IV Conceptualization of Mind

In 1924, Sidney L. Pressey, professor of psychology at Ohio State University, developed what is considered by many to be the first teaching machine. In practice it was a box with typed questions, with 4 multiple choice numbered answers. The box allowed the "test" model that added the correct answers, or the "teach" model that did not allow to advance until the answer was correct.

This work is marked by an underlying concern with individuals being productive in their creativity, in understanding, observing and measuring the abilities linked to creative performance, and to productive forms of creativity (e.g. invention and technological innovation, solutions to social problems).

The study of the creative mind and ways of measuring and increasing creativity emerged as the right mixture of nature and science by the times of post-World War II. The child became a focus for psychological investment in creativity. What was in question, particularly in the United States, was promoting the open-minded citizen in opposition to the authoritarian one. At the same time, creativity became a commodity presented to educators and parents as absolutely necessary.

Creative acts (acts that give rise to something new) are opposed to reproductive acts (acts that reproduce or repeat, more or less accurately, something that already existed, behavior patterns that had already been mastered, etc.). This ability to imagine and create orients human beings towards the future, something different from what is, towards “creating the future and thus altering his own present” (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 9).

This book puts together and edits essays and materials from different sources in order to bring to western academics the views of the mind that were present in Vygostky’s works that because of historical and political reasons (including the cold war) were relatively unknown and untranslated in the west until the 1960s.

The Macy conferences were a series of interdisciplinary scientific meetings held in New York between 1941 and 1960. Interdisciplinarity was in itself one of the major objectives of conferences that brought together scientists from different areas to break down disciplinary boundaries. Medicine would occupy an important place, not only because of the sponsor dedicated to health, Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, as well as the isolation felt as a discipline in the face of the need to relate to areas such as, for example, nuclear physics or society (p. vii).