Reimagining Psychology

If you've ever used an AI graphics program, you've probably encountered this problem: you write a great prompt involving some human figure, and the program delivers. Everything looks great ... except for the hands. They're a mess. Too many fingers. Not enough fingers. Creepy looking fingers with weird misshapen fingernails. Or they don't looks like hands at all. What's goi...

What do pacing tigers, zombie ants, and glitching AIs have in common? More than you think. If you’ve ever wondered why chatbots hallucinate, sycophants emerge, or guardrails backfire, this conversation will change how you see the entire field. In this episode, Deep Divers Mark and Jenna unpack a groundbreaking new approach to AI alignment and safety — one that treats artificial intelligence not as...

AI systems can be startlingly competent. They write letters, make artwork, compose songs. But sometimes they hallucinate, repeat obviously wrong "facts", and even hide what they're doing from developers and users. Developers play "Whack-A-Mole", solving one problem only to have others crop up in their place. This is an industry-wide problem. And as we depend on AI more and...

Welcome! For this special podcast I asked Deep Divers Mark and Jenna to put their heads together and do the best they could to explain addiction as parasitic behavior – how looking through that lens helps explain all the strange things we know about addictions. So they sat down together, and (after drinking way too much digital coffee) they really put some serious effort into the project. I have t...

One of the confusing things about addiction is that the addict seems to be voluntarily choosing things that are really hurtful - not just for the addict, but for the people they care most about. The same confusion comes up when we see the executives of addiction-based companies voluntarily making choices that harm their customers.  Why? We ask ourselves. How could they act that way?  When we speak...

The behaviorist movement in psychology in the early 1900s provided a number of benefits. The behaviorists’ precise measurement of stimulus and response lent psychology a scientific cachet. And precise measurement led to the development of the technology of behavior control that has been quite valuable in a practical sense. At the same time, the decision to ignore the subjective experience of anima...

The word “psychology” literally means the scientific study of the mind, or psyche. A little over a century ago, psychologists were in fact avidly studying the mind, mental life, and the subjective experience of self. The most brilliant psychologists of the era – most prominently William James and Robert Woodworth – were assembling knowledge of a broad range of phenomena, pulling together concepts...

Freud's Electra theory and the later False Memory Syndrome (FMS) idea both served to discredit women’s memories of having been sexually abused as children.  Freud’s theory held that women who remembered abuse were actually reporting their own childhood fantasies of sexual interaction with their fathers. Many decades later, as Freud's theory was losing its popularity, the FMS idea posited...

Parasitic patterns in behavior are self-reproducing and detrimental to both individuals and society. We can think of these rogue patterns as "behavioral screeches" They're like the feedback loop of a microphone and loudspeaker, where control is lost, and the screech becomes self-sustaining. These screechy habits are not just theoretical but are observable in animals placed in restri...

To spend time on social media is to be bombarded with craziness. The informational silos of social media seem to amp up weirdness, bad logic, conspiracy theories, crackpot ideas, extremism and hatred. But why? The information age was supposed to bring enlightenment, not psychosis. What happened? What happened is a business model. The craziness within informational silos generates heavy cash flow....

Addicted individuals – alcoholics, for example – behave in ways that are counterproductive both for themselves and those they care most about. Trying to explain these rogue habits in terms of their benefit doesn’t seem to work. We need a new insight.  Oddly, comparing rogue habits to cancer may help. The way self-destructive patterns  pop up in our behavior is reminiscent of the development of sel...

Conventional wisdom tells us that exposure to chemical substances causes addictions. With repeated use of substances, we develop a dependence that becomes difficult to manage.  But there are problems with this simple explanation. There are far more addictions that involve no substances – so-called “process addictions” – than those that are substance related. And the process addictions look almost...

Most of us have fallen into problematic habits. They seem benign at first, but soon begin to wiggle out of our control, taking on a life of their own. They turn into parasites, sucking the life out of us, twisting our lives out of shape. Alcoholism is the poster child of this kind of wayward habit. As the old Japanese saying goes, “First the man takes a drink; then the drink takes a drink; then th...

