The ESL Teacher C · Nomad Educator

🧠 Overview of Psychology (very basic)

** The information here gives an overview of psychology and elements I learned that I think can help you improve your understanding of your mind and help your exploration of this field of study.**

During my undergrad, studying psychology, I feel I have learned many things that are useful and insightful about our everyday actions and reactions to the world. Many will feel obvious, but directly formulating and organizing the obvious brings it to the forefront of our explicit understanding.

So without further ado, here are some things I learned about the mind and brain in my undergraduate studies that are worth sharing.

Content
Main areas of study in psychology

Psychology is more than the image of a therapist listening to his patient on a sofa. The field of psychology encompasses many topics of the mind, here are a few and a brief description (note that in my list, an object of study can be a person, an animal, a program):

  • Neuroscience: the branch more versed in the biology of our mind, so the brain and nerves
  • Behavioural: focuses on visible acts produced by the object of study
  • Cognitive: focuses on the thoughts and thinking patterns of the object of study
  • Personality: focuses on what makes a person the individual they are
  • Developmental: focuses on the steps of growth of a given object of study
  • Psycholinguistics: focuses on things like language acquisition
  • Abnormal: focuses on mental illness and impairments and behavioural disorders
  • Social: focuses on human interactions and dynamics
  • Motivation: focuses on why people do what they do
  • Sleep: focuses on what happens when we fall asleep
  • …
Factors that affect our individual growth

Here is a diagram to illustrate at a glance what factors can contribute to our individuality:

It may well be that in a person, one factor impacts more strongly than others at a given point in life. Normally it’s always a combination of factors that influence the development of a being.

Practice does makes perfect

Revisiting information you have seen will reinforce the neural pathways in your brain attached to that knowledge, thus improving its retention in your memory. ☞ Check this post about the neurology of learning to know more. I explain how the whole system works and it feels empowering to learn about the inherent capacity of the brain to learn so well.

There is a connection between your gut and your brain

Say what? The bacteria in your gut, your microbiome’s health, can affect your mental health. So if you feed them well, in other words if you have a healthy diet or a diet adapted to your needs, you will be taking care of your head not just your body.

*The research is relatively recent in this area.

The elephant in the room: Freud

The name of Freud is almost synonymous with the field of psychology. It is also controversial. I’ll give you here some main points to know about him:

  • No, his theories are not taught as valid;
  • Yes his theories based on sex are discredited and irrelevant;
  • Freud made sex relevant as something to address when analyzing an individual;
  • Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious;
  • Freud was a man of his time and his theories derived from theories of conservation of matter (nothing is created, nothing is lost, all is transformed). So based on this, his theories tried to apply the logic of science to psychology, not the craziest idea out there;
  • This is the id, ego and superego guy and although that model is not an accepted theory, for the average person it’s part of the popular imagination and it’s a useful and common device to illustrate our mind’s mechanisms in a literary form.
The other elephant in the room: Jung
  • While Freud was all about sex, Jung was all about mysticism;
  • He is even rumoured to have played around with different drugs and substances like psychedelics;
  • Some of the main concepts associated to him are the shadow and archetypes.
The final elephant in the room: Pop psychology

I never realized how pop psychology gave such a bad reputation to the field of psychology, but it does, badly. This includes self-help books, books that claim they will allow you to manipulate others, gurus of happiness, etc.

Many of these have true positive effects and are based on research, but also many others are scams or money-grabbing. So when they claim or cite experiments, go read the research they are referencing. If you’re interested, I can make a guide to read scientific papers (work in progress) (it’s not as hard as it seems) and suggest tools to help you identify scams (work in progress).

So here it’s up to you to take the time to read and learn how to identify nuggets of wisdom versus pseudo scientific catchphrases, note that these aren’t mutually exclusive.

Conclusion

Psychology is us trying to explain to ourselves how our minds and brains function. Because science hasn’t been able to obtain clear answers, definitive theories, and because people are so diverse, it is also a ripe field for pseudo science to take advantage of the gray zones. So stay alert but don’t dismiss it altogether. I’d like to quote one of the openings to the ‘Twilight Zone’ show, the mind “is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. ” I wish you a fun exploration 🧠

Recap

☞ This post was meant to be short and sweet, here are the things I wrote about:

Want to learn more

☞ I made this post about educational sources that teach about psychology and artistic sources that explore and illustrate themes in psychology. I’m constantly adding to it. Well worth a glance 😉

Questions/Comments

☞ Is there something in this post that blew you away?

☞ Is there a topic you’d like me to include or to address further?

Teacher C

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