Intro to Philosophy of Learning n Memory
The Human Brain is the single most beautiful and highly complex piece of nature’s engineering that had been fascinating humans from centuries beyond. Every individual’s life revolves around one’s own brain as whatever one experiences from birth to death are reflected in the activity of his/her brain. The series of posts I'll be writing on is dedicated to the course “Learning and Memory” as a part of its requirements and will reflect my brain’s activity of the same.
The origin of studies of the brain and memory, in particular, can be tracked down to Aristotle, the renowned Greek philosopher. He founded the idea of associationism which says that memories are formed by “associations” or linkages between pairs of events or experiences, such that invoking one anticipates the other. He described associationism in three principles namely,
Continuity: events experienced at the same space or time tend to be associated.
Frequency: the more frequent the events are, the more strongly we associate them.
Similarity: if two things are similar, the thought or sensation of one will tend to trigger a thought of the other.
The next famous idea about the brain came from Rene Descartes, the French Philosopher who we all know for his famous quote “I think, therefore I am”. He was a firm believer in dualism and so promoted the idea that mind and body are two separate entities. He thought that the body was like a self-regulating machine and works like clockwork machinery famous during his period. Then came along John Locke who introduced reductionism for studying the mind, inspired by Isaac Newton’s work on Light. He proposed that the mind could be broken down into simple elements, together when combined evoked consciousness, just like how sunlight is formed by combining individual colors (remember VIBGYOR!) made up of various frequencies.
The idea of Associationism which we met earlier in the era of Aristotle was formalized by William James who was the first to offer a formal course on Psychology. He founded the famous memory model which described that mental linkages between the two events consist of multiple connections between the deeper underlying components. Then on the scene, arrived Charles Darwin after a long voyage which helped him to evolve his theory of natural selection. This began the era of evolutionism which shattered the beliefs that humans are special and different from animals.
Experimental psychology was born from Wilhelm Wundt, who enforced that the mind should be understood in terms of internal mental representations and procedures. Hermann Ebbinghaus introduced the psychophysics of memory and modeled memory mathematically using the learning curve, retention curve and forgetting curves. At the same time, Ivan Pavlov was working on animal learning and formed the basis of classical conditioning. His famous dog experiment showed how an unrelated stimulus like a bell’s ring can be associated with a known response like salivation by conditioning the same on food served. Edward Thorndike added to this field by stating his law of effect (a.k.a operant conditioning) which describes how an animal learns new behaviors to maximize its chances of obtaining desirable outcomes.
John Watson put forth his idea of behaviorism and argued that psychologists should study only the observable events (behaviors) and should not speculate about the unknown within (for e.g. consciousness). He proposed psychology should be a rigorous branch of natural science with behaviorism as its basis. Skinner took this idea to an extreme and advocated that free will and consciousness are nothing but illusions. Obviously, strict behaviorism soon faced opposition as it failed to explain the fundamental of human cognition namely language, perception, reasoning and memory. This frustration laid the foundation for the rise of cognitive psychology.
The modern field of Cognitive Psychology made it possible to study the unobservable. Tolman explained how learning can occur even when there is no particular motivation such as food. Stimulus sampling theory found by William Estes described how randomness or perception affects memory and generalization. It led to the formation of connectionism (my personal favorite!) by David Rumelhart which said that memory and learning can be explained by networks of simple processing units whose activity reflects the information represented by them.
In summary, we can say that the study of the brain is a fight of Nature vs Nurture. On one hand, we have the Gang of Nativists, lead by Plato, Descartes, Leibniz and Darwin who believe that Knowledge is inborn. And on the other, we have the Band of Empiricists, founded by Aristotle, Locke, James, and Pavlov who say that knowledge is acquired through experience. But the reality is not completely black and white and so I believe the study of the brain is more like Yin and Yang, needing seemingly opposite ideas which actually are two sides of the same coin and gives rise to one another.