When the Oxford got psychology and vice versa.
Well, the first official time was in 1898 with the appointment of the first world professor Jeff Stout.
Now if you try to read stuff before anything, he wrote before he came to Oxford,
it's clear that this was a move by the philosophers to get psychology in through the back door.
Stout on the Herbert Johanna Sjoberg in Germany is almost unintelligible.
However, when he came to Oxford, he actually wrote a book called Manual of Psychology and in it is full of extreme,
interesting work on after images colour vision.
He obviously was a very devoted scholar and devoted to the subject.
Whether Henry Wilde himself would have approved this is another question.
Henry Wilde was the one who established the readership, and the university accepted it,
notwithstanding the conditions that he done on the road to conditions.
The reader shall, from time to time, would lecture on the illusions and delusions which are instant to the human mind.
He should also lecture as far as may be practicable on the psychology of the lower races of mankind, lower races of mankind,
as illustrated by the various fetish objects in the Anthropological Museum of the University and other universities.
Now,
one of the reasons the world might have been unhappy about stouts appointment and it became successively unhappy about other appointments as well,
was that Cambridge had established an appointment at Lectureship in Psychology.
Wilde had ex had explicitly said no experimental work should go on in psychology.
None. And he was very insistent that that be maintained.
Now. The job at Cambridge, The Lectureship was in experimental psychology and physiology of the senses.
And they appointed W.H.O. our rivers to that post.
Simultaneously, he held an appointment of a new CEO and came in Oxford.
But you can see the world might have actually considered Cambridge experimental psychology as part of the lower races of mankind.
Rivers became eminent as a neurologist.
He was a physician, psychiatrist, psychologist, and then he went off, became an anthropologist and went to tourist trade expedition in New Guinea.
He took McDougall with him. McDougall then became the second wild reader.
Wild was still alive, and McDougall was an inveterate experimenter.
We have some of his equipment, some some of the examples of the starting experiments of McDougall used to study fatigue and attention and so forth.
He did a lot of work. He wrote several textbooks. He was probably of one of the six most influential psychologists in the world at the time.
Nevertheless, Wild tried to get him sacked because he was experimenter.
And you can see the interesting correspondence between the vice chancellor and wild,
which Corinne has put on the display cabinet there of the university didn't sack with two,
but it didn't treat MacDougall all that well in other respects.
He had no room. He had no college connexion.
He borrowed space from physiology, but put his own name, put it up on the door.
Department of Psycho Physics, I think he called it.
Then he went off and did quite important work on selection during the First World War returned to Oxford.
The physiologist wouldn't give him the space back. So are you going to talk to a very disgruntled state?
Oh, it's great loss to Oxford.
But some might say in retrospect he wasn't very happy at Harvard either, which is where we went and only stayed there for a year.
He was unhappy with Harvard's plumbing system. And then he went to what in America is called Duke University, which here is called Duke University.
And then he became interested in schools in parapsychology.
So I say he was stopped was followed by MacDougall, who in turn was followed by William Brown.
1920, by which time Wilde had died the year before now, Brown himself was interested in clinical psychology.
And it turned out to have very great benefit to Oxford and in an indirect way.
But of.
He's he wrote in 1933, I think it was Oxford is the only great university in the world which still has no laboratory and experimental psychology.
That was true. Well, one of his patients was Mrs, who was.
And the year after he wrote that this is what's. Sends a check to the university for ten thousand pounds.
It just came as a check without any return address.
An envelope from a London hotel. No legal ramifications.
Whatever it is, he's so envious that our outlook on keeping up with the threat.
Well, the university was sufficiently embarrassed by this that it set up an institute of experimental psychology on the following year.
Some years later, when the university created the second chair, we thought of right to name the chair after Mrs. Walsh.
The question is how do we actually track her down?
So we put an ad in these in the times to members of the Watts family, and indeed we did find some and they were delighted.
And one of them actually came to the official opening of the new the new building.
Mm-Hmm. Now.
Brown was succeeded by William Stephenson, and there's some Kareena's has a quote from the Stevenson there with his assistant, Oliver Zango.
