Dr. V.K. Maheshwari, Ph.D

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Se. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.

— Percy W. Bridgman

A concept is a class of stimuli which have common characteristics. These stimuli are objects, events, or persons. These stimuli are objects, events, or persons. We ordinarily designate a concept by its name, such as book, war, and student, or dedicated teachers. All these concepts refer to classes or categories of stimuli. Concepts are not always congruent with our personal experience, but they represent human attempts to classify our experience at least crudely.

Concepts are distinguished by their attributes and the values of their attributes. Some concepts have more attributes than others and that some attributes are more dominant or obvious than others. Concepts with a few obvious attributes are easier to learn than concepts with several obscure attributes. As a teacher  you must determine the number and relative dominance must be given special emphasis. Large numbers of attributes can be reduced by ignoring some and focusing attention on others of by combining the attributes into a smaller number of patterns. Identifying the type of concept you are teaching makes clear the relationship of the attributes and the possible level of difficulty of the concept. Conjunctive concepts are generally (but not always) easier to learn than disjunctive or relational concepts. The student, of course, should learn the same relationship of the attributes which you used in identifying the type of concept with which you are dealing.

A principle is a statement of the relationship between two or more concepts. Principles are sometimes called rules or generalizations. A fundamental  truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.

Types of Concepts

Attributes combine in three different ways to produce three types of concepts:

A. Conjunctive Concepts

B. Disjunctive Concepts

C. Relational Concept

Conjunctive Concepts

In Conjunctive concept the appropriate values of several attributes are jointly present. They are often the easiest to learn and to teach because of the additive quality of attributes and values. More simply, attributes and values are added together to produce a conjunctive concept. The student must simply learn a list of attributes and appropriate values.

Disjunctive Concepts

A disjunctive concept is one that can  be defined in a number of different ways. In such a concept, attitudes and values are substituted for one another. Disjunctive concepts are often difficult to learn because of the seemingly arbitrary equivalence of their attributes. Disjunctive concepts are, in effect, rules which the student must learn to apply to equivalent stimulus situations.

Relational Concept

A relational concept is one that has a specifiable relationship between attributes, like time ,many, few, average, longitude, mass and weight etc.. These concepts are more difficult to learn. Since the concept does not adhere in the attributes themselves but in a particular relationship of the attributes, it is easy for the child ( and even the adult ) to become confused.

Uses of concepts and Principles

There are various ways in which concepts are useful in the student’s education and one way (as stereotypes) in which they are not always useful but are at least influential.

Concepts reduce the complexity of the environment

As concepts are not particular stimuli, but classes of stimuli. If one is forced to respond to each stimulus one encountered as unique, the complexity of the world would overwhelm us. This complexity is especially evident with the present knowledge explosion, which forces us to develop efficient categories of information to spare ourselves the distraction of  fine detail. The fact that we can group events into classes is an important source of mastery over our environment.

The learning of concepts and principles, therefore, enables the student to grasp, in an array of environment stimuli, similarities and dissimilarities and differences which he would otherwise have great difficulty coping with. Education, in this sense gives the student environment mastery which he would otherwise lack.

Concepts help us to identify the objects of the world around us

This use is closely related to the first use, we have described. Identification involves placing an object in a class and, therefore, reducing the complexity of the environment. Identification are never absent from our experience.

Concepts and Principles provide direction for instrumental activity

By using concepts and principles we know in advance the actions we can take; placing the object or person in the right class enables us to arrive at important decisions. This use is probably very important in problem solving. In problem solving, it is possible that we try different classes for an object until we find one that it fits in and one that solve the problem.

Concepts and Principles make instruction possible

The steps involve for the teaching of concepts and principles are largely embodied in a set of verbal instructions. These instructions would not be possible if the student have not already learned some concepts and principles.

Suggested Instructional Procedure for The Teaching of Concepts

Jhon P.De Cecco and William Crawford describe the teaching of concepts as a series of seven steps which conform to the four components of the basic teaching model. Step 1 and 2 pertain to instructional objectives. Step 1 requires a statement of the objective and step 2, a type of task analysis. Step 3 provides the student with the appropriate entering behavior. Step 4 through 6 is specific instructional procedures for concept teaching and step 7 deals with performance assessment.

Step One-

Describe the Performance Expected of the Student After He Has Learned the Concept

In the case of concept learning, the expected performance is the correct identification of new examples of the concept. For the concept direct object, this could be the expected performance; When given new examples of direct objects in English sentences, the student will correctly identify them. You will note that this description of terminal behavior requires a performance quite different from rattling off this definition; A direct object is a noun or pronoun which receives the action of a verb. The student might very well memorize the definition and fail to identify direct objects. And, conceivably, the student could correctly identify direct objects and not give a very good definition. The description of the expected behavior should not include the requirement that the student give a definition of the concept.

Describing terminal behavior has two purposes. First, the teacher has a means for assessing the adequacy of the performance and for determining the need for further instruction. The teacher at a given point in time may not desire that the students for completely able to identify and use the concept. In the beginning, for example, the teacher may be quite satisfied to have the students recognize direct objects only in simple English sentences. Later, he may want the students to recognize direct objects in compound sentences in both dependent and independent clauses. Still later he may want the students to use direct objects in various sentence contexts. The prior description of the students’ expected performance  clearly indicates to the teacher and to the students the degree of adequacy the students are to attain at a particular time. Second, the students have a way of assessing their own performance and of determining when their learning is complete. The students’ self-assessments then become a way of generation their own reinforcement.

