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Have you ever plucked a rose off of its stem? Your objective may have been to smell it, pull out the petals, use the resulting rose hip to make tea, enjoy the many colors within the rose, or you may have had some other purpose. The reason you plucked the rose from its stem doesn't really matter though. What is important is that you experienced the touch, smell, possible taste, sight, and likely the pain of the rose.
How is it that all of these senses can be excited by one object? Are the pathways to these sensations the same (meaning do touch, smell, sight, etc. occur along the same nerve bundles)? Or, do you really experience the rose directly at all? Is it possibly a trick of the nerves themselves that allows you to have a sense (or senses) of the rose? Johannes Muller's law of specific nerve energies is one possible explanation of how the mind senses a rose.
The object of psychological study is the mind. This is not a physical structure, it is the output of a physical structure (the brain). The mind is connected with thought, perception, personality, memory, and many other features that are produced by the brain. So how does tangible input, such as physical interaction with a rose, come to be sensed by an intangible output (the characteristics of the mind)?
While some would say that the brain is the physical organ of the body that connects the outer world with the inner mental processes, Johannes Muller believed that there was no direct connection. The law of specific nerve energies states that an individual's mind cannot access objects in the natural environment except through the nerves. But what does that mean?
There is a belief within philosophy carried over to psychology, that people do not perceive the real world. In essence, all humans are blind to the real world and can only experience it indirectly. The difference in experience between the senses is due to the different areas of the brain that those nerves excite. This is the reason why the eye can experience flashes of light whether there are actual light flashes or an individual is poked in the eye. The separate sensations travel along the same pathway (the optic nerve bundle) to the same location in the brain.
Scientists have been successful, in some respect, demonstrating that this idea has some validity. The left eye is connected to the right side of the brain, and the right eye is connected to the left side of the brain. One researcher moved these connections (right eye-right side, left eye-left side) in a lizard to see what the effect would be. Normally, if an object is going to strike and it comes from the left side, the individual would move to the right to avoid it. When the optical nerve connections were reversed in the lizards, they moved in the opposite direction they normally would have.
This demonstrates that if the optical nerve ending that sensed green light was reconnected to the connection that saw red light, when a green light was shown to the individual, they would perceive it as red. Neuropsychologists have conducted a multitude of experiments that prove this theory in different areas of the brain.
So, when you see or smell a rose, it is not the rose you see or smell, it is the excitement of nerves that tell the mind what sight or smell to perceive.
Let's review what we've learned. First, and this is really important, the brain and the mind are different things. The mind isn't a physical structure, but rather, an output of the physical structure that is the brain. This is what defines psychology and what forms the basis of the law of specific nerve energies. Experience is determined within the brain and not by interactions with the environment, though the environment is required for that experience to be determined.
The law of specific nerve energies was originally advanced by Johannes Muller, and it states that an individual's mind cannot access objects in the natural environment except through the nerves. The idea is that people only perceive what the sensing nerves tell them about the environment and that these nerves are tied to specific areas of the brain, which then relay the different output. The impact of this law is that many researchers have devised different ways to determine if the law is true or not.
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Psychology 312: History and Systems of Psychology20 chapters | 143 lessons | 11 flashcard sets
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