Well, that's it still remains the case.
As Brown had written, that Oxford had no experimental psychology of it, didn't have a school of psychology either,
but there were a series of very contentious debates and confrontation which eventually led to the establishment of people.
That's psychology with one of the other two pillars.
Heaven forbid, if both things could get in one or the other.
Still, it was something of.
Now, it's often, said the Gilbert Royal, who wrote a book which was influential at the time concept of mind was as a very ardent opposer of people.
All I can say is that I got to know him reasonably well when I joined, when I came to Oxford and he was an enthusiastic supporter of psychology.
And he used to come to the institute as it was to attend seminars and practical courses and so forth.
Now, because of a fluke, I cannot put it any other way.
I ended up in Oxford as a student in 1949. I hadn't intended to come as a student.
I had had a fellowship from my home university that took me to anywhere in the world that I wanted for one year that if they approved it and I said,
I think I'd like to go to Oxford, amongst other places.
And so I wrote to the then professor, the first professor, George Humphrey, and said, Can I have some research space in the institute?
And he met me. He said, Well, I have to find out more about you.
Of course, he came back with a broad grin on his face a few weeks later when he called me to meet him.
He said I sent a cable to Wolfgang Kurwa, who was one of my teachers at Swarthmore College, has replied, Watch crunches, OK.
So. It still remains the case even after P.P.P, and now I'm quoting Browne again in any university of the world,
except Oxford psychology may be taken as a separate subject and examinations are set in that subject.
Well, I came to Oxford in 1967. I had asked for any background on this subject.
The registrar sent me a mountain of material. This has been debated for some years in the sub faculty.
So we pursued it and it was a tough job.
We had 13 committees, one for each paper and a coordinating committee.
It took a few years. Several people were very active in establishing what we hope to become the single schools of local tradesmen.
Geoffrey Grey was especially important. Michael Orcollo and tradesmen several people.
And then came the crunch time the general board said.
If the philosophers approve it, we can go ahead.
So we then had to meet the philosophers and David McFarland and I agreed to go talk to the
philosophies of faculty to persuade them that this was not a threat to the PPP would still continue.
Fortunately, I was late to the meeting and so was Michael Dommett,
and we met each other outside the faculty book and we had a good chat before we went in.
He said, I'm with you. And Michael Dummett was a very influential philosopher of the time, who was perhaps a happy coincidence.
So finally, in 1969, a single school was established and it was inaugurated in 1970.
Now, the old institute was that there had been an old school building on Bhambri Road.
The first professor, George Humphrey, had the salubrious accommodation of an outside lavatory for his office.
There was a height of the park, which had six small rooms, of which I was given one by George Humphrey over Zango had another.
So forth and so on. Bernard Babington Smith had another.
The workshop had one, and we were given very, very severe instructions.
The workshop must close down and all noise must cease on Thursday afternoons because that's when Bernard Babington Smith does his tutorials,
and that was rigidly enforced and rigorously enforced.
There was a single room for teaching practical classes and other single room, which was the office,
and it had the bust of McDougall, which we still have in the new building of.
And the then wild professor, wild breeder Brian Farrell also had a room,
and the wild breeder has always been connected with psychology, it's always been as it were a gift from Wu-Tang to two of them.
Anyway, in the mid 1960s, there was a move to another building one South Parkes Road with nice large Victorian building,
with some hops out of the back and so forth and so on. This was this was before the age of.
Shall we say, enthusiastic health and safety,
because I was stationed on the top for the only way you could reach my office was through a narrow staircase,
and I started to wonder what would happen if there were a fire next door to me was due to the singer who.
The secretary, she always came in with three dogs. So I got in touch with the surveyor, is there some way in which we can have a of fire escape?
And to my delight, they came.
They attach a rope from my window, which I climbed down and I wondered about Judith and her three dogs escaping the fire when I came in.
Nineteen sixty seven. As professor the I went, of course, to that building, as I've just said.
But the plans for the new building were already well established.
The foundations have been dug and so forth and so on.
