Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
they are components, or which must at least domesticate them, is
stronger and more forcible if this serial stage is not unduly
abridged.
But, secondly, many, if not most, of these activities when developed a
little, group after group, as they arise, must be controlled, checked,
and organized into higher and often more serial compounds. The
inhibiting functions are at first hard. In trying to sit still the
child sets its teeth, holds the breath, clenches its fists and perhaps
makes every muscle tense with a great effort that very soon exhausts.
This repressive function is probably not worked from special nervous
centers, nor can we speak with confidence of collisions with "sums of
arrest" in a sense analogous to that of Herbart, or of stimuli that
normally cause catabolic molecular processes in the cell, being
mysteriously diverted to produce increased instability or anabolic
lability in the sense of Wundt's _Mechanik der Nerven_. The concept
now suggested by many facts is that inhibition is irradiation or long
circuiting to higher and more complex brain areas, so that the energy,
whether spontaneous or reflex, is diverted to be used elsewhere. These
combinations are of a higher order, more remote from reflex action,
and modified by some Jacksonian third level.[9] Action is now not from
independent centers, but these are slowly associated, so that
excitation may flow off from one point to any other and any reaction
may result from any stimulus.
The more unified the brain the less it suffers from localization, and
the lower is the level to which any one function can exhaust the
whole. The tendency of each group of cells to discharge or overflow
into those of lower tension than themselves increases as
correspondence in time and space widens. The more one of a number of
activities gains in power to draw on all the brain, or the more
readily the active parts are fed at cost of the resting parts, the
less is rest to be found in change from one of these activities to
another, and the less do concentration and specialization prove to be
dangerous. Before, the aim was to wake all parts to function; now it
is to connect them. Intensity of this cross-section activity now tends
to unity, so that all parts of the brain energize together. In a brain
with this switchboard function well organized, each reaction has grown
independent of its own stimulus and may result from any stimulation,
and each act, e.g., a finger movement of a peculiar nature, may tire
the whole brain. This helps us to understand why brain-workers so
often excel laborers not only in sudden dynamometric strength test,
but in sustained and long-enduring effort. In a good brain or in a
good machine, power may thus be developed over a large surface, and
all of it applied to a small one, and hence the dangers of
specialization are lessened in exact proportion as the elements of our
ego are thus compacted together. It is in the variety and delicacy of
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