Step Two

Reduce the Number of Attributes to be learned in Complex Concepts and Make Important Attributes Dominant

In this step what you learned about the values, number, dominance and relationship of attributes can be put to pedagogical use. This step requires you to make an analysis to the concepts you decide to teach your students. The determination of the values and the number of attributes can be made before instruction is underway. The determination of the dominance of the attributes requires experimentation on your part and observation of which important attributes students are likely to ignore. After you have made these determinations, you must devise procedures for teaching the concept. Two general procedures reduce the number of attributes of complex concepts: You can ignore some of the attributes and focus on those you think most important, or you can code the attributes into fewer patterns. The choice of which attributes to ignore requires that the teacher have considerable familiarity with the concept and its ordinary use. For a complete comprehension of the concept, the learner would have to learn all the attributes listed.

Step Three

Provide the Student with Useful Verbal Mediators

The teacher should ascertain the child’s knowledge of the words used as attributes and attribute values and his knowledge of the relational words that are necessary. In this step you can see how verbal and concept learning are related. Considerable evidence indicates that the learning of certain names or labels (as verbal mediators ) facilitates the student’s learning of a concept. Some studies even indicate the type of verbal association which can be most helpful. THIS STEP PRIMARILY CONCERNS ENTERING BEHAVIOUR. In this step we establish the verbal associations necessary for learning the  concept. We are beginning to realize that verbal learning and concept learning have much in common.

Step Four

Provide Positive and Negative Examples of the Concept

In discussing this step, we shall use the word EXAMPLE rather than INSTANCE or EXAMPLER since EXAMPLE is used more frequently in discussions of teaching. A positive example of a concept is one which contains the attributes of the concept. A negative example is one which does not contain one or more of  the attributes For example the positive examples of the concept of bird are canary, hummingbird, and robin , while negative examples are dog, cat, snake, fly, bee , and even bat. The research on the concept learning indicates that provision of negative and positive examples is a major condition of learning. We can even say that the use of positive and negative examples is an essential condition for the learning of concepts. The presentation of mixed series of positive and negative examples is usually more effective than the presentation of a purely positive or a purely negative series.. Presentation of only negative examples makes concept learning extremely difficult. As for number, you should present enough positive examples to represent the range of attributes and attribute value. In the case of negative examples, you should present at least enough of these to eliminate irrelevant attributes which students are likely to include as part of the concept.

Step Five

Present the Examples in Close Succession or Simultaneously.

In this step we are concerned with the order in which the examples as a whole and the types of examples are presented to the learner. The learning condition which this step seeks to provide is contiguity- the almost simultaneous presentation of the examples of the concept. A study by Kates and Yudin indicates the presentation you can make; SUCCESSIVE PRESENTATION, in which one example is shown at a time and removed after twenty seconds; a FOCUS CONDITION, in which two examples are presented together- the focus example (which is always positive) and the new example ( which is positive or negative ) and the SIMULTANEOUS PRESENTATION , in which each new example is shown with all the previous examples remaining in view. They found that simultaneous presentation was better than the focus condition, in which, in turn, was better  than successive presentation. Apparently, simultaneous presentation is superior because the student does not have to rely upon memory for previous examples.

Step Six

Provide Occasions for Student Responses and the Reinforcement of these Responses

Student responses and reinforcement of these responses are crucial learning conditions for concept learning. The primary purpose of reinforcement is to provide informational feedback to the student  on the correctness of his responses. Since this feedback is crucial, any inconsistency, delay, or failure to provide it will impair student learning. However because the student knows which terminal behavior he must acquire, he can to some extent monitor his own learning. Since reinforcement has motivational aspects, negative verbal feedback may impair concept learning by discouraging the student from making early guesses which can be confirmed. The teacher should remember to focus on the reinforcement of the student’s responses and not on the student. The mode of response should not be shifted, at least in the early learning of the concept. It is quite possible however, that the shift from spoken or written responses is less inhibiting than the shift from drawing to writing or writing to drawing. Various mechanical and electronic devices may maintain consistency of response mode and informational feedback better than we can now do under ordinary class room conditions. These same contrivances may also provide students with more occasions for reinforced practice than we can provide.

Step Seven

Assess the Learning of the Concept

In this step you are providing both contiguity and reinforcement. Here you should present several new positive and negative examples of the concept and ask the student to select only the positive examples. The available evidence does not indicate weather this step is necessary  fo concept learning. It is important in concept teaching because it is our means for assessing the students performance. It also provides the student with additional opportunities to make responses for which he can obtain his own or the teacher’s reinforcement or both.

Suggested Instructional Procedure for the Teaching of Principles

We shall now describe the teaching of principles as a series of six steps. Steps 1 and 2 pertain chiefly to instructional objectives,. Step 2 requires a task analysis. Step 2 also specifies the prerequisite entering behavior, while step 3 assists the student in the use of the appropriate entering behavior. Step 4 and 5 provide the essential learning conditions of contiguity, practice, and reinforcement. Step 6 pertains chiefly to performance assessment.

Step One

Describe the Performance Expected of the Student after He has learned the Principle

As in the case of concept learning, , this step allows the student to monitor his own performance and to generate his own reinforcement

Step Two

Decide and Indicate which Concepts or Principles the Student must recall

In this step, you must analyze the principle to determine what the component concepts are, and you must assess the entering behavior of the student to determine whether he has mastered these concepts.

Step Three

Assist the Student in the recall of Component Concepts

In this step you provide contiguity by having the student simultaneously recall the component concepts.

