Psychophysiological theories sechenov

post from mecacci l, brain and history 1979

Sechenov wrote Reflexes of the brain (1863), Studies of Physiology (1884-1898) and Elements of Thought (1878, 1903). He argued psychological processes reduced to physiologic processes. It derived from German physiologists such as Ernst Brucke, who reduced psychology to chemistry and physics. He also includes Sigmund Exner (outline of a physiological interpretation of psychological phenomena, 1894), Freud (Project for a scientific psychology for neurologists, 1895) and others.

In Reflexes, originally titled "An Attempt to explain physiologically the origin of psychological phenomena" the brain is broken down into a machine. The complex human brain has actions that pass from involuntary to voluntary then to psychological. The latter is a series of reflexes that are integrated. What Sechenov did is to move the functional/structural analysis from spinal cord to the brain. p.6 schema stimulus and effector. The reflex apparatus updates itself constantly. Simple reflexes include movement of the leg of a decapitated frog, neonatal suck, and later in ontogeny, walking which is increasingly automatic. Emotional reflexes are triggered by stimuli such as thirst or hunger. Psychological reflexes have a psychological factor that relate to the external world. In man, emotion may intensify behavior, or thought may inhibit them. External factors are always the origin of the psychological processes. Centers in the mesencephalon and medulla inhibit reflexes chemically based on context and past experience, and are controlled by the cortex. The higher cerebral reflexes and the lower spinal reflexes each were decomposed into their single elements, and analyzed. Sechenov's students, the Petersburg (Leningrad) school, applied it to neuromuscular function. They outlined precise rules by which , studied in the muscle prep, excitatory and inhibitory processes established themselves. "Principle of dominance" Students Tarkhnishvili in 1890 studied gavanic skin response. Danilevsky in 1891 stated the study of electrical phenomena of the brain can be an instrument for the investigation of material processes which are he substrate of subjective psychological processes (beginning of psychophysics).