From "entertaining Psychology" K. Platonov

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

"WATCH POINT"

During the war, in a front-line hospital, I had to observe a doctor who, after several sleepless days, finally managed to get some sleep. Soon the wounded were brought in, and it was necessary to provide them with urgent assistance. But the doctor could not be woken up. They shook him, splashed water on his face. He hummed, twisted his head and fell asleep again.

- Doctor! They brought the wounded! Need your help! - And he immediately woke up.

This is explained as follows. Those who had previously awakened the doctor affected deeply inhibited areas of his brain. I turned to his "guard post", as Ivan Petrovich Pavlov called it, an uninhibited or slightly inhibited part of the cerebral cortex, which is awake even during sound sleep. A person is connected with the outside world through a "guard post".

Irritation reaching such "sentry points" of the brain can disinhibit other areas of the cerebral cortex, which were previously deeply inhibited. Thus, a mother who has fallen asleep over the cradle of a sick child does not wake up if someone calls her loudly, but she will immediately start up when the child moans softly. The miller could sleep soundly during a thunderstorm, but woke up immediately if the millstones stopped.

The cells of the "sentry post" are not completely inhibited and are in the so-called paradoxical phase, in which they are more sensitive to weak stimuli than to strong ones. That is why I spoke the words that woke the doctor up quietly, but very clearly.

Animals also have "sentry posts". Thanks to them, bats sleep, hanging upside down, and do not fall, horses sleep, as you know, while standing, and a sleeping octopus always has one "duty leg" awake. The dolphin sleeps in turn with the right and left hemispheres.

When the doctor puts the patient to sleep, a constant connection is established between them, the so-called rapport. It is determined by the formation in the brain of the patient of a "sentry post", as it were, aimed at the doctor.

ABOUT TYPES OF NERVOUS SYSTEM, TEMPERAMENTS ALSO

In 1927, Pavlov made a report with the title in the old Russian style: "Physiological doctrine of the types of the nervous system, temperaments, too." In it and in his subsequent works, he and his collaborators revealed the connection between temperament and the type of the nervous system, determined by the ratio of strength, mobility and balance of the processes of excitation and inhibition in the cerebral cortex. "We can rightfully transfer the types of the nervous system established on a dog (and they are precisely characterized) to humans. Obviously, these types are what we call temperaments in humans. Temperament is the most general characteristic of each individual, the most basic characteristic of it. nervous system, and this latter puts one or another stamp on the entire activity of each individual, "he said.

However, the same person in different conditions may exhibit features characteristic of different temperaments. Observing how leisurely the child learns and helps the mother, you might think that he is phlegmatic. But, seeing him at the stadium, when the team for which he is rooting scores a goal, we will decide that he is a choleric. In class, he will seem sanguine, but at the blackboard he can sometimes be mistaken for a melancholic. If, under all these conditions, one observes pupils with different temperaments, then their behavior will be even more unequal.

Temperament greatly affects the overall appearance of the individual, but it does not at all determine the social significance of a person. Krylov and Kutuzov were phlegmatic; Peter I and Suvorov, Pushkin and Pavlov - choleric; Lermontov, Herzen, Napoleon - sanguine; Gogol and Tchaikovsky are melancholic.

A person of any temperament can be smart and stupid, honest or dishonest, kind and evil, talented or mediocre.

FROM ADVANCEMENT TO QUALITY

"And how many personality traits are known in psychology?" This simple question baffled me and then haunted me for a long time. Indeed, why not count? After all, not psychologists, but the people designated these properties, combining them into personality traits with apt words.

In the end, feeling powerless to do the job myself, I asked my wife, who had both sustained attention and a "sense of language" (abilities that I lacked), to take over the task.

She copied from SI Ozhegov's Dictionary of the Russian Language, edition of 1952, which contains 51,533 words, all words denoting personality traits. Thus, the "Alphabet of personality traits" was composed of 1301 words. The first was "adventurism", and the last - "yachestvo".

Interestingly, out of 1301 words, 61% are negative properties, 32% are good, positive and 7% are neutral.

This is how the people reflected in the language one of the basic laws of upbringing: praise can be generalized, but reproach must be more differentiated and detailed.

Later, Georgian psychologists counted similar words in their language, and there were about 4000 of them! Bulgarians, on the other hand, have identified 2000 such words in their language.