Step Four

Help the Student to Combine the Concepts in the Proper Order

In this step you also provide contiguity of concepts and  contiguity for the proper relationship of the concepts. The student’s learning requires guidance here. It is not enough to ask him to order the concepts properly. Your questions must guide the ordering.

Step Five

Provide for Practice of the Principle and for Reinforcement of Student Responses

We may well assume, if steps 1 through 4 are properly enacted, that the student knows the principle and that no further practice is necessary. Instructional conditions, however, are not always  optimal, and there is usually the practical necessity of providing for review and reinforcement beyond the original learning situation. In the case of plurals, students have the opportunity to identify plurals in their reading and to form them in their writing. Of course , the instructor must monitor the students’ practice and reinforce correct responses and point out incorrect ones. Reinforced practice of a principle is particularly  crucial when the learning of one principle interferes with the retention of others.

Step Six

Assess the Learning of the Principle

Here we must refer to step 1 to remind ourselves what performance we selected as our instructional objective. Our objective indicates that it is not enough to give the student a list of positive and negative examples. To be certain that the student has not given a rote definition, you should test further to determine how well he has acquired the new principle.

I once knew an otherwise excellent teacher who compelled his students to perform all their demonstrations with incorrect figures, on the theory that it was the logical connection of the concepts, not the figure, that was essential.

— Ernst Mach

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Se. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that’s there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile.

~Edward Zwick

Abreaction is an automatic, unconscious reaction that a person has in response to a stimulus, which reminds the person of a situation they experienced before. It is the bringing to the surface of unpleasant suppressed thoughts and feelings in such a way that their being felt, emotionally, out in the open, lessens their power or hold over a person, and sometimes can seem to extinguish them completely. Abreaction is like a reverse lightning-rod, for it can “ground” tempestuous psychic energies that exist inside a person, in order that such energies will lose their power on the outside.

With roots in ancient religious practices of purification and cleansing and in ancient medicine’s purging’s, Plato evolved a verbal catharsis for diseases of the soul, and Aristotle developed a catharsis of the passions through tragic drama. Through the centuries, most cultures have had recognized contexts in which emotions were evoked, heightened in intensity, and ultimately released or discharged; and cathartic procedures can be detected in many cultures’ healing practices. The late decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of numerous psychological healings with a cathartic basis. Catharsis came to mean the lively remembering of a traumatic experience in addition to the emotional release; and the term abreaction frequently was used to refer to the emotional release..

The principle of catharsis has been generally recognized as important since Aristotle’s discussion of it.  To have ‘a good cry’ is a well known popular remedy for emotional stress; . Freud earlier writings seemed to give new emphasis and precision to the practice of catharsis. In early papers he described a process which he proposed to call the ABREACTION of repressed emotions, ascribing great therapeutic value to it.. The assumption underlying the practice of abreaction was the forgotten or repressed ‘ideas’ were beset by a charge of emotional energy or Libido;  and that process of abreaction discharges  this energy from the system and thus gets rid of what was a sort of irritant, comparable to a foreign body encysted in a living tissue.

Some psychologists give great importance to  abreaction. Dr O Pfister, for example, in a section headed ‘The Necessity for Abreaction ‘ writes : “If an idea accompanied by strong emotion is re[pressed and fortified by  its autistic gain of pleasure, the instinct to which this idea belongs, suffers, with in a circle of activity, a damming up which often persists for a life time…. That which was buried remains unchanged under the thick covering, under excavation it disintegrates;….. the analysis first creates the possibility of freeing the imprisoned instinct.” But he does not seem to be content with the notion of abreaction as a simple discharge of a bottled-up quantity of energy. He speaks of the abreaction as “ outlet by expressive movement and associative connection,” but also as a “ mental outcropping of the unconscious which exposes it to the light of consciousness; thus with the becoming conscious and acceptance of the  analytic interpretation, the manifestation will have to fade… like a developed but unfixed photographic negative in the daylight.” Here Pfister puts forward a somewhat crude view of the curative process that has enjoyed a certain vogue,  the view that consciousness is a sort of light which like sunlight , has antiseptic power, and that this power deodorizes and renders harmless in some mysterious fashion, the stinking complexes hauled up from the depths of “ the unconscious.”

Dr. William Brown has made the most whole-hearted recent defense of Abreaction. “Dr. Bwon’s paper raises some very difficult and important questions which go far beyond that of the therapeutic value of ‘abreaction’.

“The immediate practical question is – Does ‘abreaction,’ the revival of the emotion which is presumed to have accompanied the disturbing experience and to have played some part in bringing on the neurotic symptoms—does this, in itself, relieve the symptoms or play any direct and essential part in curing the disorder?

“Those who return a positive answer to this question seem to take their stand on two distinct grounds.

“(1) They claim to have observed that relief of symptoms does often follow immediately upon such ‘ abreaction.’

“(2) They offer an explanation of this relief; which explanation, they claim, renders the alleged facts intelligible and brings them into line with more general principles of the mental life. The more general principle chiefly concerned is the Freudian conception of an emotion as a quantum of energy, comparable to a charge of electricity, which may become attached to any idea, and many remain so attached through long periods of time without giving any sign of activity or change; or may become detached from one idea and reattached to another, giving to it dynamic properties and various capacities for playing havoc with the life of the patient. Some such conception of the emotions seems to underlie the Freudian principles of ‘transference,’ ‘transposition,’ and ‘sublimation’ as well as ‘abreaction.’

