By Charles Henry
3
The most outstanding feature of the cerebral living being - Man is his ability to sponsor his own independent movements. The factor of motion becomes a necessary component of sensation. When we consider the five senses of feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting we begin to understand how these bodily functions in their dependence upon motion. Taste cannot occur without the gliding motion of the tongue over the surfaces of the object being tasted. If we contact an object without moving our fingers the sense of touch dwindles down to a dull static pressure. It is this essential factor of motion that stimulates nerve endings and generates the reaction of sensing nervvous tissue and this interplay/union is called psychomotor reaction. We might also consider psych-motor reactions (movement and sensation) in the formation of ideas which derived from sensations and ideas which finally lead to "representational patterns" of the original object. We can even go further and view mental representational as capable of expressing psychic motions since the motive energy of the psycho-motor reaction is also "carried over" into the mental field. Were this not possible then we would not be able to express an idea with self caused movements in the external world. In fact, we might also say that the perceptible world about us appears to be a vast collection of sensations and representations formed with our experiences. Furthermore we can divide them into 2 categories.
Category I - The Quantitative or those types of objects and phenomena in the environment which are best suited for sensory evaluation. Most objects and 3-Dimensional aspects are included in this category. They can be readily described by their representative dimensions correspomding to the length, width and height. The relationships of objects to distance and time as representations of space-time permit us to calculate their movements and speeds. the very fact that in this category the sensory interaction between the individual and his surroundings permit such precise measurable representations signifies the importance of this class.
Category II - The Qualitative or those phenomena in our environment that leads to sensations not as accurate and precise as those in the preceeding category. Here we find heat, elecricity, magnetism, colors, sounds. flavors, odors, etc. It soon becomes apparent the sensations in this class cannot be invested with exact detail and description, but more with approxiamate and general values. Before man developed instruments to overcome his natural handicaps he was content to use vague terms with regard to these phenomena, such as equals, less than, and greater than. In the past there was little clear definitive values in appraising temperature other than approxiamte terms like cold, warm, very warm, hot, very hot, and boiling stages of water until the invention of the thermometer rescued us from such vagueness. Electricity once had to be denoted as + and - until the voltmeter and ammeter were invented to give us computer electronics eventually.
psychobiophysiques
Page 2
Page 4
send an e-mail to; [email protected]