LIE DETECTOR

According to newspaper reports, in the early eighties (last century. - Approx. ed.) the British government bought a large batch of polygraphs from the United States.

The polygraph, or lie detector, accurately registers changes in pulse, respiration and other physiological functions of the interrogated under the influence of emotions. Some foreign lawyers consider them to be objective evidence of the falsity of the testimony of the person undergoing verification.

But such techniques go back to ancient times and were once called "the courts of the gods." Different peoples in different ways found methods that made it possible to identify a person with a bad conscience. The story of how the thief grabbed the hat when the wise judge shouted: "The hat is on fire!" Is found with various variations in the epic of many nationalities.

The Chinese also once had a similar custom. During the trial, the accused of theft kept a handful of dry rice in his mouth. If he, after hearing the accusation, spat out the dry rice, he was found guilty. This custom is also based on psychology. Fear is not only experienced by a person, but also causes a number of bodily changes, in particular, salivation decreases from fear - it dries up in the mouth. Therefore, for a thief who is afraid of exposure, the rice remains dry.

But such "judgments of the gods" could be valid only in relation to those accused who themselves deeply believed in their correctness. For a person, if he is afraid of being unjustly condemned as a result of the error of such a court, the rice will also remain dry! For the same reason, lie detectors are misleading. After all, what caused the emotions they register - a lie, a memory of a crime, fear of being innocently condemned, indignation with violence against a person or anything else - they cannot reveal.

COURAGE

This happened in 1961 in the center of Antarctica, at Novolazarevskaya station. Among the winterers was the doctor Leonid Rogozov. And it had to happen for him to get sick with appendicitis. Leonidas could easily help any of his twelve comrades. But no one could perform an operation on him.

He understood not only that he would die without an operation, but he also knew that then the station would be left without a doctor for the entire winter. Not a single plane in the Antarctic winter could reach Novolazarevskaya. And he, according to all the rules, opened his abdominal cavity, removed the appendix and stitched.

HYPERSONS AND "STEPSONS OF THE SCHOOL"

“I’m already sixteen years old, and I don’t have any talents yet. This means that nothing good will come of me,”Sergei once said with a sigh.

Indeed, outstanding musical, artistic and literary talents sometimes appear already in early childhood. Mozart played the harpsichord at the age of four, at the age of five he was already composing, at eight he created the first sonata and symphony, and at eleven he created the first opera. Glinka at the age of seven or eight made chimes, hanging basins in the room. The ear for music and memory were already noticed in the two-year-old Rimsky-Korsakov.

Three-year-old Repin cut horses out of paper, and at the age of six he already painted with paints. Serov sculpted from the age of three, and at the age of six he painted from life. Surikov was also fond of drawing early and, according to him, he looked into faces from childhood: how the eyes are set, how the facial features are composed.

Pushkin, already a seven or eight-year-old boy, wrote poetry and even epigrams in French.

This early manifestation of talent in psychology is called hyper-ability.

But an incomparably greater number of children who amazed the so-called prodigies with their giftedness turned out to be empty flowers in the future.

At the same time, there were many people who left a deep mark in the history of culture and science, whose talent did not appear immediately, sometimes very late. So, for Vrubel it happened when he was twenty-seven, and for Aksakov even later - at fifty.

Tchaikovsky's example is no less instructive. He did not have absolute hearing, the composer himself complained about his poor musical memory, he played the piano fluently, but not so well, although he had played music since childhood. Tchaikovsky took up composing for the first time, having already graduated from the school of jurisprudence. And despite this, he became a genius composer.

And how many mistakes there were in the assessments of abilities! How many "stepchildren of the school" were!

So Seryozha was wrong. At sixteen, and much later, a person has no reason to say: "Nothing good will come of me." You can only say: "Nothing good has come out of me yet."

However, the sooner a person finds his vocation, that is, the kind of work that he likes more, for which he has an aspiration, in which he will work with enthusiasm and success, the better. And for this you need to have an idea not only about different professions, but also about yourself, about your abilities for various professions.

DOLL GAME

The famous ethnographer Margarita Mead not so long ago discovered on one of the islands of the Pacific Ocean a tribe of natives living completely isolated from the rest of the world. The life of this tribe turned out to be very peculiar: for example, neither children nor adults knew dolls.

