The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
Ferrier was the first in the field here. He found, when the _angular_
convolution (that lying between the 'intra parietal' and 'external
occipital' fissures, and bending round the top of the fissure of
Sylvius, in Fig. 6) was excited in the monkey, that movements of
the eyes and head as if for vision occurred; and that when it was
extirpated, what he supposed to be total and permanent blindness of
the opposite eye followed. Munk almost immediately declared total and
permanent blindness to follow from destruction of the _occipital lobe_
in monkeys as well as dogs, and said that the angular gyrus had nothing
to do with sight, but was only the centre for tactile sensibility
of the eyeball. Hunk's absolute tone about his observations and his
theoretic arrogance have led to his ruin as an authority. But he did
two things of permanent value. He was the first to distinguish in these
vivisections between sensorial and _psychic_ blindness, and to describe
the phenomenon of _restitution_ of the visual function after its first
impairment by an operation; and the first to notice the _hemiopic_
character of the visual disturbances which result when only one
hemisphere is injured. Sensorial blindness is absolute insensibility
to light; psychic blindness is inability to recognize the _meaning_ of
the optical impressions, as when we see a page of Chinese print but
it suggests nothing to us. A hemiopic disturbance of vision is one in
which neither retina is affected in its totality, but in which, for
example, the left portion of _each_ retina is blind, so that the animal
sees nothing situated in space towards its right. Later observations
have corroborated this hemiopic character of all the disturbances of
sight from injury to a single hemisphere in the higher animals; and the
question whether an animal's apparent blindness is sensorial or only
psychic has, since Munk's first publications, been the most urgent one
to answer, in all observations relative to the function of sight.
Goltz almost simultaneously with Ferrier and Munk reported experiments
which led him to deny that the visual function was essentially bound
up with any one localized portion of the hemispheres. Other divergent
results soon came in from many quarters, so that, without going into
the history of the matter any more, I may report the existing state of
the case as follows:[17]
In _fishes, frogs_, and _lizards_ vision persists when the hemispheres
are entirely removed. This is admitted for frogs and fishes even by
Munk, who denies it for birds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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