The Integrative Action of the Nervous System

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Scribner, 1906 - 411 pages
 

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Page 258 - If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no 'mind stuff out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.
Page 258 - My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.
Page 258 - natural language" ; and these emotions themselves, being so strongly characterised both from within and without, may be called the standard emotions. Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My...
Page 258 - The next thing to be noticed is this, that every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is felt, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs. If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods. It would be perhaps too much to expect him to arrest the tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such curious analysis...
Page 234 - The singleness of action from moment to moment thus assured is a keystone in the construction of the individual whose unity it is the specific office of the nervous system to perfect.
Page 8 - A simple reflex is probably a purely abstract conception, because all parts of the nervous system are connected together and no part of it is probably ever capable of reaction without affecting and being affected by various other parts, and it is a system certainly never absolutely at rest.
Page 117 - A second consequence is that each receptor being dependent for final communication with its effector organ upon a path not exclusively its own but common to it with certain other receptors, such nexus necessitates successive and not simultaneous use of the common path by various receptors using it to different or opposed effect.
Page 298 - The sufferer is subjected to a disorder of co-ordination which, though not necessarily of itself accompanied by physical pain, must inflict on the mind, which still remains clear, a torture inexpressibly distressing. Each attempt to execute certain muscular acts of vital importance, such as the taking of food, is defeated because from the attempt results an act exactly the opposite to that intended. The endeavour to open the jaw to take food or drink induces closure of the jaw, because the normal...
Page 2 - In the multicellular animal, especially for those higher reactions which constitute its behaviour as a social unit in the natural economy, it is nervous reaction which par excellence integrates it, welds it together from its components, and constitutes it from a mere collection of organs an animal individual.
Page 302 - Two separable systems of motor innervation appear thus controlling two sets of musculature : one system exhibits those transient phases of heightened reaction which constitute reflex movements ; the other maintains that steady tonic response which supplies the muscular tension necessary to attitude.

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