Biological psychology, also known as biopsychology, is simply the viewing of developmental mechanisms of animals through the prism of biology. How do interior structures affect an organism's behavior on a macro level? This term is a large umbrella for all the different variations of psychology, behavioral science, neuroscience, and biology. Often, biopsychology aims to look at the big-picture results of the studies within these different fields.

The term 'biopsychology' was coined by Knight Dunlap in the early 1900s, but it has incredibly old traditions, going back to 1700 BC. Despite the millennia, the crux of the study was very similar to the present day, a question known as the Mind-body problem. The question was, what is the relationship between mind and body? Where in the body is the mind located? The famous Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle had different opinions. Plato thought the mind arose from the brain, whereas Aristotle thought that the mind was split, with rational thought existing in the brain and emotional responses originating in the heart.

Many thinkers had various hypotheses about where the mind was located, and by the 1800s, an accidental medical case proved that it was in the brain-in 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage experienced an accident at work, in which an iron rod went completely through his head, entering under his cheekbone and exiting above his forehead. The bar destroyed large areas of his brain, but did not kill him, and he remained awake and talking during the trip to the doctor's office. Lucky to find an experienced doctor, Gage was cured of his injuries two months later, but contemporary sources said his behavior had changed. The post-accident Gage was angry, cursed a lot, and had a short attention span. But beyond that, all his other mental faculties, including memory and motor skills, were unaffected. He lived for another 12 years before dying of epilepsy. This case fueled the interest in the relationship between brain structures and human function and behavior.

Modern biopsychology, in tandem with neuroscience, can pinpoint many correlations between areas of the nervous system and the behaviors they're responsible for. Various methods are available to closely study the relationships between brain structures. One of the oldest methods of exploring animal brains-as this method is considered unethical to perform on humans-consists of disabling targeted parts of the brain through lesions, or the destruction of tissue, and observing the results.

Other methods include electrical stimulation of the brain in small doses, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-which measures the flow of blood to certain portions of the brain, or EEG, in which devices on the cranium measure brain activity. Even selective breeding can be used to yield specific DNA segments which prove useful to scientists.

Over time, the sprawling field of biological psychology will reveal the structures which compose our brain (through neurology), their effect on our actions (psychology), and our reactions (behavioral science). The advancements in this field have been vast in the last century. Though no conclusive discovery has yet proven the location of higher consciousness and identity.

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