Applied Psychology: Making Your Own World by Warren Hilton (easy books to read TXT) π
The other aspect of the Sense-Perceptive Process has to do with the mental interpretation of environment.
Both these aspects are distinctly practical.
You should know something of the weaknesses and deficiencies of the sense-perceptive organs, because all your efforts at influencing other men are directed at their organs of sense.
You should understand the relationship between your mind and your environment, since they are the two principal factors in your working life.
CHAPTER III
SENSORY ILLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR THEIR USE
[Sidenote: Unreliability of Sense-Organs]
Figure 1 shows two lines of equal length, yet the vertical line will to most persons seem longer than the horizontal one.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
In Figure 2 the lines A and B are of the same length, yet the lower seems much longer.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
Those things lo
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Warren Hilton
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Title: Applied Psychology: Making Your Own World
Being the Second of a Series of Twelve Volumes on the
Applications of Psychology to the Problems of Personal and
Business Efficiency
Author: Warren Hilton
Release Date: March 19, 2009 [EBook #28359]
Language: English
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Applied Psychology
MAKING
YOUR OWN WORLD
WARREN HILTON, A.B., L.L.B.
FOUNDER OF THE SOCIETY OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY ISSUED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF
THE LITERARY DIGEST
FOR
The Society of Applied Psychology
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1920
BY THE APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY PRESS
SAN FRANCISCO CONTENTS
In the preceding book, "Psychology and Achievement," we established the truth of two propositions:
I. All human achievement comes about through bodily activity.
II. All bodily activity is caused, controlled and directed by the mind.
To these two fundamental propositions we now append a third, which needs no proof, but follows as a natural and logical conclusion from the other two:
III. The Mind is the instrument you must employ for the accomplishment of any purpose.
With these three fundamental propositions as postulates, it will be the end and aim of this Course of Reading to develop plain, simple and specific methods and directions for the most efficient use of the mind in the attainment of practical ends.
To comprehend these mental methods and to make use of them in business affairs you must thoroughly understand the two fundamental processes of the mind.
These two fundamental processes are the Sense-Perceptive Process and the Judicial Process.
The Sense-Perceptive Process is the process by which knowledge is acquired through the senses. Knowledge is the result of experience and all human experience is made up of sense-perceptions.
The Judicial Process is the reasoning and reflective process. It is the purely "intellectual" type of mental operation. It deals wholly in abstractions. Abstractions are constructed out of past experiences.
Consequently, the Sense-Perceptive Process furnishes the raw material, sense-perceptions or experience, for the machinery of the Judicial Process to work with.
In this book we shall give you a clear idea of the Sense-Perceptive Process and show you some of the ways in which an understanding of this process will be useful to you in everyday affairs. The succeeding book will explain the Judicial Process.
Whatever you know or think you know, of the external world comes to you through some one of your five primary senses, sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, or some one of the secondary senses, such as the muscular sense and the sense of heat and cold.
The impressions you receive in this way may be true or they may be false. They may constitute absolute knowledge or they may be merely mistaken impressions. Yet, such as they are, they constitute all the information you have or can have concerning the world about you.
Philosophers have been wrangling for some thousands of years as to whether we have any real and absolute knowledge, as to whether matter actually does or does not exist, as to the reliability or unreliability of the impressions we receive through the senses. But there is one thing that all scientific men are agreed upon, and that is that such knowledge as we do possess comes to us by way of perception through the organs of sense.
If you have never given much thought to this subject, you have naturally assumed that you have direct knowledge of all the material things that you seem to perceive about you. It has never occurred to you that there are intervening physical agencies that you ought to take into account.
When you look up at the clock, you instinctively feel that there is nothing interposed between it and your mind that is conscious of it. You seem to feel that your mind reaches out and envelops it.
As a matter of fact, your sense impression of that bit of furniture must filter through a great number of intervening physical agencies before you can become conscious of it.
Direct perception of an outside reality is impossible.
Before you can become aware of any object there must first arise between it and your mind a chain of countless distinct physical events.
Modern science tells us that light is due to undulations or wave-like vibrations of the ether, sound to those of the air, etc. These vibrations are transmitted from one particle of ether or air to another, and so from the thing perceived to the body of man.
Think, then, what crisscross of air currents and confusion of ether vibrations, what myriad of physical events, must intervene between any distant object and your own body before sensations come and bring a consciousness of that object's existence!
Nor can you be sure, even after any particular vibration has reached the surface of your body, that it will reach your mind unaltered and intact!
What goes on in the body itself is made clear by your knowledge of the cellular structure of man.
You know that you have a system of nerves centering in the brain and with countless ramifications throughout the structural tissues of the body.
You know that part of these nerves are sensory nerves and part of them are motor nerves. You know that the sensory nerves convey to the brain the impressions received from the outer world and that the motor nerves relay this information to the rest of the body coupled with commands for appropriate muscular action.
The outer end of every sensory nerve exposes a sensitive bit of gray matter. These sensitive, impression-receiving ends constitute together what is called the "sensorium" of the body.
When vibrations of light or sound impinge upon the sensorium, they are relayed from nerve cell to nerve cell until they reach the central brain. Then it is, and not until then, that sensations and perceptions occur.
Consider, now, the infinitesimal size of a nerve cell and you will have some conception of the number of hands through which the message must pass before it is received by the central office.
Many of our sensations, especially those of touch, seem to occur on the periphery of the bodyβthat is to say, at that part of the exposed surface of the body which is apparently affected. If your finger is crushed in a door, the sensation of the blow and the pain all seem to occur in the finger itself.
As a matter of fact, this is not the case, for if one of your arms should be amputated, you would still feel a tingling in the fingers of the amputated arm. Thus has arisen a superstition that leads many people to bury any part of the body lost in this way, thinking that they will never be entirely relieved of pain until the absent member is finally at rest.
Of course, the fact is that you would only seem to have feeling in the amputated arm. The sensation would really occur
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