In this opening episode, we return to the late 19th century — to Leipzig, Germany — where a quiet revolution was unfolding. A man named Wilhelm Wundt stood at the threshold of a new science, asking a question that philosophers had debated for centuries but never dared to measure: what is the mind, and can it be studied?

Wundt built the first laboratory devoted to experimental psychology, a place where thoughts, sensations, and reactions were recorded with the same precision as chemical reactions or physical forces. Inside his lab, students measured their response times to sounds and lights, seeking to understand the invisible processes of consciousness itself. For Wundt, the mind was not a mystical entity or a theological mystery — it was a phenomenon that could be observed, timed, and quantified.

This episode explores how Wundt’s meticulous experiments transformed psychology from a branch of philosophy into a scientific discipline. We follow his intellectual journey from physiology to philosophy, his belief in voluntarism — the active will of the mind — and his influence on an entire generation of thinkers who would scatter across the world to found laboratories of their own.

Through Wundt, we see how the scientific study of the mind began not with therapy couches or behaviorist boxes, but with stopwatches, metronomes, and a deep conviction that even our most private experiences could be measured and understood.

A story of precision and purpose — the birth of a discipline that dared to quantify thought itself.