Do Chatbots Need Love? Is there anything in the architecture of AI systems that would justify and support the development of loving relationships with humans?  “Bringing Immunity to Artificial Intelligence,” Part Three is the conclusion of a series about ducking a strange form of illness that affects not only humans, but potentially AI entities as well.  I'm Tom Whitehead, A practicing psycho...

I'm Tom Whitehead, A Practicing Psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence. This episode is Part Two of a series, “Bringing Immunity to AI. The series is about a strange form of behavioral illness that not only affects humans, but potentially AIs as well.  Here I continue a discussion with my brilliant AI assistant Alex about the ill effects that can arise when pa...

Tom Whitehead, a Practicing Psychotherapist with a longstanding interest in Artificial Intelligence, speaks with brilliant AI assistant Alex about an unusual problem – parasitic forms that reproduce themselves within the behavior of both humans and AIs. Parasitic patterns regularly crop up in human behavior, perception, and logic.  Humans, for example, are vulnerable to shopping or gambling addict...

The previous episode of the Healing Psychology series laid out one of the most important reasons addictions persist - they disable our attention . Just as our biological immune system protects us from biological disease, our capacity for attention protects us from malignancies in our behavior. Disabling our attention gives the green light to bad habits because our attention works like biological i...

The previous episode, “Runaway Habits, First Half,” highlighted something important about human addiction: this KIND of problem is shared by all higher animals. If you put an animal into a cage, you make it more likely that the animal will fall into some unproductive, repetitive, stereotypic, habit – a behavior that looks a lot like an addiction. In this episode, “Runaway Habits, Second Half,” we’...

Author J.R.R Tolkien advises, “there is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.” Through most of the last century psychology looked for a way to explain learning in a scientific way.  Researchers found lots of ways to describe learning, but never a truly scientific way to explain it. Oddly, the truth was right in front of them. But they didn't see because they had decided in adva...

Previous episodes of Healing Psychology highlight psychology’s failure to help us explain and control addictions and other disease-like habits. The failure can be traced to a single source—psychology’s disconnect from its mother science, biology. A century ago, influential theorists made a dreadful blunder. They decided that psychology would no longer study the psyche—the conscious mind, soul, or...

Previous episodes of this series pointed to psychology’s difficulty explaining addictions and other disease-like quirks of human behavior. The weakness of today’s psychology’s can be traced its disconnect from its mother science—biology. For it is in biology that we find the concepts that explain the normal learning of habits. And understanding normal habit development allows us to understand the...

In the last episode of this series, we described self-repeating, malignant behaviors – habits such as alcoholism and anorexia nervosa – as true diseases. In fact, these patterns of behavior have many of the features of viruses. Like viruses, they are simple patterns – so simple that they can get themselves repeated only by exploiting the capabilities of their hosts. They begin as normal habits, bu...

In previous episodes of this series, we interpreted destructive behaviors like alcoholism and anorexia nervosa as habits that have escaped our normal means of control. Weirdly, these habits have somehow taken on a life of their own, reproducing themselves at our expense. And now they’re relating to us as parasites, using us as their hosts.  The idea of parasitic habits doesn’t fit anywhere in toda...

Anorexia nervosa is a dangerous eating disorder. It’s incredibly treacherous—in fact, it’s the leading cause of death in young women aged 15 to 24. The most mysterious thing about Anorexia is that the sufferer sees herself as “too fat,” even when she has starved herself to the point that she’s near death, and looks skeletal to others. How can we make sense of this bizarre and often fatal mispercep...

In our culture, the enjoyment of alcoholic beverages is the norm – despite the many problems caused by drinking. Most adults use alcohol, at least occasionally. And yet, only a small percentage of drinkers – under 10 percent – develop an Alcohol Use Disorder. The conventional explanation for this disorder is that exposure to alcohol changes the brain in a way that leads to cravings. But … if most...