The small man... said: "Where does a wise man hide a leaf?"
And the other answered: "In the forest."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936),
Innocence of Father Brown
While studying something in great detail it is sometimes easy to miss an obvious general idea, as if to let leaves hide the forest. The opposite can be true too, while studying something in a broad perspective, it is easy to omit some basic details, to let the forest hide the leaves, in this case. The best understanding of a topic, however, can come only from the convergence of studies at different levels of detail.
All of the six divisions of biopsychology have their shortcomings, and therefore quite often questions can only be answered through the use of several approaches, balancing out each others weak points. Consider the following 'weakness' summary of the branches of biopsychology.
The common weakness of physiological psychology and psychopharmacology is that they are limited in their dealings with human subjects because of the direct brain manipulation involved.
Comparative psychology does not deal directly with humans either - it studies biology of behaviour by comparing the behaviour of different species and using the findings to understand the human behaviour.
Neuropsychology's weakness is that it deals almost exclusively with case and quasiexperimental studies as it studies patients with brain damage.
The common weakness of psychophysiology and cognitive neuroscience is that they can only use noninvasive techniques with limited manipulation of the brain itself as they deal only with human subjects.
Even though the study of a wide range of organisms allows comparison of similarities and differences, other animal species cannot simply be used as a model for the study of human behavior. Therefore, for all the areas of biopsychology that cannot deal directly with human subjects, the common problem is that there is always a certain doubt about the applicability of the animal study findings to the human world.
For all the branches that deal exclusively or mostly with humans there is another problem, they are limited in the amount of brain manipulation they can use.
Clearly, two or more approaches combined, if they are selected properly, will complement one another well. Together they will be able to provide evidence for points of view that none of them could defend individually.
In most cases, being convinced by the results of one study or even of a group of studies using the same approach in biopsychology is not satisfactory. One can be more sure of the validity of conclusions when they come from convergent evidence and not from a single study.
Because of the development of data from the biological and behavioral sciences over the past 25 years, the need for the convergent-operations approach is even more necessary now than when Zing-Yang Kuo first emphasized its importance (Lickliter, 2000).
Converging operations have been made use of with various topics, such as alcohol use and abuse (Windle, 1996), aggression (Williams et al., 1996), intersensory perception (Lickliter, 2000), role of visual imagery in perception (Kosslyn et al., 1999), techniques for visualizing neurons (summarized by Pinel, 2002), Korsakoff's syndrome (summarized by Pinel, 2002), and others. Here we will present the two latter topics to show the work of converging operations in them.
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