States of Mind

Professor George Miller, from Princeton University, explains what psychology is, what psychologists do, and the importance of the Second World War to the study of human behaviour.

Professor Jerome Bruner, from the New School for Social Research in New York, explains how the study of the 'mind', once a dirty word in psychology, has revolutionised the explorat...

Until the present century vision was often regarded as a simple process - the eyes provide the brain with pictures of the outside world, and the brain just looks at them. We now kn...

Until recently psychologists shunned questions about the philosophy of 'mind' in the belief that they were tedious and unanswerable. Professor Daniel Dennett , from Tufts Universit...

One of Sigmund Freud's most important contributions to psychology was the notion of an unconscious mind which can guide our behaviour in curious and unexpected ways. This has not o...

In the 18th century it was assumed that the mind was 'transparent to itself '- that everything occurring in the brain was available to conscious thought. This idea seemed much less...

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For most people the expression of such feelings as fear, anger, jealousy or love forms an important part of human life. It is now recognised that psychologists have paid little att...

The most publicised work in understanding human social behaviour in recent years has been the 'naked ape' approach which attempts to explain our dealings with each other in terms o...

Robert Hinde has spent most of his academic life at Cambridge studying the behaviour of birds and monkeys. More recently he has turned his attention to the more complex issue of hu...

In Victorian times armchair anthropologists regarded tribal man as a fossilised remnant of our primitive ancestors. Clifford Geertz, Professor of Social Science at Princeton, who h...

The act of painting a scene is normally imagined to be an exercise in manual dexterity. There is, however, a great deal more to drawing or painting than the simple 'copying' of a v...

The work of psychologist Sigmund Freud forms the basis of psychoanalysis, but his ideas have also profoundly altered the way we account for our own everyday behaviour and the behav...

Although psychoanalysis is usually associated with the work of Sigmund Freud, a number of psychologists have found themselves in disagreement with certain aspects of Freudian theor...

Despite remarkable advances in medical science over the past century, there is still no clear medical understanding of the causes of most forms of insanity. Dr Thomas Szasz, author...