And we finally moved into the new building in 1971. But what I remember richly about that whole period, even before I became a professor,
the number of really outstanding visitors we had to the department with Chomsky's Skinner with this toy was used to spend lots of time here.
George M. Carr, Preben, King Solomon Asch, social psychologist, came very often.
He used to spend his summers in Oxford for the two Gibsons, Jemmy and Eleanor, both for her.
It seemed to be a favourite place for people to retire into Jay-Z, Young wrote to have said.
Could he retire into our department? We were delighted. 10 Bergen also asked if he could come.
David Whitford asked if he could come, and we accepted all of these and many others.
Plus Donald Broadbent, Margaret Broadbent, Bert Rosner, Reuben Konrad Donald had been director of the pew in Cambridge.
He not only came with Margaret. He also brought Konrad, who was his deputy.
Susanna Miller was here for many years. Still is Cathy Park's Jane Melinda, however, Petrovich and Parker and so forth and so on.
First watch Professor Jerry Bruner came and he opened up the department to Developmental Child Interests,
and Gordon College, who was appointed as a lecturer, provided a bridge to clinical studies.
I just want to say one other thing about how things have changed out of all recognition in the general background,
when I and my colleagues were here from sixty seven for the next 20, 30 years, the NRC was extremely proactive.
You wouldn't believe just how proactive they were from current.
Behaviour they when we apply for a research grant, they said, oh, well, there's several people working in her department.
Let's have a research group. So we did.
They had a site visit as they head for site visits.
They wrote to the university, said we'd like to take over was friends for two years.
They hadn't told me about this. University refused in the first instance.
They said, we never will professor. But in fact, they did eventually agree.
And people took it in turns much more important.
The MRC established interdisciplinary research groups.
Not only for psychology, but for anatomy, physiology, different people working together in what you might call neuroscience.
Interesting, paused and we got one.
We had to discuss it with heads of physiology, pharmacology, anatomy, neurology.
So we're with Kaufman in nineteen fifty two point one million pounds for over seven years.
And Alan Curry, chair of the. And then later the McDonald Foundation, became interested in for a similar thing.
Now, the MRC today, just you could not imagine them doing anything like that.
And it was very important for the history of psychology that they had a particular I know I
just want to finish on of what I think might be the morality tale of when I was interested,
when I had considered coming to Oxford, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to come as Professor Baldwin offered hospitality to me to want to come over.
Will you use the restroom? We will show you.
You can have a look around and get some sense of what it is.
As you can see what college it is, you'll be attached to it.
So I accepted the vice president showed me around.
It was Brian Lloyd, in fact a physiologist and.
He then pointed out to me as he showed me the various sites and modelling.
This is where breakfast takes place within the senior common room.
So I do remember that and I had the night in the guest room and I came the following
morning to breakfast and I saw around the circular table in the centre of the room.
Still, there are simply a wall of newspapers.
Well, I sat down, I didn't see anybody.
I took my plate, put cereal in it, and I was about to put what I thought was sugar in the most cereal and behind a newspaper, a voice said.
That's so true now. Now that's a morality tale because salt is spicy, especially if as an open wound.
It's nutritious, but not sweet. But it also.
Describes those of your colleagues who are salt of the Earth for a minute,
and I think and it also means that you're being observed more or less continuously.
I think that's the story of Oxford from 1918 98.
I think that's the sort that's been there from the beginning, right?
Thank you, Larry. There was a lot of a lot of things I didn't know and nothing.
And speaking of the salt of the Earth and a maudlin, I don't know whether maudlin bargains for it,
but pretty soon I think there will be for holders of the chair of psychology, kick around maudlin college.
And I hope they don't see that as three too many.
I could see some three phases of the history of the department or the history of psychology at Oxford, I should say.
The first is this long struggle for legitimacy, which Rich Lowry has told you quite a lot about.
And you can see the letter there from Wild Rice, a grumpily from Alderley Edge because it give it out to address wild outrage,
saying how MacDougall was not a proper holder of the charity endowed because psychology was only a lower branch of mental philosophy.
