Reaction-time and attention in the hypnotic state / [G. Stanley Hall].

  • Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley), 1844-1924.
Date:
[1882]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reaction-time and attention in the hypnotic state / [G. Stanley Hall]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    supply of the brain is impaired, allowing increased vascu- larity, brain-blushing, or local erethism, which may also be assumed in explaining what athletes call getting the second breath, the blood being proportionately diminished in other parts ot the brain. On this hypothesis an hypnotic subject would be one with an irritable habit of excessive action in these centres. Bosenthal’s observation1 that nitrate of amyl arrests hypnotism, is not inconsistent with this hypothesis, which on the whole is more favourable to the theory of restricted diffusion of stimulus within the highly vascular centre than to the automatist’s view that oidy lower centres are active in the hypnotic state. Behind the circulatory is of course always the molecular aspect of the cerebral changes, which Tamburini thinks should be chiefly regarded in judging the various degrees of this state from gaze to coma. Except Wundt’s inference from his studies of reflex action, that the excitatory is pre- ceded by an inhibitory stage of cell-action, and the fact that the vigour of cell-action, and perhaps the evolution of heat, does not coincide with the increase of blood-supply, very little is known here. In the dread of admitting the study of psychoses into plij-siology, we may speak of the “lability” of passion and irrepressible volition, or of the erethism of temper and that.too with real and increasing advantage; but in the study of our central question, viz., what were all the causes which enabled our subject to reduce his reaction- time from 18 to 10 hundredths of a second, it simply shows lack of intelligence to ignore the psychological or subjective side of the problem. From this side science, and indeed apperceptive as distinct from associative thought in general, may be described as the power of correlating and intensifying certain impressions by dichotomising and crowding off irrelevancies. Yet if certain large tracts of thought are sunk in forgetfulness or torpid indifference, others are apt to be uncritically over-estimated or morbidly dwelt upon often up to the point of illusion. If the sphere of ideas is unnaturally restricted or morbidly contracted, selfishness and egoism or mono-ideism, often deepening into positive insanity, are liable to result. Certain concentrative kinds of mental alienation—and our age of specialities seems particularly to favour forms of monomania —coexist with permanent or transient species of inhibition of normal motor reactions or various degrees of anaesthesia. The depth of sleep and abstraction may be measured by the 1 See Cenlralblatt fiir Nerveulieilkunde, 1882, p. 89.