July 5, 2015: Jenn and Brenden, First London Blog Post

Gustav Fechner (1801-1889) was a German philosopher and physicist who laid the foundation down for psychophysics. He told us that it was possible to measure the relationship between the physical and psychological worlds. By measuring the relationships between the stimuli in the external world (physical events) and the person's perception and experience of those stimuli (psychological events) you will see that they are not the same. The world isn't always as it seems and different individuals may perceive events differently. An example from the book would be going to the movies. Watching a movie will always look extremely real and life-like, but what is actually happening on the screen is just photographs being projected at a very fast pace. This is happening so quickly that psychologically the movements are very real, but physically is that of a succession of discrete images.

This is also relatable to optical illusions. Examples of optical illusions that I have done are the Flash-lag effect, where there are moving and stationary objects that are perceived at different times. I've also done the Motion-bounce illusion, where the sound is influencing the perception of motion. I chose optical illusions as an example because it's an experience of perceiving something which doesn't actually exist or is different than it actually appears to be. For the Flash-lag effect you will see a blue circle in the middle and a blue line connected to it. The blue line will rotate around the circle while a separate blue line is flashing and rotating at the same time. The question is whether or not they are aligned. Most people will psychologically see one of two things, either the flashing line is lagging just behind the line connected to the circle, or you'll see the flashing line at an angle and where they meet there is a kink. However, physically the flashing line and the non-flashing line are in a perfectly straight line. As you can see, optical illusions can have an impact on both the psychological worlds and the physical world.

When reading about Fechner’s psychophysics, specifically the difference threshold, it reminded me of a time in high school when a hypnotist came towards the end of senior year. He called up several seniors and juniors, including me, and had us line up on stage next to each other. We were all instructed to hold out our arms and close our eyes. The hypnotist told us to imagine we had a very heavy weight in our right hand that was 100 pounds or so, and a penny in our left hand. With our eyes shut, our arms started moving up and down… People who had an open imagination started struggling to hold up the heavy weight with their right hand. The hypnotist picked these people to be hypnotized because it’s important to have an open mind to be hypnotized. This reminded me a lot of all of the research done on finding the difference between two stimuli, and even how mentally your perception of a stimulus can change. This reminded me of when Fechner said he finally discovered there is a relationship between the physical and psychological world. Sometimes what we perceive isn’t always reality, and in the hypnotist example some people could actually feel the weights on their hands even though there was nothing there.

Benjamin, JR., L. T. (2014). A Brief History of Modern Psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Travel Link to a restaurant we found that was yummy!: http://www.beckscafe.co.uk/

Below is a picture of a street performer we saw as we walked around London.

Timeline: G. Stanley Hall opened the first psychology laboratory in America in 1883.