The dolls brought by the ethnographer and distributed to the children were equally interested in both girls and boys. They began to play with them in the same way that children of all nations of the world play with dolls: to nurse, dress, put to bed, punish for misdeeds.

It is logical to think that the biological instinct of motherhood began to speak in the girls, and the boys were temporarily carried away by playing with dolls to imitate girls. Indeed, in half of the children, the fascination with dolls was temporary, and soon they stopped playing. The other half did not lose interest, but, on the contrary, intensified, and the children came up with more and more new games with dolls. But contrary to the seemingly logic, they quickly lost interest in dolls … the girls, while the boys continued to play with them.

The peculiarity of the activities of these islanders consisted, among other things, in the fact that the main cares for caring for children and their upbringing were traditionally assigned to freer men, while women were always busy getting and preparing food.

In this case, a general, but not always so clearly visible pattern emerged: social conditions more significantly determine the interests, feelings and activities of a person than his biological characteristics.

PERSONAL EQUATION

In 1796, the head of the Greenwich Observatory, Maskeline, fired the young astronomer Kinnebrock, as he was half a second late to mark the passage of a star across the meridian. Maskeline established the error of Kinnebrock's calculations by comparing his data with his own, which, of course, he considered infallible.

Thirty years later (that's really true: better late than never!) German astronomer Bessel restored Kinnebrock's reputation by showing that all astronomers, including Maskelyne, and himself, are inaccurate, and that each astronomer has his own mean error time. This time has since been included in astronomical calculations in the form of a coefficient called "personal equation".

From this case, it is customary to begin the history of studying the speed of a simple motor reaction.

However, the personal equation is not the speed of a simple reaction, but the accuracy of the reaction to a moving object. After all, an astronomer may not only be late, but also hasten to mark the time when the thread in the lens, as it were, cuts the light in half.

A simple motor reaction, sometimes called a "psychic reaction" for short, is the fastest possible response by a simple and known movement to a suddenly appearing but known signal. More fully and accurately, this reaction is called a simple sensorimotor reaction, since there is also a complex sensorimotor choice reaction (let me remind you that sensing generalizes sensations and perceptions).

The time of a simple reaction, that is, the time from the moment the signal appears until the moment the motor response begins, was first measured in 1850 by Helmholtz. It depends on which analyzer the signal is acting on, on the strength of the signal and on the physical and psychological state of the person. Usually it is equal to: to light - 100-200, to sound - 120-150 and to an electrocutaneous stimulus - 100-150 milliseconds.

Neurophysiological methods made it possible to decompose this time into a number of segments, as can be seen in the figure.

DIFFICULT COORDINATIONS

The more biologically expedient coordination, that is, the consistency of several simultaneous movements, the easier and more accurate it is achieved. The more the coordination contradicts biologically established agreements, the more difficult it is.

While walking, we swing our arms a little obliquely to the beat of walking, repeating the coordination of the running of our four-legged ancestors. This is not difficult for us, but it is not easy for a four-year-old child to learn to clap consistently and rhythmically when playing the fretboards.

Try to rotate your arms in front of you in one direction, towards you or away from you, first in coinciding phases (so that both hands are simultaneously up, and then down), and then with a lag of half a turn (so that when one the hand was at the top, the other at the bottom). Both are very easy. But not everyone will be able to simultaneously rotate their arms in different directions - one towards themselves, the other away from themselves. This coordination was never needed biologically, and it needs to be learned again.

It's pretty easy to learn to slap yourself on the stomach with one hand and stroke your head with the other, or to write threes on the board with one hand and eights with the other. But it is very difficult to do this by quickly changing hands.

STRUCTURE OF ACTION

Vacationers in the rest house, which we walked past, played in the towns. This game always captivates not only its participants of all ages, but also the audience. It was not without reason that Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a passionate city dweller in his old age.

We stopped to cheer. Best of all, a tall, slender young man knocked out figures without a miss with accurate and beautiful throws. We, admiring his game, did not even immediately notice its originality: the one who placed the figure clapped his hands over it and quickly ran to the side.

It turned out that the best player on the team was blind.

In this case, both the purpose of the action and the movements of the blind and sighted players could be the same. The difference was in the perception to which they react: the blind - to the auditory, the rest of the players - to the visual. Consequently, the psychological structure of these actions was still different.