Those of us who are not inclined to accept Prof. Freud’s every suggestion as established truth will feel that this way of conceiving emotions smacks too much of the old theory of ideas, according to which an idea is an entity capable of being somehow stored in the mind and brought out for further use on successive occasions. And we shall fear that the acceptance of this way of describing the facts of our emotional life may lead to much the same difficulties, confusions, and errors as those which are now generally recognized to be the inevitable results of the acceptance of the ‘idea’ theory.

The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn’t be in flashback.
~Alain Resnais

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D. Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed. Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

“We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”

― Gloria Steinem

It is a question that has been asked in many different ways, in multiple contexts ‘ which is the smarter sex’- male or female?’ .The question has a long and turbulent history entangled with belief about the appropriate roles of males and females. The question of whether female or male are smarter presupposes that it can be answered with the valid comparison can be made  that ‘ female’ ,’male’ or ‘neither’ are the possible answer.

More significant than differences in male and female intelligence, according to Anne Anastasi, is the immense amount of overlap. She reminds us of Samual Jhonson’s reply when asked whether man or woman was more intelligent; “ which man, which woman” . This view  challenges our stereotypes of men and women. In fact, much evidence points to the wide individual differences found within each sex.

The overall IQ scores of boys and girls are very similar. There is some evidence that sex differences exist for particular kinds of cognitive abilities Review of a number of studies has shown that females are superior in language skills, verbal fluency, and reading, while males are superior in mathematical reasoning and spatial abilities (Oetzel, 1966). While neither sex is sup the two sexes show different patterns of intellectual abilities.

These have been supported by several researchers. Some argue that intellectual differences between sexes reflect different child-rearing practice; socio-cultural training. The parents and the society train boys and differently in terms of what to expect from them. It is known that intelligence related to personality characteristics.

Boys are socialized in a way so promote self-reliance and competence, which are positively correlate intelligence. On the other hand, the traits are discouraged in girls so mi that high intelligence is often considered a masculine quality.

The sex differences also partly result from the fact that many items standardized intelligence tests are biased in favor of the male population. Hence sex differences are the products of the test itself. Researchers differ in their convictions regarding sex differences. A group of researchers that sex differences are reflections of constitutional and genetic difference between males and females. The most reasonable conclusion is that differential abilities are the products of some combination of genetic and environmental factors.

In the light of these intellectual differences it is interesting to compare performance of the sexes on the standardized achievement test and their school performance.

Keeping in mind the great degree of overlap, we can compare the performance of two sexes in various physical and mental activities Advantage in the major intellectual functions ( verbal and numerical reasoning ) is well divided between the males and females. Whereas  the girls have the verbal advantage and considered as ‘word smart’, in linguistic/verbal intelligence   the boys have the advantage in numerical reasoning

On the standardized achievement test the boys surpass the girls in those subjects requiring numerical reasoning, spatial aptitudes, and the retention of certain information in such subjects as history, geography and science. The girls surpass the boys in subjects which require verbal abilities, memory, perceptual speed, and accuracy. These differences in test performance are consistent with the differences in aptitude.

Most studies show that despite sometimes significant differences in subtest scores, men and women have the same average IQ. Women perform better on tests of memory and verbal proficiency for example, while men perform better on tests of mathematical and spatial ability. Although gender-related differences in average IQ are insignificant, male scores display a higher variance: there are more men than women with both very high and very low IQ

In actual school performance, however the girls consistently surpass the  boys . That is, the girls obtain better school grades, whether the subject is language, literature, arithmetic, science history, and so on. When compared with boys receiving the same achievement test scores, girls even surpass boys in school grades. This difference in school performance persists throughout high school and college.. Annastasi suggests several reasons for the superior school performance of the girls. Their superior verbal ability gives them the advantage both in responding to instruction and in testing, both of which, of course, are predominantly verbal. Also, girls tend to be more docile than boys-less resistant to school routine and more resistant to out-of-school distractions. The predominance of women teachers in elementary school enables the girls to identify more quickly to girls than to boys.

Paradoxically, career and success belong to the men rather than to the women. Despite the superior academy ability and achievement of the women, vocational achievement is virtually a male monopoly. In the Terman studies of gifted children, the adult careers of the women were very undistinguished. A very small number engaged in university teaching, creative writing, art, and research, but two-thirds of those with IQs of 170 and above were office workers or housewives. Follow-up testing also indicated that the mean IQ of the women tended to drop at a faster rate than that of the men.

The picture is very clear. The stereotype of women as housewife, mother, companion, and social catalyst make it difficult for the female of intellectual ability and aspiration to distinguish herself in the  professional or semiprofessional world without the risk of losing some of her femininity  in the eyes of her  would be male competitors and her conservative female friends.. I t is not at all uncommon in the high schools and colleges to see the girl of superior intellectual ability and of average physical appearance displaying more interest in social than  in academic achievement. The last veil which the women must surrender for her full emancipation is the one that now hides her intellectual capacities.

All through life there were distinctions – toilets for men, toilets for women; clothes for men, clothes for women – then, at the end, the graves are identical.”
― Leila Aboulela, Minaret

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D. Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed. Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

Fatigue is a word by which we denote the diminished efficiency of the organism that seems to result from intense and sustained activity and which during a period of rest and more especially of sleep, gives place to full efficiency. A Fatigue can be described as the lack of energy and motivation (both physical and mental).

