The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human NatureBerman, Louis
History
The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature
Berman, Louis
Endocrinology; Personality
Now of all the different factors which determine the tones, that is to
say, the internal pressures, of the various parts of the vegetative
apparatus (including all structures not controlled by the will in
the term), the internal secretions or hormones are by far the most
important. This significance is conferred upon them because it is
by their activities primarily that these pressures are produced,
regulated, lowered and heightened; in short, controlled. We have seen
how the thyroid and adrenal hold the reins of the drive or check
systems in the vegetative apparatus. Together with the other ductless
glands, they decide the advance or halt, forward or retreat, tension
or relaxation, charge and discharge, of the visceral--involuntary
muscle--blood vessel combination which is at the core of life. Here
again they emerge as the directorate.
Carlson, the Chicago physiologist, who probably knows more about being
hungry than any other man on the planet, once demonstrated that the
injection of an ounce or two of the blood, which means the internal
secretion mixture, of a starving animal, into one not starving
increased the signs of hunger and the accompanying hunger contractions
of the stomach. There can be no doubt that hunger is the expression of
a certain specific concentration of internal secretion or secretions
in the blood. When the quantity, in the cycles of metabolism, becomes
sufficiently great, it stimulates the stomach to contract in a way
which augments the pressure within it to a point at which the feeling
of hungriness, and the wish to satisfy it, or to get rid of it,
becomes imperative, and the dominant of consciousness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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