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Psychology Today

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Psychology Today
Psychology Today
What is psychology? Psychology is the scientific study of the behavior of individuals and their mental processes. Walter Cannon, John Watson, and Herman Ebbinghaus are only three out of many psychiatrists that have changed the world today.
Binge eating and anorexia are two common eating disorders. Anorexia is the disorder you under take when you withdraw yourself from food and Binge eating is when you consume too much food at a certain period of time. But what makes us hungry? How do we know that hunger is what were feeling? We as humans use an external clocks in our daily routines, such as when to sleep or eat. This external time triggers our hunger. For example when the clock reads 12:00pm many people feel hungry just because it is the universal time for lunch time. This hunger is triggered by learned behavior. In addition, the smell, taste, or texture of food can also trigger your hunger. An example would be if you like hamburgers, the smell of a hamburger cooking may trigger your hunger. Also people can feel hungry for a particular taste, more specifically, the four basic tastes which are salty, bitter, sour, and sweet. People will continue to feel hungry until these four tastes are satisfied. Walter Cannon was a pioneering physiologist. He believed that gastric Miller2 activity in an empty stomach was the sole basis for hunger. Walter Cannon and his student A. L. Washburn came up with the stomach contraction theory which states that we know we are hungry when our stomach contracts. The two of them conducted an experiment in which Washburn trained himself to swallow a balloon which was uninflated and attached to a rubber tube. The other end of the tube was attached to a device that recorded changes in air pressure. Cannon then inflated the balloon in Washburn’s stomach. When inflated in his stomach transmitted his stomach contractions to a recording device. While his stomach was being monitored Cannon pressed a

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