That struggle went on a long time of like the last decade is probably still going on when Larry arrived.
But the second that was the second phase, which was the development of the department, the astonishing development of the parliament.
I think from the from the outside lavatory on the Banbury Road to the to the building on the corner and not just obviously the building,
but the range of activities that have gone on in it. The collection of outstanding scientists who work there.
And Larry's been rather modest in his description of that phase, which clearly must be very much his his doing.
It's I agree it must have been nice that to do that in a phase when the expansion of
the universities was a sort of public public cliche and Robin's report was going on,
everyone thought there should be more students, better, better, better, better resourced and so on and so on.
I. I regret that if now Judge Gibson job skills schedule turned up and said, can I spend a few months in department?
My administration would say, Well, we pay x pounds per square metre for the university, you know?
So there were there were there were words of respect.
Happier times. Nonetheless, Larry's must have had considerable will and energy efficiency in essentially creating the department as it now is.
And so the third phase is, I guess, consolidating those gains, taking new opportunities as they come.
But within the framework, which I think was very much laid down in the in the seventies, eighties and nineties.
So what was laid down was first, that psychology at Oxford was I was a broad department.
It had pre-eminent strengths in brain and behaviour and in cognitive psychology clearly, but was always part of the mission.
It wasn't sometimes, but unfortunately cold, hard side psychology.
In that respect, it has and work of international policy and developments ever since the appointment.
It brings us to the Watts chair and in social psychology for a long time.
And also in in the area of abnormal psychology, psychological disorders.
Now that's a field which I think has waxed and waned or gone through twists and turns
because of the complexities of relationship involved with with other agencies, other departments.
And so that's been rather an uneven trajectory. But that's well, I hope we'll hear shortly that that aspect is definitely going to be airborne.
So part of part of that phase was the establishment of the final on a school in experimental psychology that Larry's alluded to.
Supplementing CBT in psychology was a subject you could take on its own as a as a full core discipline.
John Hall sent me an email in which he discovered,
rather than probably in the in the waiting room of a restaurant and where on a copy of the handbook to the
University of Oxford in 1951 that had a simple explanation of what the psychology of what PGP was about.
And it said the Honours P School was a rigorous. Some have said, rather severe training in psychology.
Well, I hope we're still rigorous. I'm not sure whether it's to our credit if we're severe.
It also said good psychologist must be, in the broadest sense, a humanist and at the same time, he significant price down.
He must have a first hand knowledge of the experimental and statistical methods which wealth and psychology is built,
and also said that Oxford was comparatively late in giving full recognition to the study of psychology.
Partly, perhaps because of the feeling that students might be attracted to it for the wrong reasons.
Well, we're attracting excellent students.
I'm not sure what reasons they're coming from, but I hope they go out with the right reasons, whatever they came in with.
And I think from the current perspective, rather than saying I'm not sure what it means to be in the broad sense of humanness,
but I'd like to think of psychology as a predominantly a liberal science education.
That is, it takes people. It gives them a scientific perspective.
It gives us a scientific perspective on human beings and thereby the educated have it at a critical,
systematic and a quantitative approach to human problems, as well as the psychology, the practise of psychology in a more specific sense.
So I hope that what we're doing is generating. Practising psychologists, researchers and professionals of high order,
but also training a lot of people to go out there and apply across a very wide range of activities.
What they've learnt about how human beings can be understood systematically,
how they can be investigated, how behaviour is a proper subject for empirical critical analysis.
I also hope that what we bring to the students now and I think have throughout the
history of psychology at Oxford is the idea that this is an outward looking discipline.
There are some places where people are very concerned that psychology should be done by psychologists and that, for instance,
somebody who hasn't done a first degree in psychology might not be a proper person to teach
in a department or might not be a proper person to take on as a graduate student or whatever.
I I feel very strongly opposed to that view.
I think psychology has flourished because of its concepts, its community, its outward looking with a whole range of related disciplines,
both in the biological neuroscience and in social sciences, in formal understanding of computation and so on.
And I think it would be a sad day if we didn't recognise those links.