Physical fatigue – the person’s muscles cannot do things as easily as they used to. Physical fatigue is also known as muscle weakness, weakness, or lack of strength.
Psychological (mental) fatigue – concentrating on things has become harder. People may feel sleepy; have a decreased level of consciousness, and in some cases show signs similar to that of an intoxicated state.

Causes of fatigue

The possible causes of fatigue are virtually endless. Below are some (by no means all) possible causes of fatigue:

• Mental health (psychiatric) – when stress levels become excessive, they can easily cause fatigue. Stress and worry are two emotions that commonly cause tiredness
  Clinical depression can cause tiredness for several reasons. Fatigue may be caused by the depression itself, or one of the problems associated with depression,.
• Metabolic – Cushing’s disease, kidney disease, electrolyte problems, diabetes, hypothyroidism, anemia, kidney disease, and liver disease.
• Drugs/Medications – some antidepressants, antihypertensive, steroids, antihistamines, medication withdrawal, sedatives, and anti-anxiety drugs.
• Heart and lung conditions - pneumonia, arrhythmias, asthma, ,  heart disease, coronary heart disease, and congestive heart failure.
• Sleep problems – working till late at night, jet lag, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia, and reflux esophagitis.
• Chronic pain – patients with chronic pain typically wake up tired, even after having slept for a long time. For many, pain disrupts their sleep, which also leaves them tired.
• Overweight and underweight – overweight/obesity is a rapidly growing problem in much of the world today.

The fatigued condition is revealed by symptoms or signs of two kinds, the objective and the subjective. The objective signs are drooping bodily attitudes, sluggish motions, and diminished efficiency. The subjective signs again are of two kinds, namely, localized bodily sensations of fatigue and a general sense of inefficiency, of difficulty in energizing, of lack of energy.

Factors responsible for fatigue

That which one call fatigue is no entity, and can not be accounted for in terms of any one kind of physiological change. Definitely the using up of reserve stores of energy is one factor. This factor may with advantage be called’ exhaustion’  we then recognize exhaustion  as one of the factors of the syndrome we call fatigue. In some instances of fatigue it is of predominant, in others of relatively slight, importance.

A second great factor is the presence in the blood and tissues of products of metabolism which, acting both on the brain and on other tissues, and locally as well as in more diffuse manner, somehow retard metabolism.

A third principal factor is fatigue-sensation. This is a special quality of sensory impression excited in the afferent nerve-endings of muscles (and perhaps in other allied tissues, such as tendons and ligaments) in consequence of intense or prolonged activity. The nature of the stimulus, is not known, it may be chemical in part or whole. But, whatever the stimulus, the afferent currents excited in this way seem to have an inhibitory effect.  If one  hold out his right arm horizontally for half an hour, he begin, after a few seconds, to experience sensory effects, localized in the deltoid and other shoulder muscles; these sensations grow gradually more intense, and at the same time one  find it necessary to put forth more and more effort to sustain the limb.

These two effects increase together during the first five minutes or so, and then seem to attain a maximum. If in spite of them I persist with his task, these local effects seem to diminish rather that to increase; but he become aware of a more central, less definable form of fatigue, an increasing difficulty in sustaining his effort. And at the end of half an hour I give up, feeling exhausted and aware that only some new and stronger motive could enable him to persist in his effort for a still longer time. Yet he has not expended any great amount of energy. If he had walked briskly for the same length of time, or swung a pair of clubs, he should have done much more muscular work.

The fatigue induced has, then, been essentially local. But though local it is not wholly a matter of the changes occurring in the muscles and other peripheral tissues. The local conditions are in the  central nervous system also and there they are of two fold nature. There is a general inhibitory effect which I experience as something to be overcome by increased effort. It is probable that this may be rightly conceived as an obscure instinctive impulse to relaxation, to seek repose. But there is in all probability an actual blocking of the efferent nerve channels through which may effort innervates the deltoid muscle. This is indicated in two ways: first, the impulse to relax in general, it is not only an impulse to relax this effort but an impulse to general relaxation and repose; yet, if I relax my right arm, I can raise and sustain my left arm in spite of this impulse, with very much less effort, less will-power, than is required to persist in sustaining the right arm. Secondly, as I sustain my right arm, it begins to show tremors and coarse irregular slight movements which I cannot altogether prevent, and my innervation spreads more and more widely, overflowing into muscles that have no direct part in sustaining the arm.

There is good reason to believe that this local central fatigue has its main locus in the synapses upon the efferent path, perhaps chiefly in those at the spinal level. The synapses are the weak points, and the points of  varying resistance, in the neural channels (the neurons themselves are extraordinarily resistant to fatigue), The synapses are susceptible to the influence of various drugs. I have shown reason to believe that they are subject to a rapidly oncoming fatigue (probable of the nature of self-poisoning) when kept in continued action; an effect which is rapidly removed as the blood washes away the products of metabolism.

During long-continued activity of brain and body the poisonous products of metabolism become diffused through all the tissues and body fluids. Then these products act upon all the synapses of the brain, raising their resistances to the passage of the nervous current; thus rendering all bodily and mental tasks more difficult, and tending to reduce me to  passivity and sleep by way of this relative isolation of each neuron from its fellows; this is partial dissociation of all my nervous system.

After long-sustained activity of a varied kind, I am reduced to a condition is which I can only with the utmost difficulty resist the onset of sleep. I feel utterly tired; and, as soon as I sit down to rest, my eyes tend irresistibly to close and I fall asleep. No task that can be set the will is more severe, more trying, than that of resisting sleep in such conditions. Many a tired soldier has fallen asleep at his post, thought he knew that his yielding meant death and disgrace. In this condition the two factors of exhaustion and general diffuse poisoning of the brain by products of metabolism are probably of chief importance.

