Wilhelm Wundt

Wilhelm Wundt

Today, Wilhelm Wundt is known as "the father of psychology." He is duly credited with this title, for in 1879, he was the first person to create the first psychological laboratory dedicated to the experimentation of psychology. Wundt was attempting to measure the "atoms of the mind," which was the fastest and simplest mental processes by using a machine to measure the time lag between a person hearing a ball hit a platform and their pressing of a telegraph key. As a result, this lab was established, and the psychological laboratory in the University of Leipzig was recognized and headed by Wundt and soon thereafter became a learning center for all those interested in psychology. It was at around this time that he established his famous theory of introspection. Introspection could also be called self- observation and this method made people look inward and retell the different experiences they had when they did different things like smelling or tasting something. Though sensations are technically outside the mind, they were considered psychological. This was used to find the mind's structural elements by both Wundt and his student Edward Titchener. The studies he and his students had also done were on perception and sensation along with studies on vision and reaction time. Wundt taught many other students as well, passing on his knowledge of psychology and he also published 53,000 pages worth of psychology on various subjects including books like The Principles of Physiological Psychology and the ten volume Volkerpsychologie , the latter published when he became interested in cultural psychology when he realized that experimental psychology only covered the surface of psychology in general. These many accomplishments of Wundt only solidify his title of "the father of psychology."