And I think in Oxford right now, we're profiting from them very well.
So we're attempting to sustain the vision of the subject division of the Department of Education,
which which Larry started by laying down in the in the late 60s and early 70s.
But obviously things change. We don't sit comfortably freight, freight freezers, what we do and in the past era.
And so I want to say a few words about what's happened as it were on my watch in the last 10 years.
What's at how psychology changed?
How was it taken forward its mission? Well, two things, actually, when I arrived in 2001,
two things were already happening that I had had no input into, but hadn't yet actually fully taken place.
One was that it was a quite radical restructuring of the final on a scale involving a division into a part one.
Second year examining the to first year exam, which allowed to ensure that it was a core coverage of all the main areas of psychology.
But then an opportunity, I think almost uniquely good opportunity for students to really pursue particular interests and
get them in-depth into particular areas in the system of research projects and advanced options.
In fact, where we're right now achieving what I hope is a victory in discussions with the Graduate Studies Committee
because we have a we've had a few years and MSI in psychological research and the students on that.
M.S. complained that many of the courses are being taught weren't actually as advanced as the ones referring to our undergraduates.
And we're now in the process of changing the change in the structure of the family so that an
enhanced version of those advanced undergraduate options can serve as part of the NSC curriculum.
Anyway, that restructuring was due, in large part the work of Brian Rogers, who's sitting over there now as a proctor who devised a.
An elegant structure, sometimes a rather sometimes the structure, I think, which nobody else understood for him,
but the elegant structure which allowed various combinations of taking three,
four or five papers in psychology if Europe during P.P.P and meeting the requirements of the British Psychological Society and so on.
The other important thing that happened in 2001 is that this university went divisional.
Frankly, I've no idea how it worked before or how it could have worked out the way it's supposed of that before,
but maybe people will tell me that worked very well. Anyway, it went divisional.
Somebody somewhere must have decided to discuss what what division the psychology would go into.
But that decision had been made, and it was. But I arrived. It was made that psychology should be part of the medical science division,
and I think all experience since suggests that it was absolutely the right thing to do.
Not least because the Alpha Division might have joined or simply dissolved. So within that division, where to some extent an outlier.
We don't have lots of great labs for a chromatography and protein sequencing machines.
Unlike most other departments. We don't have a. A major role in teaching medical students, though, thanks to Jan,
we have we do contribute to their education and we're relatively relatively small compared with
the mass of some of the mammoth clinical research operations that take place up the hill.
Nonetheless, despite being in some respects, a bit of an outlier, we've been very much a home in the division.
The officials and other members of the division have been very supportive of our activities and both practically and an intellectually.
And we've built up a wide network of Connexions with other departments in the division.
The physiology of Deepak's that now is pharmacology, psychiatry, neurology, as well as sustaining all our links with with social sciences,
with linguistics and with the other philosophy on other subjects in the humanities and social sciences that are relevant to psychology.
So division has been quite forward-looking in pulling together a strategic approach to neuroscience,
but went beyond the departmental divisions in which we've played an important role.
And two particular elements of that I'd like to highlight. One is that the Oxford is the home of.
Certainly one of the two leading centres for functional brain imaging in the UK, and that was a.
This is film rape, which is housed off at clinical neurology.
But Alan Carey in the psychology department was one of the people who was instrumental in getting that going to get funded and getting it set up.
And there are many members of psychology, have very active research programmes using that facility.
We're very closely integrated with it. Matthew Rushworth in particular,
and Heidi Ernst Berg together have used not only functional but structural
methods of MRI to great effect in understanding the organisation of the brain.
Kate Watkins, a more recent recruits, also has a major push in insisting that institutions spends a lot of time using again both factual,
functional and structural methods to understand some of the developmental issues around around language.
More recently, isn't that another facility has been set up.
And that's the Meg Magneto encephalopathy system, which is housed up at psychiatry and that has some, some slightly checkered origins.
It's probably not too tactful to discuss in a public meeting, but in the last year.
