Neuroscience in Psychology Textbooks 31work and which energy must be devoted by both the lecturers and the
students to gloss over these paradoxes and problems, which are so
obviously present. One could understand these paradoxes as symptoms in a
genuine psychoanalytic way, if I am allowed to do so: they are not
concerning some kind of unbeknownst depths (as in the typical pseudo-
Freudian understanding), but rather they are located at the very surface of a
discourse: as being hidden in plain sight.
Let us start with the intriguing introduction in Richard A. Griggs’s
(2010) Psychology: A Concise Introduction: “Why are psychologists
interested in how neurons work? Isn’t this biology and not psychology?
The answer is that it’s both. Humans are biological organisms” (Griggs,
2010). Strange conclusion, no? Given the first premise that it’s both
biology and psychology, should there not be stated: “Humans are
biological and psychological organisms”? But this is not what we read, we
read: “Humans are biological organisms”: end of the line, no psychology
involved any more. Thus, is not the claim: the psychological is fully
traceable within the neurological? And here we might already be able to
track down a first problematic slope in the mainstream attempt today to
ground psychology in neuroscience: if psychology is but the reflection of
neurology, then it is essentially but an epiphenomenon of the biological
and hence in the end collides with the neurological. And this is precisely
what is stated there: “Humans are biological organisms.” The brain as the
black hole of psychology: “How we feel, learn, remember, and think all
stem from neuronal activity. So, how a neuron works and how neurons
communicate are crucial pieces of information in solving the puzzle of
human behavior and mental processing” (Griggs, 2010, pp. 39-40).^3
However, at the end of the day this collapse of psychology into
neuropsychology seems to result in a lack of understanding. As Griggs’s
textbook testifies when dealing with neural transmission:
We have a fairly good understanding of how information is
transmitted, but we do not have as good an understanding of exactly how(^3) Or as in Coon & Mitterer (2012): “Although these neurons may seem far removed from daily
life, everything you think, feel, and do begins with these tiny cells” (p. 52).