Physics and Biology/Anatomy do not
necessarily go together, but I guess they can in this case. Fechner talks about weber’s Law and psychic
measurements and how they can measure sensations. Broca talks about a young gentleman he
studied who could not talk, but knew what you were saying and could respond
with his hands a little bit. Psychic
measurements are going to possibly explain what is going on with the young man
in Broca’s discussion.
Fechner/Weber's law states that
subjective sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus
intensity. Meaning that Weber’s Law can
help to measure the amount of sensations between the mind and the body by using
psychic measurements and psychophysics, “From this it may be foreseen, that
this law, after it has been restated as a relation between sensation and the
psycho-physical processes, will be as important, general, and fundamental for
the relations of mind and body, as is the law of gravity for the field of
planetary motion.” He had listed quite a
few formulas throughout this paper and explained what they were for, but I just
kept getting confused and lost. I do not
mind physics and explaining how things work through it, but when you start to
add algebra my mind shuts down. Math is
not my forte in any way at all. I was
lucky to have passed Statistics at all and now here an article that really only
talked of formulas. Needless to say I
understood in the beginning, but once Fechner started talking about Math I was
lost in another world.
Broca on the other hand was easier
to understand, because I am interested in illnesses of all kinds. I am especially interested in illnesses that
doctors have never seen before or become baffled with because it was not
exactly what they thought it was at first since it has developed new traits or
has taken a different turn than what it says in the textbooks as time goes on. Mental illnesses are probably one of the most
unpredictable sources out there in the world.
In this reading Broca studies the brain of a 51 year old man with quite
an interesting story; this man had been 21 when he was brought into the
hospital with only the ability to speak the word tan tan
and gesture accordingly in conversation so he
would hopefully of been understood. The
hospital then referred to him as tan. When
he first arrived at the hospital he was intelligent and perfectly capable of
taking care of himself, however, later on in his stay at the hospital he had
lost the entire function of his right arm and then slowly he lost the functions
of his entire right side and his sight started to weaken and those who had been
in contact with him daily had explained that even his intelligence started to
drop. After he had gone to a different
hospital for an infection that had covered him from heel to buttocks on one
side of this body is when Broca was able to see Tan for the first time. After Tan had died they had a chance to look
at his brain to find that the majority of his left side was soft and damaged
expect for the part which controlled speech, which makes sense since he was
still intelligent enough to understand speech and want to answer, but was
unable to since only the left side of his tongue worked.
Well this was an interesting pairing
to say the least. They were actually
somehow able to work with each other and explain the problem in Broca’s
paper. Fechner did a good job at
explaining the various laws and measures and their importance and Broca did a
good job at explaining what had happened to young Tan to the best of his
ability. Since both of these papers were
written so well you could compare them easily to one another and see how they
tie together.
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