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Last updated: Sat, Aug 17, 2024
A need to understand behavior was felt long before there was neuroimaging or most of today's techniques for investigating neural physiology. Early psychologists had a very limited ability to look inside to see the mechanisms by which behavior occurs. Much of the investigational technique of psychology is of the “black box” variety. Early psychologists could only observe behavior and make generalizations that might distill our knowledge of behavior, or make deductions about regularities and patterns that occur within the black box. This limitation still affects psychological research.
We see elsewhere (Dimensions and Flavors of Pain and Pain Measurement) that our ability to observe pain is very limited. We can precisely measure some of the stimuli that cause pain, and we can observe brain activation, but we can only ask the subject how he or she felt. This leads to several types of problems. One we have already seen—the problem of the many factors that may influence an individual's response to a painful situation. (See also In a Complex Body.) One aspect of this problem is illustrated by a metaphor known in systems science, that of an ant wandering about a beach covered with pebbles. The path followed by the ant may be very complex, going this way and that way and over and back again. The complexity of the path that the ant follows may result either from complexity of the ant or from features of the environment. With humans there is not only a complex environment but a complex history. As with pain, we can watch and ask, but we can't directly observe a person's history or the impact it has on the present.
Some approaches to psychology have relied heavily on introspection, that is, looking into one's own mind directly, or its close relative, looking into another's mind using observation or language. Freudian and other psychoanalytic branches of psychology particularly partake of this approach. Any attempt to form conclusions on the basis of introspection is subject to the criticism that what we believe is happening internally may be mistaken. This is true whether the investigator relies on his or her own introspections or on the introspections of a subject. If a subject or a patient says, “I feel this,” or, "I did this because...," the only thing we know for certain (because we have observed it) is that the subject made the statement. Yes, self-reports about pain fall into this category of introspective understandings.
The problems with introspective understanding led to the movement of psychological behaviorism, which discounts or rejects conclusions that rely on self-report of internal states. Just the observable facts, ma'am. As you'll see in a later section, the cognitive-behavioral viewpoint that current psychological pain therapy heavily relies upon often takes this view of internal states, with important implications.
One of the most important limitations that comes from not knowing the mechanisms inside the black box is the difficulty in determining cause and effect. Suppose that whenever A is true, B is also true. If you can see the mechanism, it may not be difficult to determine whether A causes B. You can follow the gears and levers of the mechanism and watch how A becomes or causes B. If you can't see the mechanism (it's inside a black box), it's hard to determine whether A causes B. Even if A always precedes B, it's possible that a third condition causes both A and B. Proving that A is what causes B requires not just proving that A precedes B, but that A always and necessarily causes B.
If I tell someone I am concerned with the problem of pain, they frequently ask me whether I mean physical pain or mental pain. That question expresses the dualism of our culture. If I say, "My foot hurts me," I express the dualism of my thinking....Pain has been used repeatedly as the simplest possible example of a physical stimulus that inevitably results in a mental response.1
People are generally comfortable with the idea that a painful stimulus can cause a nerve cell to fire. Most also feel comfortable with the idea that messages flow upward into the brain. Up to this point the model is like a doorbell. The visitor (pain) pushes a button, which closes a switch, which activates a chime. At that point, however, the resident hears the chime and it's no longer a machine-like system. At that point there's a person involved, with a mind, a will, habits, and plans for the afternoon. Is that perhaps the difference between the physiological point of view and the psychological?
In a sense the answer must be, "Yes." The bottom-up model, the phsyiological model built up from molecules and cells, explains simple things simply. As complexity increases, explanations become more complex, more difficult to follow, more conditional, and more prone to errors.
One of the earliest modern views of pain came from the 17th-century natural philosopher Rene Descartes. He believed, and persuaded others, that the heat of fire sets in motion the nerve fibers, which he saw as rather like the system of cables and pulleys in a rich man's house used to summon a servant in his time. The fibers were connected to the brain, which "heard" the alarm and decided on a response. This "explained" in a sense how messages got to the brain, but left unspecified what happens next.
Descartes, as many scientists and philosophers since, was not comfortable with explaining what goes on in a person's mind in terms of fibers and signals. This discomfort is perhaps the origin of what is called "mind-body dualism," the inclination to see a human as a machine-like body equipped with a non-machine mind. This discomfort doesn't much impede modern neuroscientists. If there are to be scientific explanations of mental life, the only known substrate for thinking is the nervous system. A biologic thinking machine with almost one hundred billion neurons and one hundred trillion synaptic connections surely is capable of behaviors entirely beyond the behaviors of the inidividual cells and molecules that it is composed of, just as the human body is capable of things that its individual cells aren't. This is called emergent behavior.
So on the one hand we have physiologic knowledge. It is progressively detailed and well-proven. It is incomplete but it is rolling forward and building up. It has more difficulty with complex behaviors than with simple behaviors. It isn't able to predict complex behaviors very well, only simple ones. On the other hand we have psychological knowledge. It can look directly at the most complex behaviors. It has difficulty distinguishing causality from correlation or circumstance. There are no biological nouns to represent concepts in the behavioral world, so the concepts come instead from our social and cultural ideas about ourselves and each other.
We use these two kinds of knowledge best if we take from each that which is well-proven, and if we insist that findings from one be checked against findings from the other.