Polymath

STEM · Full roadmap · ~95 min read · 28 steps

🧠Psychology, how the mind and behaviour actually work

Understand the mind, judge the studies, and spot the myths

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Unit 1

1

Start here

Course overview

2

What psychology actually is

Psychology is the science of mind and behaviour

3

Psychology, psychiatry, and pop psychology

Three different things people mix up

4

The biological perspective

Mind as a product of the brain and body

5

The behavioural perspective

Behaviour is shaped by rewards and punishments

Unit 2

The cognitive perspective

The mind as an information processor

The psychodynamic and humanistic perspectives

Hidden depths, and the drive to grow

The evolutionary perspective and putting the lenses together

No single lens is the whole answer

How psychologists actually study the mind

Different methods answer different questions

Why correlation is not causation

Things moving together does not mean one causes the other

Unit 3

Milgram and obedience, then the fine print

Famous results need their caveats

Asch, conformity, and the power of the group

People will doubt their own eyes to fit in

Stanford Prison and the replication crisis

Some classics did not hold up at all

Neurons, the brain's basic unit

Cells that signal each other with electricity and chemistry

Three myths about the brain

The brain facts everyone gets wrong

Unit 4

Sensation versus perception

Raw signals versus the brain's interpretation

How we learn, classical and operant conditioning

Learning by association and by consequence

Memory is not a recording

Encoding, storage, retrieval, and reconstruction

Thinking and cognitive biases

Useful mental shortcuts that misfire

Emotion and motivation, Maslow read carefully

What drives behaviour, and a famous pyramid that is shakier than it looks

Unit 5

How we develop, attachment and Piaget

Minds and bonds grow in patterns

Personality, Big Five over MBTI

A measurable model versus a popular quiz

Intelligence and its measurement fights

A real but contested thing to measure

Social psychology, the power of the situation

We misread why people do things

Stress, health, and the mind body link

Chronic stress wears the body down

Unit 6

Mental health, the major categories and stigma

Common disorder families, described plainly

Being a smart consumer of psychology

A checklist for any claim about the mind

Where to go next

Where to go next

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