PSYCHOLOGY CLASS.

Shannon News, 21 July 1922, Page 2

PSYCHOLOGY CLASS.

ATTRACTING ATTENTION. The eighth meeting of the .W.E.A. Psyeliology Class was held on Monday evening last'in the Council Chamber. < The lecturer, Mr Ernest Mander, be-gan-by saying that he proposed that evening to break new ground. During the earlier part of the course they had been considering human motives, and they had seen how ’all human motives could be accounted lor as inborn and acquired tendencies of tlie body to behave in a certain way. in. other words,' they had seen how all human behaviour was, at bottom, instinctive behaviour. “But now,” he. said, "we come to consider ihental processes, the way in which ideas are obtained, the way in which they ac* and re-act upon one another, in tliq mind, and the way in which they determine the actual details of conduct.* By reference to instinct we can account for all our motives. Instinct determines what, in the last anu ysis, we are striving for, the kind~bf satisfaction that we really want; but the manner in which we strive to satisfy ft our instinctive hunger—that depends upon what ideas we have and upon our mental. processes. You have, for example, a natural, instinctive desire to attract the attention and to win

the approval of other people. You have—even though you may refuse to recognise the fact—an instinctive (possibly unconscious) hunger for attention and approval. That is the motive of a very large part of human beha-

viour, a very much larger part than most of us realise. But the actual manner in which you will set about attracting attention to yourself—that will depend upon the ideas which have found their way into your mind. You may dress conspicuously; you may try to excel at golf or football or billiards; you may; write letters to the press; you may talk about- yourself, about the things you have seen, the things you have done, the illnesses you have had, the, fact that you were once ‘given up’ by three doctors. Again, you may become a “prominent person” in your, church, on local committees, or in ypur political party. You may bully your wife or demand “proper respect” from your children; or you may get on a soap-box at the street corner. But in any case, the chances are that you will be sublimely unconscious oi jthe real motive at, the back oi it all.

The lecturer then proceeded to discuss tlie nature of Mind. He begged bis bearers to get fid oi the ideas oi the old traditional psychology (?) which conceived the mind as consisting oi many “iaculties” —the Will, tile Imagination, the ' Intellect and so for in—which were spokeA of as though they corresponded with the arms and legs, liver and lungs of the body. “It is .tragic to realise,” he. said, “that the ideas of the ‘man in the street’ about psychology axe practically the same to-day as they were two thousand years ago. This traditional-psy-chology was taken over from the ancient Greeks by the clerics of the Middle Ages, and by them it was passed on to. the multitude. Even today the popular ideas' about human motives and the human mind are only comparable with the idea Of the sun circling around the \earth.” After describing mind as “the sumtotal of all your ideas,” and briefly discussing consciousness (which jie likened to the surface of the mind*), Mr Mander proceeded tp deal with the way in which ideas are obtained through the senses. The last part of his lecture dealt with the different kinds of ideas, especially the visual (mental pictures) and audible (mentally heard sounds), of which our minds consist.

At the meeting which will be held in the. Council Chamber next. Wednesday, commencing at 7.30,. the subject will be “Memory.”