Compare And Contrast Paper

Rene Descartes, Herman von Helmholtz, and Wilhelm Wundt all played important roles in creating psychology how it is today, by going beyond what the thought processes were at their time and expanding on knowledge. They didn’t look at the world as other’s did, and they didn’t take “no” for an answer. These great thinkers were centuries to decades apart, but their theories combined and collided into the new psychology.

One step, and great contributor to the birth of psychology was Rene Descartes. Descartes was a philosopher born in France in 1596. Descartes was able to live comfortably from money he inherited from his father. He had many interest and talents while studying at a Jesuit school. Descartes enjoyed mathematics, humanities, philosophy, physics, and physiology (Schultz, D.P., & Schultz, S.E, 2012, p.30),

He was able to disprove the belief system at this time by using first frogs as test subjects. After working on frogs, Helmholtz moved to human subjects. Through his research, he was able to demonstrate “that the speed of conduction was not instantaneous suggested that thought and movement follow each other at a measurable interval and do not occur simultaneously, as had been thought” (Schultz, D.P., & Schultz, S.E, 2012, p. 57).

The only problems with Helmholtz’s research was that there were difference’s in reaction times between test subjects, and Helmholtz himself was only interested in the length time itself (Schultz, D.P., & Schultz, S.E, 2012). Because of the reaction time issues, Helmholtz ended up abandoning his research. The research was later reviewed and picked up again. Helmholtz was a scientist, and was focused on practical knowledge and research. His experiments, even though practical, would lead the way to new psychology to be born when Wilhelm Wundt came along, as well as help future