The head of psychiatry look for somebody who could who could take it on and transform that facility into one that could provide state of the art,
rigorous research and Meg open to the subjects of the division as a whole.
Ken O'Brien. Our department has taken on that job, and for everything I hear, it's it's going very, very successfully.
And it's both integrated with the brain imaging at film, but also using some of the same approach, analytical approaches and so on.
So these are costed these across divisional neuroscience facilities in which psychology is deeply embedded in to the benefit of all concerned.
We've also got many continuing collaborations with the psychiatry department.
Quite a lot of people have gone to and fro in the course of the time.
I'm here, Catherine Harman, who came to lectureship in our department, went up to a further post there.
Mark Williams holds a Wellcome Trust Senior Principal Research Fellowship jointly between the two institutions.
I think that's a a flourishing and healthy relationship. We've also got a lot of involvement with work and genetics.
So another jointly appointed welcome principal fellows is Jonathan Flint, who whose other half is in the hidden welcome institute for him.
Welcome Centre for Human Genetics, but genetic approach is calling on.
That expertise are also quite important enough in several programmes in the department,
for instance, Dorothy Bishop's work and the guy who shows work on developmental disorders.
And I have to say that this, I think,
happy and fruitful relationship with the medical science division has been very much promoted by by the fact that Nick Rawlins,
who was a lecturer when I arrived and became the Watts professor soon after,
has always had a big role in the in the division and has acted as a very effective two interpreter
so he could tell the people at the centre of the division just what psychology was all about,
and he could tell psychology what the medical profession was all about. He's no longer play that role,
but I hope he can communicate equally effectively as a to how fundraising can help us and possibly how we can help fundraising.
I think for the 10 years I've been here, I think the most satisfying aspect of of my role has been the the the good fortunes,
the demographics of which are quite a lot of members of the academic staff came up to period period of retirement.
And I've actually had a hand in the appointment and no less than 11 lecturers in 10 years.
And they're mostly young ish people.
It's quite an early stage in their career, but identifies extremely promising,
and I think they're all fulfilling that promise, and activists are so lively and committed to engagement with teaching.
I think from that point of view, the department is extremely healthy and given life expectancy,
assuming these people don't get seduced to flashy chairs elsewhere, they can maintain its health for a good 20 years to come.
The downside of that is that the demographics are now not a set of people
approaching retirement for the set of people in the in their thirties and forties.
And so unless some miraculous also expansion can be found, which seems kind of unlikely at the moment,
then I suspect that my successor is not going to have the same opportunity to,
ah, to develop the careers of young scientists and psychology that I've had.
And that's better. The other thing I should say is that all of these new lectures we appointed more than half are women.
That's something I'm very pleased with, and it wasn't the consequence of any. Very explicit.
Equal opportunities policy is simply that of the able young academic psychologists out there,
a large proportion of women, and we're very pleased to have them on board.
Some would point out that since 75 percent, 75 or 80 percent of our undergraduates are women,
but it's not really very egalitarian, about 50 percent of the teachers to be female, but that's that's an issue for the future.
The other thing I'd like to. Comment on is that we shouldn't restrict thinking of the department as the appointed university teaching staff.
They're very important. But there are a lot of other people and always have been ever since.
Ever since Larry got a donor province to run the department and people like that,
they've always been a lot of people in the department who are supported on external research fellowships but contribute to our activity,
contribute to our prestige, contribute to the intellectual life of the department. So for instance, we're talking about people at all levels here.
Some of them are a junior research fellows from the colleges.
Summer Postdoctoral Fellows on on other people's programme grants some health and career development fellowships.
Some are of high professorial levels like welcome principal fellows.
And I think the importance of those people is indicated by the fact that in the last research assessment exercise in 2008,
in which we had a very successful outcome, we submitted actually the work of thirty nine scientists, only 20.
Only 19 of those were actually people who held official university teaching or professorial posts.
So more than half in that sense, more than half of the research activity is being driven by by these external people,
and that was actually interesting contrast with Cambridge.
I don't know why, but in terms of the league table that came out of that RDC, what was called the grade point average,
which makes it sounds like we're coming out of the University of Minnesota or something.
