this course, Introduction to Psychology.

My name is Dr. Paul Bloom. I'm professor of this course.

And what this is going to be is a comprehensive introduction to

the study of the human mind. So, we are going to cover a

very, very wide range of topics including brains,

children, language, sex, memory,

madness, disgust, racism and love,

and many others. We're going to talk about

things like the proper explanation for differences

between men and women; the question of whether animals

can learn language; the puzzle of what grosses us

out; the problem of why some of us

eat too much and what we could do to stop;

the question of why people go crazy in groups;

research into whether you could trust your childhood memories;

research into why some of us get depressed and others don't.

The style of this is there'll be two lectures a week,

as well as course readings. Now, to do well in the course,

you have to attend both the lectures and do the readings.

There will be some overlap. In some cases,

the lectures will be quite linked to the readings.

But there will be some parts of the readings that will not find

their way into the lectures, and some lectures--some entire

lectures that will not connect at all to the readings.

So, to pursue this course properly you have to do both.

What this means is that if you miss a class you need to get

notes, and so you should get them from a friend or from the

person sitting next to you. The slides are going to be made

available online. So, one of the things you don't

have to do is you don't have to write this down.

You take notes any way you choose, but if you don't get

anything on there it'll be available online.

I'm going to post it in a format which will be black and

white and easy to print out so you don't have to worry about

this. But again, attending to the

slides is not a substitute for attending class.

There's a textbook, Peter Gray's Psychology,

5th edition, and there's also a collection of short readings,

The Norton Reader edited by Gary Marcus.

It's an excellent textbook; it's an excellent collection,

and you should get them both. They're available at Labyrinth

bookstore on York Street or you get them online.

I should note that last time I taught the course I used the

Marcus Reader, and when Professor Marvin Chun

taught his course last semester he used Peter Gray's 5^(th)

edition textbook. So, there may be a lot of used

copies floating around. You should feel free to try to

get one of those. The evaluation goes like this.

There is a Midterm and there is a Final.

The Final will not be held in the exam period,

because I like to take long vacations.

It will be held the last day of class.

The exams will be multiple choice and short answer,

fill in the blank, that sort of thing.

Prior to the exams I will post previous exams online,

so you have a feeling for how these exams work and so on.

There will also be review sessions.

Starting at the beginning of the third week of class – that

is not next week but the week after – on each Monday I'm

going to put up a brief question or set of questions,

which you have to answer and your answers need to be sent to

your teaching fellow. And you'll be given a teaching

fellow, assigned one, by Friday.

This is not meant to be difficult.

It's not meant to be more than five, ten minutes of work,

but the point of the question--15,20 minutes of work,

but the point of the question is to motivate people to keep up

with the material and do the readings.

These questions will be marked pass, fail.

I expect most everybody could pass all of the questions but

it's just to keep you on track and keep you going.

There is a book review, a short book review,

to be written towards near the end of the class.

I'll give details about that later on in the semester.

And there's also an experimental participation

requirement, and next week I'll hand out a piece of paper

describing the requirement. The point of the requirement is

to give you all experience actually seeing what

psychological research is about as well as to give us hundreds

of subjects to do our experiments on.

The issue sometimes comes up as to how to do well in the course.

Here's how to do well. Attend all the classes.

Keep up with the readings. Ideally, keep up with the

readings before you come to class.

And one thing I would strongly suggest is to form some sort of

study groups, either formally or informally.

Have people you could talk to when the--prior to the exams

or--she's patting somebody next to her.

I hope you know him. And in fact,

what I'm going to do, not this class because it's

shopping period. I don't know who's coming next

class, or what but I'll set up a few minutes prior,

at the beginning of the class, for people just to introduce

themselves to the person next to them so they have some sort of

resource in the class. Now, this is a large class,

and if you don't do anything about it, it can be very

anonymous. And some of you may choose to

pursue it that way and that's totally fine.

But what I would suggest you do is establish some contact with

us, either with me or with any of the teaching fellows,

and I'll introduce the teaching fellows sometime next week.

You could talk to us at the beginning or at the end of

class. Unless there are special

circumstances, I always try to come at least

ten minutes early, and I am willing to stay late

to talk to people. You could come by during my

office hours, which are on the syllabus,

and you could send me e-mail and set up an appointment.

I'm very willing to talk to students about intellectual

ideas, about course problems and so on.

