Kinesthesis

5 Key excerpts on "Kinesthesis"

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  eBook - ePub

  Companion Encyclopedia of Psychology

  Volume One

  • Andrew M. Colman(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Pacinian corpuscles (similar to those we encountered within the skin); these lie in the mobile joints of the skeletal system and they are stimulated by mechanical contact between the parts of the joints' surfaces. That is, stimulation of the Pacinian corpuscles occurs with changes in the angles at which the bones of a joint are held relative to each other. In addition, muscles and their attached tendons are well supplied with sensory nerves that react to changes in tension when the muscle fibre is stretched or contracted. Thus with movement of the limbs in space the brain receives information concerning joint movement and the state of muscle tension.

  Clearly, the kinaesthetic system provides a source of critical bodily information. Effortlessly, we are aware of, and continuously monitor the position, posture, and the direction of the movement of our limbs in space. Thus we easily scratch an itch that we cannot see, and we walk safely down a flight of steps without gazing directly at our feet.

  The vestibular sense

  The kinaesthetic information provided by the joints, muscles, and tendons enables the brain to know where the various body parts are relative to one another. Thus being aware of the angles of the toes, ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, and so on, enables an individual to distinguish a crouch from an upright position or from standing on one's tiptoes. Similarly, sensing the angles of the wrist, hand, and finger joints, allows the brain to recognize whether the hand is holding a small or a large object. However, such information does not tell the brain the position of the body, or how it moves with regard to the environment or to gravity. In order to obtain this sort of information the brain requires an additional class of position information.

  Saccule and utricle

  Awareness of body position, equilibrium, and movement in space arises from the two vestibular structures that lie within the inner ear. The first vestibular structure is comprised of two small sacs, the saccule and the utricle, which are attached to the auditory structures of the inner ear (see Figure 6 ). These two vestibular sacs are lined with hair-like, cilia receptors that are covered with extremely small calcium crystals. When you are relatively stationary and stand upright the force of gravity forces downward movement of the calcium crystals and bends the cilia lining the bottom surface of the sacs; when you abruptly move your head, such as when jumping downward, the mass of calcium particles lags somewhat because of inertial forces, thus bending the cilia lining the top surface of the sacs. In fact, any sort of linear movement bends and excites specific cilia producing a consequent discharge of attached nerve fibres and sends an appropriate message to the brain. Thus in a very real sense the saccule and utricle serve as gravity detectors and inform an individual which way is "up" and which way is "down". They also signal changes

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  The Self in Question

  Memory, The Body and Self-Consciousness

  • Andy Hamilton(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  4 Proprioception and Self-Consciousness (1): Proprioception as Direct, Immediate Knowledge of the Body

  We now turn from memory to proprioception. This chapter and the following one apply the same treatment to proprioception and bodily identity, involving conceptual holism, as that applied to memory and personal identity. The faculty or capacity of proprioception is both familiar – because it underlies the possibility of action – yet mysterious. It yields ordinary knowledge of bodily position and movement – what is loosely termed “bodily awareness”. Yet in Philosophy it has until quite recently been neglected; indeed, in my experience the issues it raises remain unfamiliar to general philosophical audiences. Hence a rather fuller account of the nature of proprioception is required than in the case of memory. This chapter aims to demystify proprioception by considering both Phenomenological and Gibsonian accounts. There is important common ground between Gibson’s position and that of Phenomenology, both influenced by Gestalt psychology, and a philosophical treatment of the body and self-consciousness should draw on each.

  The varieties of proprioception are complex. The core capacity yields knowledge of bodily position and movement. Strictly speaking, kinaesthesis , often used as equivalent to proprioception, is knowledge of movement of parts of the body, as opposed to their posture or position.1 Other varieties of proprioception include knowledge of fatigue and warmth and cold (as opposed to merely feeling tired, hot, or cold); the inner ear’s vestibular system that gives information about balance and posture; interoception (the visceral sense); and “visual proprioception”, the term coined by J. J. Gibson for the kinaesthetic function of vision, enabling the subject to differentiate between a change of place by the observer, reversible by moving back to the original position of observation, and a change of state of an external object.2 Interoception yields knowledge of the non-muscular organs, blood-vessels, and intestines, and is a function of the autonomic nervous system.3

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  The Bodily Roots of Experience in Psychotherapy

