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Cranioscopy, a theory developed by Franz Joseph Gall in the mid 1800s, involved measuring the skull and its unique bumps and ridges between individuals to determine psychological behavioral characteristics. It was later renamed phrenology, but proven to be pseudoscience through various localization studies.

The image above shows the 27 distinct divisions created by Gall when he developed his theory for phrenology. The basis for his theory was that each cortical organ's size is a function of its activity and resulting prominence in the skull. This simply means that the more a cortical organ is activated, the larger it will become and the resulting attributed personality or behavior will become more prominent.

Gall used previous case studies and their skull architecture to develop these divisions, also known as faculties. One example is a a woman who was the "model of friendship" having two prominences next to the faculties he named "attachment, friendship." Obviously, this theory was not correct, but this was one of the first instances of deeper personality and behavioral analysis on a medical level.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945216303240?via%3Dihub

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Phineas Gage suffered a workplace injury in 1848 that resulted in a large tamping iron penetrating his left cheek, crossing through his brain, and exiting through his skull. The gruesome injury left him blind in his left eye, but miraculously alive and conscious. His doctor, John Martyn Harlow, observed him for the next few months and for the first time in history recorded severe personality changes as a result of cranial injury.

Phineas lost his social graces, could not keep a time schedule, and was ultimately unable to continue working. The case led researchers to understand the relationship between behavior and the importance of the front part of the brain in decision-making and social cognition. It allowed neuroscientists to begin understanding localization and how not every piece of the brain is serving the same role, but rather a team of parts working together to build a human conscience and maintain bodily functions

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/phineas-gage-neurosciences-most-famous-patient-11390067/

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Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first scientist to analyze human memory using himself as both an experimenter and a subject. To study memory he developed the nonsense syllable to eliminate the influence of prior knowledge. He used these words to study his own memory using different lengths of syllables, learning conditions, and analyzing his retention intervals. With this data he developed the forgetting curve (pictured above),  which shows how long learned information stays  memorized. One interesting discovery is that the rate of forgetting decreases over time, as shown by the 42% of learning loss after 20 minutes.

To combat forgetfulness, he introduced the concept of overlearning, which involves a person continuing to study information even after perfect recall is achieved. He also discovered that re-learning requires considerably less effort than learning information for the first time. This research greatly advanced neuroscience by understanding more about cognition and how the brain learns and retains information.

Source: https://catalogue.pearsoned.ca/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205734820.pdf

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Pavlov's most infamous experiment in the 1890s discovered one of the most important foundations of understanding behavior, classical conditioning. Pavlov's experiment involved watching when a dog would salivate in response to food and he noticed that the dogs would also salivate in anticipation of food, such as when they would hear his assistants walking down the hallway.
This led him to developing an experiment with an unconditioned stimulus (food), unconditioned response (salivate), conditioned stimulus (bell), and a conditioned response (salivate). The experimental set-up is pictured above. Naturally, a dog will salivate (UR) for food (US) as a part of their hunger instincts. However, during the experiment, Pavlov would ring the bell, which is completely unassociated with hunger (CS), and present food after (US), which eventually led to the dogs salivating even without the presentation of food (CR) after enough trials. Classical conditioning is incredibly important to the field of neuroscience as it lays a foundation for how humans and animals can learn new information by association.

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Freud believed that all people possess thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories that lie in their unconscious mind that can only be released through psychoanalysis therapy. The therapy typically consisted of a patient lying on a couch and telling Freud, the psychoanalyst, stories of their childhood and memories. During the session, the pyschoanalyst would use techniques to encourage the patient develop insights to their behavior and the meaning of their innermost thoughts.

One particular case study that inspired this treatment was Anna O. Anna O, or Bertha Pappendiem, led a fairly normal life up until she became the fulltime caretaker for her father with tuberculosis. Before his death, she began experiencing bizarre symptoms including paralysis, involuntary eye movements, and hydrophobia. She was ultimately diagnosed with hysteria and did not see an improvement until Freud and his colleague Breuer began "talking therapy" with her. Freud believed that bringing hallucinations and trauma to the conscious attention could overcome symptoms, and thus developed Freud's infamous psychoanalysis therapy to help treat anxiety and depression. This case advanced neuroscience by bringing to light the behavioral components of mental disorders and providing a treatment option that allowed patients to return to their daily lifestyles. It gave researchers an opportunity to understand how the brain processes trauma and insight on how trauma can manifest physically, thus demonstrating a clear connection between the mind and behavior.

