The Museum of Psychology opens: “With a box and a rat, transcendental phenomena of human behavior have been observed” | Science | EUROtoday

Professor Javier Bandrés excursions the brand new Complutense Museum of Psychology, stopping at every object, for nearly 4 hours, as a result of there are lots of: a century-old field with slices of monkey cerebellum, a rudimentary Nineteenth-century instrument to measure the cranium of a human being and infer its character, wonderful optical illusions, a seventies machine to attempt to discover out if somebody is telling the reality. When he reaches a nondescript black object, he turns into critical. “With this box and a rat, transcendental phenomena of human behavior have been observed,” he proclaims.

Bandrés remembers a well-known experiment carried out in 1942 by the American psychologist Leo Crespi at Princeton University. The researcher designed a small wood hall, which completely different rats must stroll via to achieve meals at its finish. The greater the reward, the sooner the rodents ran. However, Crespi observed a curious psychological phenomenon. If a rat accustomed to a excessive reward was supplied much less meals than typical, its efficiency fell even beneath that of its conspecifics that at all times obtained the identical low ration. It was the expectation, and never the reward itself, that decided conduct. “Why do immigrants come to earn a pittance salary? Because of the Crespi effect! It’s a pittance for you, not for other people,” the professor displays.

Javier Bandrés is the director of the brand new museum, which can be inaugurated this Thursday on the Faculty of Psychology of the Complutense University of Madrid and might solely be visited by appointment. The tour begins in a room devoted to the neurologist Luis Simarro (1851-1921), a person who gained two Nobel Prizes with out leaving dwelling. One day in 1887, his colleague Santiago Ramón y Cajal visited Simarro in his dwelling, situated within the present Madrid restaurant Válgame Dios, and there he realized to stain mind slices to make their construction seen underneath the microscope. Months later, Cajal demonstrated that the nervous system is organized into particular person cells, neurons or “butterflies of the soul.” In 1906, he gained the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

The Complutense Museum of Psychology guards the so-called Luis Simarro Legacy, with the devices of what was the primary experimental psychology laboratory in Spain. The neurologist, a lot in demand by rich Madrid residents since he handled the delusions of General Francisco Serrano in 1885, collected an arsenal of instruments: galvanocaustic units to destroy physique tissues with electrical energy, chronoscopes to measure response time in fractions of a second, olfactometers to research odor. “There are already devices that no one knows what they were for, knowledge has been lost,” laments Bandrés, a Professor of Learning Psychology born in Madrid 68 years in the past.

The painter Joaquín Sorolla portrayed the laboratory of his pal Simarro in 1897. The Andalusian poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, 18, arrived in Madrid three years later, known as by his Nicaraguan colleague Rubén Darío to “fight for modernism,” a literary motion that attacked the bombastic nineteenth-century fashion. Juan Ramón, hypochondriac and depressed after the sudden loss of life of his father, ended up residing for a couple of months on the dwelling of his physician, Luis Simarro himself, in a mansion that’s as we speak the Hotel Suites Barrio de Salamanca. With the neurologist, the younger poet realized English and German, met Sorolla and skim Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Juan Ramón gained the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. Javier Bandrés remembers the story whereas stopping in entrance of an outdated Simarro bottle to retailer alcohol: it is rather like those painted by Sorolla.

“This museum is a tribute to psychology as a science, not to coaching spiritual or anything like that. “Psychology cannot explain how to be happy, I’m very sorry,” says Bandrés. The tour continues through a space dedicated to the psychologist José Germain (1897-1986), one of the pioneers of intelligence tests in Spain. Bandrés points to a display case full of figurines that look like toys. It is the imaginary village test, conceived in 1960 by the French psychologist Roger Mucchielli to analyze the behavior of children when they are asked to build a village. out of nowhere. The Complutense faculty preserves some 1,000 different types of psychological tests, “a unique collection in the world,” in line with the 2 retired professors who’ve compiled them, Ana María Calles and Isabel Calonge.

Bandrés enters the following room solemnly, with an perspective nearly of reverence. The house is presided over by a portrait of Mercedes Rodrigo, born in Madrid in 1891 and died in exile in Puerto Rico in 1982. “It is often said that she was the first Spanish psychologist, but she was more than that: she was the first person, man or woman, to have a degree in Psychology in Spain, obtained in 1923 at the Rousseau Institute in Switzerland,” he emphasizes.

The professor remembers that, on the turbulent starting of the twentieth century in Spain, psychotechnics, the department of psychology that explores individuals’s skills, was introduced as a salvation. “Psychotechnics promised to end the social conflict, which was not interpreted as a class struggle, but as the result of labor disorientation,” notes Bandrés. Mercedes Rodrigo undertook a mission in 1934: to seek out gifted kids in Madrid in order that the City Council would pay for his or her research. His room is full of devices to measure reminiscence and dexterity. {A magazine} reporter Now He requested him at the moment: “And are there many future talents?” The pioneer of psychology, with a smile, responded: “The largest number are girls. According to this result, you men look very bad.”

Bandrés walks previous some books on show, with anachronistic titles, similar to Mentally irregular kidsprinted by the neurologist Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora in 1917. When he reaches one other copy, the professor makes a face of disgust. “This is a sinister book,” he says. The quantity, legal psychologyis a piece from 1947 by Francisco Javier de Echalecu, a member of the Francoist General Police School. “In Spain, a final solution was being prepared for crime and political dissidence, inspired by Nazi criminal policy and promoted by Dr. Echalecu from the highest police authority in Spain, the DGS,” Bandrés mirrored in an outdated examine on the topic.

The new Madrid museum culminates in a room that pays tribute to Mariano Yela (1921-1994), founding father of the Spanish Society of Psychology in 1973. Bandrés exhibits an instrument that “marked a before and after” in his self-discipline: the tachistoscope, a tool that permits a picture to be proven fleetingly, beneath the edge of an individual’s acutely aware notion. In 1957, the American publicist James Vicary claimed that he had projected two subliminal propaganda messages in a cinema – “Drink Coca-Cola”, “Eat Popcorn” – and consumption had grown, though he later acknowledged that he had invented his outcomes.

“And this is the famous Skinner box!” explains Bandrés enthusiastically. The gadget, conceived round 1930 by the American psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner, mainly consists of an enclosure wherein an animal can press a lever to acquire meals. Skinner did many experiments. If you set a sure variety of beats to get the reward, the animal concentrated its effort when mandatory. “The rat does exactly the same thing as students with exams. They don’t study anything until the last few days,” says Bandrés. If the reward, alternatively, can arrive unexpectedly at any second, the animal hits the lever continually, compulsively. “Mobile phones are portable Skinner boxes, which provide you with continuous and immediate reinforcement. Every time you access there is a reward: a video, a news item, a like. And with a brutal characteristic: the reinforcement is immediate, without delay, and that literally hooks you hopelessly,” warns the professor.

Bandrés meets the dean of his school, Luis Enrique López Bascuas, on the finish of the tour. López Bascuas has written with chalk on a blackboard “the first mathematical equations that related the states of the human mind to the states of the body”: the Weber-Fechner legislation. The dean explains that the German physicist Gustav Fechner awakened on the morning of October 22, 1850 obsessive about this drawback and created some equations that described the connection between the true depth of a stimulus and the subjective sensation: it’s not the identical to carry one kilo extra if you end up already carrying one other 5 than once you maintain 50. Quantitative psychology was born. Bandrés, after a whole morning instructing devices, slaps the blackboard and proclaims: “This is the most important device for teaching: a person who knows and a blackboard.”