Anyway, I that that point, that point score we were we came second amongst UK psychology departments.
Cambridge beat us by a couple of couple of points in the second decimal place, but Cambridge, this submission seemed to consist of.
It was only about half the size of us. It was instead of just over 20 people.
So the actual academic size stuff the two departments is much the same size.
So we're clearly attracting and using those externally supported research shows more effectively, and they're very valuable to us.
I think it does that structure does raise a question of, first of all, what are the longer term prospects for these people?
They aren't all going to be able to develop into universal ActionScript or professorships because the jobs aren't going to be there.
Some of them will continue to get support from the Wellcome Trust and so on, but others won't.
So there are question marks over the future. And I think it's also a question mark for Oxford.
These people, not only in this department or any other department in many departments,
are a key part of the key part of what goes on the University of Oxford.
And they don't necessarily have a well recognised place the way they can fit into collegiate life and so on.
And I think Oxford, as an institution, has got to think harder about that. OK, well, that's really about about structures and and people.
Maybe I should say a little bit about what kind of research is currently going on in the department.
First of all, the area that was laid down in the in the 70s by Larry and Alan and carry on others
are behavioural and cognitive neuroscience is clearly a primary area of strength,
although there's maybe some some shift of emphasis.
So perhaps that the work that's going on on brain function is less concerned with early sensory processing that was 20 or 30 years ago.
I mean, I got very active programmes looking at control processes, decision processes, the focussing in the switching and control of attention.
The basis of memory and the molecular and cellular mechanisms that underpin that.
I think another feature of that area is to say that something which I think we're particularly.
Well, set up for an exploit, well, is the unification of human research on normal,
typically the typical human beings of neuropsychology of in relation to people with brain disorders, primate models and rodent models.
It's fairly unusual, I think, to have people working in more than one of those areas and some,
some some some of the people that parliament actually got a fortune. It's not just two, but three or three or four of them.
And I think that really maintains the focus on what can these different approaches tell us about the way the human mind and the human brain work?
Something was off the new than that is to.
It's a take this approach of unify, our understanding of the brain, understanding of of mental processing and and behaviour.
But to do it in the context of human development, developmental cognitive neuroscience has become a a buzzword,
and it is something which we develop strongly over the last 10 years.
I think so. We've now got I went down and I came here.
We brought it in the context of a developmental vision research.
Dorothy Bishop was already here working on this in the context of language disorders.
Gaia Sharif has come is also interested in developmental disorders, but from her with a strongly brain based perspective.
And we've also got a strong intersection of the understanding of development with the processing of language.
So can Plunkett's has been working for quite a long time,
both on from the theoretical modelling and experimental study of babies understanding of spoken language.
Dorothy Bishop I've mentioned as having a major programme on on disorders of language development.
Kate Watkins, I suppose you mentioned and we've got some great nation also working at work, working on development of reading.
So there's a real, there's a real, there's a real nucleus here, unifying the understanding of development,
the understanding of the brain, the understanding of language. And.
Throughout the throughout the recent history of the department, empirical social psychology has been an important ingredient.
I think it's very good that area sits close to individual cognition and development and in psychological disorders.
Many potential cross cross cross cross-cutting themes there that don't work if social psychology,
as it were seen, as something very much sitting on its own. And of course, you've got two staff members working there,
including Miles Houston's major programme on how what, how people behave as members of groups,
how they affiliated groups, how they regard other groups,
which is applied in areas like Northern Ireland and many other trouble spots around the world.
So those are the emphasis that's what's going on at the moment. What's going to happen in the next few years?
Well, one or two things I'd like to highlight. One is that.
We're going to have some significant changes in the way our teaching programmes organised because PPP is actually no more.
Now, by the way, quite a lot of what I'm saying was in the article by the Oxford Magazine kindly published to accompany this this event.
And Tim Horton, who's the editor, wrote to me and says, Oh, maybe you can tell us why PPP has been abolished.
Make it sound like it was some very retrograde move? Well, several answers that, first of all.