Source: https://www.psychologistworld.com/freud/anna-o-case-study-freud

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New Learning Models for Faster Long-Term Memories

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New Learning Models for Faster Long-Term Memories

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A recent neuroscience study used a new method of teaching called Spaced learning to maximize student long-term memory for learning in a much faster way. Using previous data on Long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term memory (LTM) the researchers created a specific timing pattern with periods of intense stimuli (teaching), followed by 10 minute distractor activities. The highly difficult exam following instruction demonstrated the effectiveness of this form of learning and re-emphasized what is already known in neuroscience about how human's encode information.
The students that underwent one hour of spaced learning performed significantly better than 4 months of standard teaching, as shown in the graph above. This research was built around the foundations of Pavlov and Ebbinghaus for how memory and association are processed in the human mind and proves their importance over 100 years later. What these foundational psychologists could not figure out was how to trigger LTM encoding, and this study works to answer that question. There is physical evidence that LTM encodes in the brain very rapidly, which is why this form of intensive learning is more effective than traditional teaching

Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00589/full

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George A. Miller (1920-2012) is noted for being a founder of cognitive psychology by making huge strides in psycholinguistics and human communication. One of his key ideas was that the human mind works like a computer and can collect, save, modify, and retrieve information.

He understood the limits of short term memory and discovered that it can hold 7+ or - 2 items at any given time. He also contributed to behavioral studies by founding the field of Cognitive Psychology, which attributes mental processes to behavior. This was a far stray from the work of Pavlov, but vital in the way we understand behavior and memory today because of its focus on mental planning. Earlier behaviorists believed behavior was based solely on stimuli, but Miller was able to prove evidence of cognition and execution following planning.

Miller is an excellent guide for this exhibit as he has a very broad understanding of both memory and behavior. He was able to build upon the work of his predecessors Ebbinghaus, Pavlov, and Freud and help the neuroscience community reach the understanding we have today.

Source: https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/george-miller

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"My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer." So began perhaps the most famous paper in the history of experimental psychology. The Harvard psychologist George Miller, inspired by information theory, aimed to measure the "channel capacity" of the mind, and found that three very different tasks pointed to the same answer. People could associate about seven different labels with continuous stimuli (like loudnesses or colors); they could rapidly identify the number dots without counting them up to around seven; and they could hold about seven items in immediate memory. And there was an additional twist. The capacity of immediate memory was the same whether each item was a binary digit (1 bit), a decimal digit (3.3 bits), a letter of the alphabet (4.7 bits), or an English word chosen from a list of a thousand (10 bits). This elasticity suggests that people don't just passively transmit incoming information but recode it into mind-friendly units, which Miller called "chunks." Human information processing is thus constricted by a bottleneck of 7 plus or minus 2 chunks. With this remarkable insight, George Miller helped to launch the cognitive revolution (pdf), ushering in a new era of theory and research in American psychology.

At this time Miller was a young professor in Harvard's Psychology Department. He had received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology in 1946, based on his work in S. S. Stevens' Psychoacoustics Lab in the basement of Memorial Hall during World War II. More than a decade before his most famous publication, Miller had already espoused a view of the human mind that challenged behaviorism by arguing that the mind existed and could be explored scientifically. In his 1960 book Plans and the Structure of Behavior (coauthored with Karl Pribram and Eugene Galanter), Miller proposed that psychologists rethink the basic unit of behavior: not the stimulus-response reflex arc, but the feedback loop. This was a mechanical version of a "plan" or "goal," but without any mysterious teleology.

Miller's diverse research interests naturally led him to adopt a more interdisciplinary approach to experimental psychology than behaviorism allowed. To that end, in 1960 he co-founded and co-directed the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with Jerome Bruner of the Department of Social Relations.

"To me, even as late as 1960, using 'cognitive' was an act of defiance," he writes. "It was less outrageous for Jerry, of course; social psychologists were never swept away by behaviorism the way experimental psychologists had been. But for someone raised to respect reductionistic science, 'cognitive psychology' made a definite statement. It meant that I was interested in the mind - I came out of the closet." (quoted in Hébert, 2006)

Miller invited Noam Chomsky to the Center, and the two of them collaborated on an influential series of technical papers on mathematical and computational linguistics. Miller also ran the first experiments testing Chomsky's theory as a processing model of human language, and the first experiments establishing that syntactic and semantic constraints could guide the perception of speech.

In 1965 Miller was appointed to chair the Psychology Department, a role he filled until he moved to New York City to teach at Rockefeller University in 1969. During his subsequent years at Princeton, Miller helped to found the new field of cognitive neuroscience, and developed Wordnet, a database of words linked by their semantic relations, which has become an important research tool in linguistics.

George Miller's influence on his colleagues, students, and the field of cognitive psychology is immeasurable. He is listed as number 20 on the American Psychological Association's list of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century.

Hébert, R. (2006). The Miller's tale: A genealogy of the father of the cognitive revolution. APS Observer 19(6).

Cohen-Cole, J. (2007). Instituting the science of mind: intellectual economies and disciplinary exchange at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies. British Journal of the History of Science 40(4), pp. 567-597.

Eminent psychologists of the 20th century. (July/August, 2002). Monitor on Psychology, 33(7), p.29.

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"My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer." So began perhaps the most famous paper in the history of experimental psychology. The Harvard psychologist George Miller, inspired by information theory, aimed to measure the "channel capacity" of the mind, and found that three very different tasks pointed to the same answer.