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.

    15/20 (page 13)
    intensity of the sensuous stimulus required to arouse us from them, and when a department of the various stimuli which, as they crowd in along all the sensory nerves, keep the various psychic elements awake, ceases to affect con- sciousness, its equilibrium is disturbed, and illusions aie unrepressed. Anxiety in “labile” dispositions is apt to sharpen into localised pain. If we concentrate attention upon an image at the centre of the field of vision, its peri- pheral tracts seem to grow dark, as indeed does the centre itself with some observers, when the attention is fixed on a point in indirect vision. When A. B. was directed from the work of reaction to another entirely different subject by the operator, flushing, palpitation, and powerful psychic excite- ment were caused ; he must always be roused into the normal state and again hypnotised before impressions of a new genus were given, as indeed was generally the practice with the exhibitor whom he attended, while within the limits of that genus great mobility of attention was common. All these facts and more or less current conceptions are in the general line of the hypothesis of a tonic cramp of the atten- tion. So, too, are common curative and prophylactic mea- sures, e.g., preoccupation, interest and exercise for the idle, the same and music for the insane, rubbing a sore spot on the skin to dissipate the painful irritation, blowing in the face or a sharp tap upon a part of the body not concerned in the action, as a means of rousing from the hypnotic state, &c. Possibly, too, the case of another hypnotic subject who was able to bring down his reaction to 27 hundredths of a second in the normal, and only to 54 in the abnormal state, may be accounted for by assuming that the work of reacting could not with him be brought out of the negative field into the focus of attention. Five abnormal reactions of this second subject were excluded because delayed over an entire second. The attention of this subject appeared to be too concentrated on the person of the hypnotiser to fully com- prehend the action desired. But while the attention-theory has much explanatory power, and may enable us to regard many abnormalities and neural disorders as only exaggerations of states familiar to every normal mind, and while it enhances our conception of the power of the mind over the body, it is time to remember that there is yet much obscurity and confusion and great inade- quacy about it. Shall we say that the hypnotised animals of Kircher, Czermak, and Preyer were suffering not from fear but from an abnormal concentration of attention in which animals have been thought to be deficient? Do hibernating animals