“Our fatigue is often caused not by work, but by worry, frustration and resentment”

Dale Carnegie

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Se. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.”

~Bertrand Russell

Hallucination is ‘seeing what isn’t there, or a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside the mind, caused by various physical and mental disorders, or by reaction to certain toxic substances, and usu. manifested as visual or auditory images.

It is the sensation caused by a hallucinatory condition or the object or scene visualized., a false belief or impression; illusion; delusion in more technical terms, to hallucinate is to think of remote objects with sensory vividness.

Delusions are false or erroneous beliefs that usually involve a misinterpretation of perceptions or experiences. Their content may include a variety of themes (e.g., persecutory, referential, somatic, religious, or grandiose).

Delusions are a symptom of some mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, delusional disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and schizophreniform disorder. Hallucinations, on the other hand, tend to only appear in people with schizophrenia or a psychotic disorder.

Persecutory delusions are most common; the person believes he or she is being tormented, followed, tricked, spied on, or ridiculed

Referential delusions are also common; the person believes that certain gestures, comments, passages from books, newspapers, song lyrics, or other environmental cues are specifically directed at him or her.

The distinction between a delusion and a strongly held idea is sometimes difficult to make and depends in part on the degree of conviction with which the belief is held despite clear contradictory evidence regarding its veracity.

Although bizarre delusions are considered to be especially characteristic of schizophrenia, “bizarreness” may be difficult to judge, especially across different cultures. Delusions are deemed bizarre if they are clearly implausible and not understandable and do not derive from ordinary life experiences. Delusions that express a loss of control over mind or body are generally considered to be bizarre; these include a person’s belief that his or her thoughts have been taken away by some outside force , that alien thoughts have been put into his or her mind , or that his or her body or actions are being acted on or manipulated by some outside force .

Hallucination may or may not be accompanied by delusion, by belief in the physical reality and presence of the object hallucinated. The more vivid and persistent the hallucination is, the more apt the subject to believe in the reality and presence of the object. Probably most normal persons have occasionally hallucinated; but persistent hallucination is one of the most common symptoms of mental disorder.

It is not possible to draw any sharp line between hallucination and illusion, or false interpretation of sense-impressions because it is not sure that some sense-impressions does not play a part in the genesis of hallucination; but in practice we speak of illusion when the role of sense-impression is obvious, of hallucination when it is doubtful or of secondary importance.

At best, imagination may be an apotheosis, radiating from a source from the vaults of mind or contained there within a … boundary, where the imaginer may feel as more or less being in control of what is being imagined, organizing or potentially directing the images that pop up about behind the eyes, and perhaps masterly unfolding them further for own use and or for others,

while hallucination may be a dazzling invasion by an image or by images, in mind or as if outside before the eyes, where the person will sort of uncontrollably be exposed to such an invasion of image-s.

It seems to me that images at best may calmly glowingly be managed in the mind of the imaginer, perhaps in a delightful entertaining way; also, images may be sought transferred into narration or … into drawn or painted or in other way manufactured pictures.

Hallucinations may evoke some weird feelings, they may make you spectacularly dazzled or even scared; they may much provoke your outer behaviour so that somebody witnessing you may get feeling worried, may decide that you need help, may try and help you find a therapy, or may help you get confined within the bounds of a madhouse.

Hallucination can be classified into three forms, these are reproductive, constructive and creative hallucinations.

Reproductive  Hallucination

Reproductive  hallucination is perhaps the most frequent variety, and lends itself most readily to a simple theoretical interpretation. Some times a person in good health who has for  any reason repeatedly perceived some object or impression, or very similar objects, may seem to perceive the same object again when it is no longer present.

Kinds of Hallucination.

Hallucinations are sensations that appear real but are created by your mind. They can affect all five of your senses. For example, you might hear a voice that no one else in the room can hear or see an image that is not real. Hallucination may be of a single sense or of several at once. the latter combined hallucinations are similar to dreams, and are always accompanied by the so-called clouded or dream-like consciousness.

Auditory hallucinations

Auditory hallucinations are among the most common. You might hear someone speaking to you or telling you to do certain things. The voice may be angry, neutral, or warm. Other examples of this type of hallucination include hearing sounds, like someone walking in the attic, or repeated clicking or tapping noises.

Auditory hallucinations are usually phonemes, verbal hallucinations or “Voices” and the words heard are frequently neologisms, nonsense words created by the patient.

Visual Hallucinations

Visual hallucinations involve seeing things that aren’t there. The hallucinations may be of objects, visual patterns, people, and/or lights. For example, you might see a person who is not in the room or flashing lights that no one else can see.

Visual hallucinations may be of absent friends or relatives, angles, god, the devil, snakes, insects, written words or other symbols.

Hallucinations of taste and smell

Olfactory hallucinations involve your sense of smell. You might smell an unpleasant odor when waking up in the middle of the night or feel that your body smells bad when it doesn’t. This type of hallucination can also include scents you find enjoyable, like the smell of flowers.

Hallucinations of taste and smell are usually disagreeable, for example of poison in food, poisonous gases, or filth. They may lead to refusal of food.

Tactile hallucinations

Tactile hallucinations involve the feeling of touch or movement in your body. For example, you might feel that bugs are crawling on your skin or that your internal organs are moving around. You might also feel the imagined touch of someone’s hands on your body.

