was concerned with what something was about. People were known to have remembered events and facts. Secondly, memory was procedural in that people could do something
Attention is also important in neuroscience.
Selective attention is attempted within the brain’s parietal and frontal lobes while more recent evidence has also shown that the temporal lobe also homes attention. It’s how we process a variety of different stimuli.
Our human attention is limited to only a few minutes on any specific topic at any one time.
If we are watching a show, a movie, or at a game we think that we are concentrating our attention 100% of the time on what is happening in front of us. But the truth is we are not. Rather, when we are present physically in front of these shows, movies, or games, our minds wander after a certain portion of the time.
Think about the last time you were at a show.
You may have taken in most of the performance but at times you recall how you began studying the curtain on the stage, checked the lighting on either side of the actors, or looked at the orchestra in front of the stage.
Similarly, if you’re at a sports game, you may think you’re examining the ball as it moves all over the field but when you leave you also realize you can remember the scoreboard at different times during each quarter and how the coaches on the line reacted to certain refereeing decisions. You may even remember what the person who was sitting in front or beside you was wearing or how they were reacting.
All of these things are signs that your attention has wavered throughout the live performance.
How you organize this information in your brain also comes from how good your attention was at certain moments in the performance too.
Another thing that makes attention so vital to study is the concept of multitasking.
When for many years people thought they could multitask successfully, more recent evidence has shown that your task will take 50% longer if you do more than one thing at a time and that you may make up to 50% more errors when you do two tasks together too.
And this has huge ramifications for people in their overall learning.
Think of all the students in schools who have attention deficit disorder and how a regular classroom has so much noise, light, conversation, and activity and how this can impact someone who has a deficiency of their attention in the first place.
Cognitive neuroscience concentrates on teaching how your brain can influence the mind.
Neuroscience explores how specific neurons operate and communicate to build complex neuronal constructions that make up the human brain. Cognitive science uses cognitive psychology together with artificial intelligence. The result is language arising from thoughts.
And these thoughts come from a higher form of thinking.
Functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERP) can be used to process even the most basic types of information. An understanding of the areas of the brain that are utilized when different stimuli motivate different responses in the face through smiling, frowning, and different emotions can also be analyzed using these technologies.
Millisecond-to-millisecond neuronal responses occur at different times when a person interacts.
These interactions eventually shape a person’s behavior around another person.
Virtual reality is also used with cognitive neuroscience to understand how people discover their world.
But, of course, everyone is different.
And with those differences, there are alterations in how brains lose attention and concentrate on various things at different times. As some people fall prey to addictions and others do not, studies of human behavior can be looked at using the cognitive neuroscience eye to assess why this is so.
And until we understand everything exists in the human mentality we need all the information we can get from both neuroscience and psychology.
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