  • Ruella Frank(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Through varied kinesthetic qualities of experience, or movement in awareness, the body reveals its potentiality for affective capacity, and we immediately and directly experience the situation we are living. We listen or attend to our self-movements and feel the subtleties of our creative and spontaneous adjusting within the evolving situation. Our kinesthetic capacity allows us to attend to ourselves and to others. It is, in fact, a most unique sense that provides the subject with greater awareness of its own and the other's body. Husserl describes this process as “kinesthetic consciousness”; this is not a consciousness of movement but a capacity to move freely, spontaneously, and responsively. It is the experience of subjectivity. That is, a bodily disposition that enables us to apprehend the body of the other as we apprehend our own: “My feeling in the other's presence… says something about me, about the other, about the situation, about the atmosphere, about our encounter” (Robine 2015, 41). Kinesthetic experiences, continuous internally facilitated sensitivities to moving, cannot be suppressed (Jeannerod 2006). They are always already and irrepressibly part of self-experience. We can, however, either bring them to awareness or obscure them. And when brought forth, valuable information regarding our condition and the state of our world becomes available. Conversely, when the potentiality of kinesthesia is diminished, the possibilities of the environment remain concealed. What can be decidedly obtained from the other is lost. Through affective experiences, we directly and immediately consider the situation we are living in a pre-reflective, pre-conscious, pre-personal way. Such evaluations are aesthetic by nature in that they enfold what we experience into aesthetic assessment (Paterson 2012). That is, the situation unveils itself to us through a variety of felt qualities and combinations of quality; aesthetic evaluations that are experienced through moving

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  A Theory of Consciousness

  • Arnold Schultz(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Philosophical Library/Open Road

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER I

  CHARGE AND Kinesthesis

  There are different types of motor responses that depend on their integral nervous organization, and these types issue in different types of perception and thinking, for motor responses are at the very heart of all our living experience. Some of these types are nervously more comfortable than others, some of them are far more intelligent, and some of them report quite disparate things about the nature of the world in which we live. The present chapter is concerned with the description and the explanation of two principal kinds of nervous impulsation that may innervate a motor discharge.

  There is a general agreement in both psychology and common sense that movements arouse sensations and that the sensations are factors in our consciousness of the movements. In general, it has been assumed that the sensations belong to a single genre called kinesthetic sensations, differing, to be sure, in quantity and location, but always identical in their fundamental quality. Kinesthetic sensations arise from sensory end organs that are buried among the muscle fibers and that are stimulated by the contraction of the muscle. Neurophysiologists have isolated and studied various kinds of end organs in detail, the most important distinction being between those reporting passive stretch (as when someone else moves one of our limbs) and those reporting active tension (as when the muscle fibers contract under their own power). Whether the movement is active or passive, the sensation, so it is implied, is one of a peculiar substantiality and thickness. Certainly this is the sensation one is likely to notice if he especially looks to see what a particular movement of the body feels like. There is no quarrel here with the interpretation that the sensation of thickness and substantiality is a kinesthetic sensation; indeed, it is hoped that the reader can identify the sensation unmistakably, for this is the meaning assigned to the term as it is used over and over again in subsequent analyses. It is denied here, however, that kinesthetic sensations are the only sort to which a movement can give rise; indeed, it is asserted that we can be conscious of a movement without feeling any kinesthetic sensation whatsoever.

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  Attention and Performance Xiii

  Motor Representation and Control

  • Marc Jeannerod(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Since the beginning of the century when Sherrington (1900; p. 1006) claimed that "muscular sense is based on a specific set of sensations, obtained by specific sense organs in muscles, tendons and joints," there has been much controversy about the contribution of muscular information to the central representation of human motor activities. Without going into the details of this controversy (see Matthews, 1982; McCloskey, 1978; Roll, 1981 for reviews), we would just mention here that nowadays the role of sensory feedback in the elaboration of posture and movement conscious coding is no longer a matter of debate. What remain to be established are the respective roles played by central signals arising from the motor command, the so-called efferent copy or corollary discharges (Sperry, 1950; Von Hoist & Mittelstaedt, 1950), and by the peripheral messages elicited by ongoing motor activities. The final proof that muscular feedback contributes to the awareness of movement and posture was provided by the finding that in humans it is possible to induce illusory sensations of movement by vibration, the characteristics of which (direction, speed, duration) depend on the stimulus parameters. This applies both to single-limb and whole-body illusory movements (Bonnet, Roll, & Lacour, 1973; Eklund, 1972; Goodwin, McCloskey, & Matthews, 1972; Roll & Vedel, 1982).

  By manipulating muscle proprioception by means of mechanical vibration applied to one or several muscles simultaneously, it is therefore possible to induce complex kinaesthetic sensations with specific, predictable spatio-temporal characteristics (Gilhodes, Roll, & Tardy-Gervet, 1986). This suggests that each movement, or motor pattern, is closely associated with a specific sensory set that might reflect the movement execution features. The fact that artificially elicited afferent messages suffice to evoke the corresponding movement sensations supports the idea that the former at least partly mediates the awareness of the latter (Roll, 1987).

  Kinaesthetic illusions of this kind can involve any of the body segments and/or the whole body, depending on the functional role of the stimulated muscle and the particular postural context. For example, we have shown that it is possible to use vibration to manipulate extraocular proprioception in order to elicit illusory head, trunk, or whole-body movements that depend on the subject's posture (subject sitting or standing, with head fixed or free) (Roll & Roll, 1987). These data suggest that the direction of the subject's gaze, via the associated extraocular proprioceptive information, may play a key role in the organization of body posture along with the other proprioceptive information arising from the various body segments.

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