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Wilhelm_Wundt,_Statue photo by Lige Zeng-

Top 10 Amazing Facts about Wilhelm Wundt

Wilhelm Wundt was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor acknowledged as one of the fathers of psychology.

His presence in the psychology field is revived as he opened the institute of experimental psychology and its opening at the University of Leipzig,

He distinguished psychology as science from philosophy and biology and he is the first person to ever call himself a psychologist.

He also formed the first academic journal for psychological research and was the reason why psychology was marked as an independent field of study, a separate science from other disciplines.

Here are the top ten amazing facts about Wilhelm Wundt.

1. He was the father of experimental psychology

He introduced the first systematic psychological experimental science. He created the first psychology laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig.

He conducted what’s called empirical or experimental philosophy in his attempts to study the mind by measuring the body.

His first trial was to assess the speed of thought by measuring how long it took to test subjects to make a judgment. He studied the subject’s reaction times and sensory processes and attention.

Just as a chemist analyses chemical components, Wundt’s purpose was to record and analyze thoughts and sensations into their constitute element to form baseline structure. The school of thoughts founded by Wundt is known as Voluntarism, the process of organizing the mind.

 2. He was assigned his own laboratory

Laboratory_122_Cambridge photo by Michael D. Turnbull-

When Wundt founded his idea of experimental psychology, the University of Leipzig assigned him a laboratory of his own in 1876 to store equipment he had carried from Zurich.

Many of his demonstrations took place in the Konvikt building, he conducted most of his experiments due inconvenience of transporting his equipment between the lab.

He arranged for the construction of suitable instruments and gathered necessary equipment. He was said to have assigned an instrument to various graduate students with the task of developing uses for future research in experimentation-  he had at least fifteen assistants.

3. He was an accomplished academic

He studied at the University of Tübingen from 1851 to 1856 as well as at the University of Berlin.

He graduated with a doctorate of Medicine from Heidelberg and later joined as staff, becoming an assistant to the physicist and psychologist Hermon von Helmholtz with the role of teaching the laboratory course in physiology. It’s here he wrote a contribution to the theory of sense perception.

He also became an associate professor for medical psychology and anthropology and he even published a textbook about human physiology.

He was drawn and attracted to human psychology and related subjects. His lectures on psychology were published as lectures on human and animal psychology.

 4. He was a mentor and a teacher

Wundt had a great influence on a number of extraordinary post graduates students who comprised seventy foreigners from different parts of the world, who in turn bloomed into some of the most eminent psychologists in their field.

They include Germans Oswald Kulipe, Ernst Meumam a professor and a pioneer in pedagogical Psychology, and Freiburg, a pioneer in applied psychology.

Wundt enabled the growth of a psychology family and its presence in the academic field of psychology of the 1^st and 2^nd generation.

5. He received several awards

Wundt-Plakette_Leipzig photo by Armin Stock-

Wundt has made several contributions to the field of psychology. He was awarded an Honorary doctorate from the universities of Leipzig and Gottingen. He was also awarded the Pour Le merite for science arts, he was nominated three times for the noble prize in physiology.

He was an esteemed member of twelve scientific organizations and societies. He was also a corresponding member of thirteen academies in abroad and Germany.

6. An asteroid was named after him

Asteroid_belt_landscape photo by Pablo Carlos Budassi-

The asteroid Vundita 635, was named in the honor of Wundt for his valuable contribution to science.

Vundita is an asteroid, a large rock that orbits the sun mainly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids are a class of small solar systems in orbit around the sun. Sometimes they are referred to as planetoids.

Its believed to be an irregular shape, and its path around the sun, hence is classified as a dwarf planet though there is a lot of doubt about its status as a planet.

 7. He has contributed to the field of Psychophysical parallelism

He introduced the concept of psychophysical parallelism, the philosophy of the mind, a theory that explains how the mind and body events are perfectly coordinated, without any causal interaction between them.

Wundt was influenced by the philosopher Leibniz and illuminates the difference between the natural causality of the consciousness process.

The method Wundt developed is a sort of an experimental introspection perception, which was Wundt’s central focus of his work.

He strongly believed the fundamental task of his work was to figure out a comprehensive development theory of the mind, from animal psychology to the highest cultural achievements in languages.

He had no difficulties in connecting the development concepts of humanities with that the biological theory of evolution.

8. He has contributed to the academia of neuropsychology

Wundt made contributions to the field of neuropsychology as it existed in that era. He made significant criticism of the theory of localization which was common then. Through his persistent demand for research hypotheses, through psychological thinking and neurological experiments.

He called for the experiment to localize the higher central nervous functions.

9. He has published several books

Wundt wrote many books over the cause of his life, the list of the works at the Max Planck Institute for the history of science are 589 German and foreign language editions from 1853 -1950.

The American psychologist Edwin Boring counted 494 publications by Wundt, with 110 pages long and amounting to a total of 53,735 pages.

It’s said he published an average of seven works per year for 68 years and wrote at least 2.2 pages per day he also wrote extracts, lecture notes, and manuscripts.

10. He has written extensively on ethics

Parallel to his occupation, he has also written on ethics, his most rad book is Ethik, which stresses how important development considerations are to grasp religious customs and morality. He strongly believed questions of ethics to be linked to empirical psychology of motivated acts.