Hallucinations of pain

Hallucinations of pain are often described as prods, pricks, stabs, darts or electric shocks, or the patient may describe ghis experience by a neologism.

Kinaesthetic or motor hallucinations.

The patient may think he has moved when no actual movement has taken place; for example, he may feel as if raised from the bed or as if flying. If they are intense, the false sensation may be transformed into an actual involuntary movement; and the patient may ascribe this movement to demonical possession vision of a single object, the Aristotelian illusion, and the geometric optic illusions. These normal illusions will not be considered further here.

Theories of Hallucination

There are numerous theoretical explanations for hallucination. Few important ones are as follows:

The theory of secondary sensations.

According to Sidis all hallucinations belong to the same order of phenomena as synesthesia. In other words, hallucinations are unusual and intense secondary sensations. This author defines perception and a combination of primary and secondary sensations; and in hallucination the secondary very much outweigh the primary in intensity, though the latter are never wanting. Normal perception, synesthesia, illusion, and hallucination represent merely four different degrees of intensity of the secondary in comparison with the primary sensations.

Centrifugal theories.

A .Psychical  hallucinations are vivid memory ideas projected outward. this is the view of Griesinger, Taine, and may of the older authors. Keaepelin also  has a group of “Apperception hallucinations” which he explains in this way. The following objections have been urged against the psychical centrifugal theory:

(a) There is a radical qualitative difference between intense images and sensations or perceptions; and (b) This view is based upon the theory of “Eccentric projection,” namely, that things are perceived int eh brain and then projected outward. (See James’s criticism)

b. Sensorial or physiological. “Hallucination is cramp of the sensory nerves” due to heightened excitability of subcortical centers or to weakened cortical inhibition. The objections are as follows:

(a) It would have to be a coordinated cramp of many sensory nerves in order to explain the combination of sensation in the hallucination; and

(b) Refluent or efferent currents in the sensory nerves are questionable, and the response of the sense organ to such currents doubtful.

. Centripetal theories.

Centripetal theories. these tend as a rule to deny the validity of Esquirol’s distinction between illulsions and hallucinations.

a. Binet’s “Point de repere” theory. There is alwyas an external object, howerer small, to serve as a starting point for hallucinatins as for illusion.

b.The physiological conception of the point de reparse. The afferent process may originate in the sense organ, sensory nerve, or even the sensory projection field, instead of being initiated be an external stimulus as in Binet’s theory. Kraepelin explains his “Elementary sense deceptions” and “Perception phantasms” in this way; and the occasional occurrence of unilateral hallucinations seems to favour the theory. The main objection is that afferent processes no matter how initiated can explain only the sensory char acted of the hallucination, and cannot account for its particular content or the fact that it is false.

Dissociation theories.

All the facts go to show that the hallucinations occurs in a dissociated state (Parish); and its content and falsity are no doubt due to this neural dissociation, that is to variation in synaptic resistance which results in the stimulus flowing into unusual cortical channels. Some form of dissociation is fundamental in the theories of Wernicke, James, Freud, and Prince.

a. Wernicke’s theory of hallucination is based upon the hypothesis of “Sejunction,” a temporary or permanent interruption of the paths followed by the nervous impulse. the nervous energy thus accumulates above the lesion; and, if the accumulations is in the psycho-sensory projection center, it sets up an abnormal irritation resulting in hallucination.

b. James’s theory is similar to Wernicke’s. Perception and ideation have the same cortical localization; but in ideation of the centers are not aroused to full activity, as the stimulation is drained off to other centres. If the flow is blocked (dissociation), the nervous energy accumulates, reaches a maximum intensity, and hallucination results.

c. Freud’s theory is based upon the activity of an unconscious mind. Hallucinations are symbolical pictureisations of the represses wishes, that is, wishes dissociated by conflict with the personal consciousness. Freud’s account is purely psychological, and from this standpoint may be correct. In other words, a a dissociated consciousness may exist and a hallucination may be a fulfilment of a wish; but this does not relieve one from the necessity of giving an explanation in neurological terms also. this theory explains only the content of the hallucination.

d. Prince believes that hallucinations may often be due to tge emergence into consciousness of  co-conscious (dissociated) images. These images although vivied remain independent of the main stram of consciousness. that is to say they are hallucinations.

Brain activity during hallucinations

Which brain areas are involved in experiencing a hallucination? Researchers havetried to answer this question with the use of modern functional neuro-imaging techniques, Neuro-imaging studies reveal a distributed network of cortical and sub-cortical areas involved in the experience of hallucinations. Although the exact role of these areas is not clear yet, it could be hypothesized that hallucinations are triggered by activity in sub-cortical and frontal areas, which in turn project to modality-specific association cortex, thereby leading to a conscious perceptual experience. With respect to auditory hallucinations, some studies observe activity in language-production areas during auditory hallucinations, some studies observe activity in the primary auditory cortex, but all studies report activity in the temporal lobe, more specifically in the middle or superior gyri. For visual hallucinations, activity is observed in secondary visual cortex.

Mechanism of hallucination.

Four approaches can be distinguished  regarding the mechanism of hallucination. These approaches focus respectively on

Inner speech

Most individuals report the experience of “inner speech” (either occasionally or continuously) when they think. Some hallucinating patients indicate that they cannot distinguish well between their inner speech and the “voices” they hear.

In addition, sub-vocal muscle activity has been reported, associated with hallucinations The “inner-speech” hypothesis of hallucinations holds that some distortion in the production of inner speech leads to the erroneous interpretation that the “inner speech” is of non-self origin.