And if you see me at some point just on campus,

you could introduce yourself and I'd like to meet people from

this class. So, again, I want to stress you

have the option of staying anonymous in this class,

but you also have the option of seeking out and making some sort

of contact with us. Okay.

That's the formal stuff of the course.

What's this course about? Unlike a lot of other courses,

some people come to Intro Psychology with some unusual

motivations. Maybe you're crazy and hope to

become less crazy. Maybe you want to learn how to

study better, improve your sex life,

interpret your dreams, and win friends and influence

people. Those are not necessarily bad

reasons to take this course and, with the exception of the sex

part, this course might actually help

you out with some of these things.

The study of scientific psychology has a lot of insights

of real world relevance to real problems that we face in our

everyday lives. And I'm going to try--and when

these issues come up--I'm going to try to stress them and make

you try to think about the extent to which the laboratory

research I'll be talking about can affect your everyday life:

how you study, how you interact with people,

how you might try to persuade somebody of something else,

what sort of therapy works best for you.

But the general goals of this course are actually I think even

more interesting than that. What I want to do is provide a

state of the art introduction to the most important topic that

there is: us. How the human mind works,

how we think, what makes us what we are.

And we'll be approaching this from a range of directions.

So, traditionally, psychology is often broken up

into the following--into five sub-areas: Neuroscience,

which is the study of the mind by looking at the brain;

developmental, which is the area which I focus

mostly on, which is trying to learn about how people develop

and grow and learn; cognitive, which is the one

term of the five that might be unfamiliar to some of you,

but it refers to a sort of computational approach to

studying the mind, often viewing the mind on

analogy with a computer and looking at how people do things

like understand language, recognize objects,

play games, and so on. There is social,

which is the study of how people act in groups,

how people act with other people.

And there is clinical, which is maybe the aspect of

psychology that people think of immediately when they hear

psychology, which is the study of mental

health and mental illness. And we'll be covering all of

those areas. We'll also be covering a set of

related areas. I am convinced that you cannot

study the mind solely by looking at the discipline of psychology.

The discipline of psychology spills over to issues of how the

mind has evolved. Economics and game theory are

now essential tools for understanding human thought and

human behavior--those issues connecting to philosophy,

computer science, anthropology,

literature, theology, and many, many other domains.

So, this course will be wide ranging in that sense.

At this point I've been speaking in generalities so I

want to close this introductory class by giving five examples of

the sorts of topics we'll be covering.

And I'll start with the topic that we'll be covering next week

on Monday – the brain. This is a brain.

In fact, it's a specific person's brain,

and what's interesting about the brain is that little white

mark there. It's her brain.

It's Terri Schiavo's brain. You recognize her more from

pictures like that. And what a case like this,

where somebody is in a coma, is without consciousness as a

result of damage to the brain, is a stark illustration of the

physical nature of mental life. The physical basis for

everything that we normally hold dear, like free will,

consciousness, morality and emotions,

and that's what we'll begin the course with,

talking about how a physical thing can give rise to mental

life. We'll talk a lot about children.

This is actually a specific child.

It's my son, Zachary, my younger son,

dressed up as Spider-Man, but it is Halloween.

No, it's not Halloween. Oh.

Well, there's more to say about that [laughter].

I study child development for a living and I'm interested in

several questions. So, one question is just the

question of development. Everybody in this room can

speak and understand English. Everybody in this room has some

understanding of how the world works, how physical things

behave. Everybody in this room has some

understanding of other people, and how people behave.

And the question that preoccupies developmental

psychologists is how do we come to have this knowledge,

and in particular, how much of it is hard-wired,

built-in, innate. And how much of it is the

product of culture, of language,

of schooling? And developmental psychologists

use many ingenious methods to try to pull these apart and try

to figure out what are the basic components of human nature.

There's also the question of continuity.

To what extent is Zachary, at that age,

going to be that way forever? To what extent is your fate

sealed? To what extent could--if I were

to meet you when you were five years old I could describe the

way you are now? The poet William Wordsworth

wrote, "The child is father to the man," and what this means is

that you can see within every child the adult he or she will

become. We will look and ask the

question whether this is true. Is it true for your personality?

Is it true for your interests? Is it true for your

intelligence? Another question having to do

with development is what makes us the way we are?

We're different in a lot of ways.

The people in this room differ according to their taste in