PPP is dead long live PPP, which is psychology and philosophy, that linkage will continue,
and in fact, it's going to be developed in a way I'll mention in a moment.
But actually, what was PPP is also being reborn as part of a new on the school in biomedical sciences,
which I think is a significant revival of the old structure of physiological sciences,
which was having a number of a number of for a number of reasons wasn't, I think,
giving it an education that was in line with the strength of biological sciences in south parts, right?
So this new course, which is going to take its first students in the in the autumn, will have a psychology as a major partner in it.
First, that all the students taking it just whatever their.
Ultimate emphasis in the cellular systems of brain sciences are going to have some psychology,
some behaviour in their first year course, so it's going to be a theme of behaviour, a theme of the brain.
The theme of the theme, the cells theme of the body.
I can't run off of all the names, all the five themes, I think.
But anyway, psychology is in there, which means that prospective and prospective cellular scientists,
prospective molecular biologists will come out of their first year knowing that actually things happen that have a level above that in the in that.
Certainly the in the second and third years, though, the option of of taking particular streams and in fact,
the of the stream of that was most explicitly authorised as a neuroscience stream,
which is very close to a reconstruction of the psychology physiology.
Population psychology will have a close to a 50 50 partnership and in training this group of biological scientists.
So I think PGP is not dead.
PGP is is alive and well in two slightly different guises, one of which I think is going to be a very exciting development,
which I hope the psychology department will sustain that sense of ownership towards.
I should mention, I'm not sure I should be mentioning this, but something something I heard at the meeting actually yesterday is that there is.
A risk and terrorist is a possibility that the government will substantially
cut the number of places for medical students in this and other universities,
and an Oxford tentative plan, if that happens, is not to cut student numbers but to replace medical students with biomedical sciences students.
So the relatively modest operation that's occurring at the moment,
which roughly reproduces the numbers really taking physiologic physiological sciences, or P.P.P, may be substantially enhanced.
You may find work of an awful lot of smart, young, biologically oriented people.
Learning psychologists is part of the picture. They should be. They should be adopting.
The other the other thing I would just like to mention with respect to PGP is that plans are well underway for a new combination people,
which is psychology, philosophy and linguistics. There's already a very active research relationship between people interested in
language in our department and and the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics.
And this will actually create an explicit educational pairing of just rather close to what in the past has been called cognitive science.
And we're looking forward that we didn't.
We don't imagine it will attract huge numbers of students, but we do imagine the ones who want to come to do it.
We want to. I really are into two and can benefit from looking at cognitive processing,
both from a formal roots and linguistics and from experimental everything in psychology.
The other thing I should mention in him coming in the immediate future is that I'm about to be replaced in two respects.
I've been the holder of the chair of psychology and I've been the head of Department of Experimental Psychology.
Now, my successor in the chair of psychology is already known safer.
Clarke is sitting here in the room and very pleased to welcome him here and to some.
Is partner in life and science anchor who a welcome principal fellow and be bringing that to Oxford and so together,
we can have a major new research enterprise on that which will bring psychological disorders much more centre stage within the
department and an area where their work on cognitive behaviour therapy has had a really significant practical national impact.
So that's that's very welcome to us. It will change the flavour to some degree.
I hope and believe it will change the flavour in an exciting direction.
And there are things that we don't yet know about in terms of future relationships with the
professional training of professional psychologists in and with the psychiatry department.
But I'm sure that will be a barrier we'll hear a lot about in the next few years.
David had quite enough to do without taking on the headship of the department.
And so the the the future headship of the department is going to be associated with the with the new.
Professor Nick Rawlins, having had to leave that position to be elevated into the clouds of glory and cherubs all around to the into the square.
I can't. It's a great convention.
I can't I can't yet tell you who do, what's professor, who's going to be,
so I hope that I hope and believe that person's been identified and they will
be able to take over the headship of the department and in a few months time.
So that may again introduce new directions, new work, new plus new excitement into into the department.
And I think we can look forward to a future that's both.
And that's interesting, but not necessarily in the bad sense. Thank you.