User:Ranceur/Faculty psychology

Faculty psychology
Additionally, faculty psychology depicts the mind as something similar to a muscle of the human body since both function the same way. The way of training a muscle is by repetitive and brutal training in order to adapt the muscle to the type of workout you’re putting it through. Therefore, by putting your mind through plenty of brain-exercising problems, your mind will also increase in knowledge. In fact, it is also called ”mental discipline”.“Mental discipline” is also the best way to train one’s mind intellectually because when you’re focused, you’re motivated to learn. For example, an athlete who works on their sprinting everyday, by running the same distance everyday. After a certain time, their body is gonna adapt to the energy and the effort they put in their training. Similarly, if a student were to read the same book weekly for an entire year. They will eventually have read the same book 52 times, and by reading this often, their mind will process the information quicker when they see the same words and will share a deeper understanding and meaning of the same book.

Faculty psychology from different perspectives
For thousands of years, a debate has been ongoing: whether we are born with knowledge or gain it through experience. Multiple philosophers have different opinions on it and thus, the debate is still ongoing to this day. It has been called many names over the years: Pocketknife vs. Meatloaf, nativism vs. empiricism, and more recently, faculty psychology vs. associationism. In Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett describes faculty psychology, using a metaphor, being the pocketknife brain. It is called this due to the fact that faculty psychology is the theory that the mind is separated into sections that serve their own purpose just like a pocketknife. She describes this concept by mentioning exponents, instead of simply adding a mere tool to our brain(2¹⁴), adding an entire new function for each faculty/tool (3¹⁴), resulting in a more complex brain. The conclusion made results in a much more flexible brain that contains complex traits. Lisa Feldman Barrett links her idea of the pocket brain to phrenology’s idea of how the brain functioned.

Complex brain
Humans have, thanks to evolution, pretty complex brains. However, not everyone knows what a complex brain really is. A complex brain is able to adapt to its environment and it's because of that that us humans can live in society. We’re able to change the environment or meet new people and because of our complex brain, we can adapt to all those changes. Our brain also allows us to resist injury since if certain neurons are occupied doing other things or simply stop working, other neurons will take their places and do what they were originally intended to do. Consequently, we can compare the complex brain and the Pocketknife brain together. In the complex brain, a group of neurons is able to do another group of neuron’s jobs while in the Pocketknife brain, it’s a whole different story: occupied or lost neurons are seen as losses of purpose.

Meatloaf brain
Not only does Lisa Feldman Barrett present the idea of the pocketknife brain, she also mentions a new idea called the meatloaf brain. Just like the pocketknife brain and our human complex brain, it contains the same amount of neurons. Although, unlike these two every single neuron is connected to one another. She describes her meatloaf brain as a single element since all neurons are connected to one another. If a single neuron receives the green light to modify it/’s firing rate, it will control the outcome and firing rate of every other neuron, in contrast to faculty psychology where the brain’s neurons are divided into their own separate tasks and do not share as many connections with one another.

2. Edmund J. Sass, Ed.D. “Faculty Theory and Mental Discipline”.
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