Psychology

Psychology is the scientific study of the human mind and behaviour, it is about ‘what’ the mind does, how the brain functions, and how we process, organise, and store information known as stimuli in the brain.  Psychology is classed as a science because whilst we cannot see inside the brain, without the use of scanners, we can objectively observe and measure the way the mind works by studying human behaviour. In experiments we monitor people’s responses to tasks, such as reasoning, calculating, recognition, word association, and memory, and from the scores or results, we can gain an idea of how people’s brains function and how their minds really work.   

The mind often referred to as ‘the seat of human consciousness’, is the intellectual component that enables us to be aware of and experience our world.  It is that with which we mentally process stimuli and that which enables us to think, reason, plan and make sense of the world around us.  Some people believe the mind is the thinking-feeling element of what we know as ‘I’ but there is no conclusive definition.  Similarly, there is no collective definition of what ‘normal’ means.  In psychological research, the word normal is not used, since we know that we have different experiences, different upbringings, different thought processes, belief systems, and ways of associating information perceptually and neurologically.

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