That dream about the dinosaur in the leotard, those times that you said that thing that you know you shouldn't have said, or even that thing you didn't even know you were gonna say.
The little cogs of your consciousness cranking away, making your life possible, making society function, all of the things that you're so glad you can do and all of the ones that you wish you could stop doing.
Excluding other human minds, your mind is the most complicated piece of the universe that humans currently know about.
The rules that govern it are mysterious and elusive.
Maybe our brains just aren't complex enough to understand themselves.
But that's not going to stop us from trying!
The word 'psychology' comes from the Latin for the " study of the soul." And while its formal definition has evolved over the last several decades, today we can safely call it the science of behavior and mental processes.
The term 'psychology' wasn't coined until around the turn of the sixteenth century, and the practice that we would actually call science today wasn't established until the mid-1800s.
But of course, humans have always been curious about themselves and what's going on up here.
Aristotle pondered the seed of human consciousness and decided that it was in the heart, not the head -- being, as we have seen quite a lot here on Crash Course, absolutely and completely wrong.
