Child development; Infant psychology; Motor ability in children
We were told in school that the fifth sense was “feeling,” but
psychologists now regard this not as a single sense, but as a group,
called the “dermal” or skin senses. The sense of touch and pressure,
the senses of heat and cold, and the sense of pain are the principal
ones of the group.
Our baby showed from the first that she was aware when she was touched.
She stopped crying when she was cuddled or patted. She showed comfort
in the bath, which may have been in part due to freedom from the
contact of clothes, and to liking for the soft touches of the water.
She responded with sucking motions to the first touch of the nipple
on her lips. Preyer found the lips of new-born babies quite delicately
sensitive, responding even to the lightest touch; and there are other
sensitive spots, such as the nostrils and the soles of the feet.
On the whole, however, the rose-leaf baby skin proves to be much less
sensitive than ours, not only to contact, but also to pain, and perhaps
to heat and cold, though this has not been so thoroughly tested. This
is not saying, of course, that the physiological effects of heat and
cold upon the baby are unimportant.
Our baby had no experience of skin pain in her early days, and
being kept at an equable temperature, probably received no definite
sensations either of heat or of cold.
The foregoing are the “special senses,” that is, those that give
impressions of external things, and have end organs to receive and make
definite these impressions,--the eye at the end of the optic nerve,
the different kinds of nerve tips in the skin, and so forth. Another
sense now claims almost to rank with them,--the recently studied
sense of equilibrium and motion, by which we feel loss of balance
in our bodies and changes in their motion (changes only, for no one
can feel perfectly smooth motion). This sense has been traced to the
semicircular canals of the ear; and as this part of the ear is the
oldest in evolution, and the rudimentary ears of the lower orders of
animals are quite analogous to it in structure, biologists now suspect
that hearing may be a more recent sense than we have thought, and that
much which has been taken for sense of sound in the lower animals--even
as high as fishes--may perhaps be only a delicate sense of motion.
I failed to watch for this motion sense in the baby. It would have been
shown by signs that she felt change of motion when she was lifted and
moved. Equilibrium sense she must have used as soon as she began to
balance her little head, but in the first limp and passive days there
was no sign of it. Still, there are tales of very young babies who
showed disturbance, as if from a feeling of lost equilibrium, when they
were lowered swiftly in the arms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account