Speech perception

According to Hoffman (Hoffman et al., 1999) a dysfunction of the speech perception system underlies auditory-verbal hallucinations. In the analysis of every-day sound characteristics, there is an important degree of acoustic ambiguity, due to background noise, and due to the “pasting” of phonemes (also called “blurring”). Syntactical and semantically expectations, based on earlier learnt words, therefore play a crucial role in speech perception. Hoffman’s hypothesis is that hallucinations arise from an impairment in verbal working-memory, Theory and findings which leads to pronounced linguistic expectations that could generate spontaneous perceptual “outputs”.

Reality monitoring

“Source monitoring” refers to the ability to distinguish between different sources of information, e.g., whether something was read in a newspaper, or whether it was told by a friend.

Reality discrimination and reality monitoring are considered to belong to this category of processes. Reality discrimination refers to distinguishing between internally generated information and externally presented information

Thus, reality discrimination refers to the “online” distinguishing of external versus internal sources, whereas reality monitoring refers to information that was presented or generated in the past. Reality discrimination measured  found that hallucinating patients made significantly more errors than non-hallucinating patients (specifically, the hallucinating patients erroneously indicated that a word had been presented in a burst of white noise).

Mental imagery

In the 19th century, Fancis Galton wrote that mental imagery exists as a continuum in the population, ranging from a total absence of mental images (subjectively) to imagery of great intensity and vividness, ending in pure hallucination (Galton, 1883). A number of studies investigated the imagery hypothesis with inconsistent results. The fact that none of the studies included adequate behavioral measures may account for this inconsistency.

The hypothesis that imagery and perception are more alike (and therefore harder to discern from each other) due to increased sensory characteristics of mental images in individuals that experience hallucinations thus predicts that these subjects will show smaller performance differences between a perception and an imagery condition of the same task.

Integrating the various perspectives

Despite the differences between these four cognitive approaches, there is also some conceptual overlap, which makes the possibility of integration especially attractive. Indeed, it could be argued that two earlier theories, namely the proposals of Frith  and of Grossberg incorporate elements of more than one approach.

Frith’s theory can be seen as an integration of the “inner speech” hypothesis and the reality monitoring hypothesis. According to Frith, hallucinations arise from failures in the monitoring of own intentions during inner speech (sometimes called ‘selfmonitoring’ by Frith). As a consequence, the cognitive system does not recognize that inner speech originates from the self, and thus erroneously attributes it to a non-self source. Thus, this approach does not consider the production of inner speech to be impaired, but rather states that auditory hallucinations are derived from defective monitoring of inner speech.

A different approach to hallucinations has been described by Grossberg (2000), based on the finding that top-down perceptual expectations can importantly affect the detection of stimuli

Grossberg  recently hypothesized, under normal behavioral conditions, a volitional signal can be phasically turned on that can alter this balance to favor top-down excitation, which can create conscious experiences in the absence of bottom-up information. In this way, conscious mental imagery can arise. In addition, Grossberg  proposes a mechanism by which hallucinations in schizophrenia could arise, namely when the phasic volitional signal becomes chronically hyperactive. As a result, top-down sensory expectations can generate conscious experiences that are not under the volitional control of the individual who is experiencing them. The net effect is a hallucination

This theory integrates elements of the imagery hypothesis and is reminiscent of Hoffman’s statement that “pronounced linguistic expectations can generate perceptual outputs”.

Most cognitive theorists agree that hallucinations are misattributions of internally generated information to an external source. Different hypotheses have been developed, concerning the role of inner speech, speech perception, reality monitoring, and mental imagery.

Diagnosis of Hallucination

Because many factors can trigger hallucinations, the best thing to do is to call the doctor right away if you suspect that your perceptions are not real. The doctor will ask about the symptoms and perform a physical exam. Additional tests might include a blood or urine test and perhaps a brain scan.

Causes of Hallucinations

Mental illnesses- are among the most common causes of hallucinations. Schizophrenia, dementia, and delirium are a few examples.

Substance abuse is another fairly common cause. Some people see or hear things that aren’t there after drinking too much alcohol or taking drugs like cocaine or PCP.

Lack of sleep can lead to hallucinations. social isolation, particularly in older adults

Medications taken for certain mental and physical conditions can also cause hallucinations. Parkinson’s disease, depression, psychosis, and epilepsy medications may trigger hallucination symptoms.

Other conditions that can cause hallucinations include, Terminal illnesses, such as AIDS, brain cancer, or kidney and liver failure, high fevers, especially in children, migraines, deafness, blindness, or vision problems, epilepsy (in some cases, epileptic seizures can cause you to see flashing shapes or bright spot

Treatment of Hallucinations

If you know someone who is hallucinating, avoid leaving them alone. Fear and paranoia triggered by hallucinations can lead to dangerous actions or behaviors. Stay with the person at all times and go with them to the doctor for emotional support. You may also be able to help in answering questions about their symptoms and how often they occur

Medications

Treatment for  hallucinations will depend entirely on their underlying cause. For example, if you are hallucinating because of delirium due to severe alcohol withdrawal, your doctor might prescribe medication that slows down your nervous system. For psychosis, the treatment may be a different kind of medication like dopamine antagonists.

Psychological Counselling

Counselling might also be part of your treatment plan, particularly if the underlying cause of  hallucinations is a mental health condition. Speaking with a counselor can help you get a better understanding of what is happening to you. A counselor can also help to develop coping strategies, particularly for when you are feeling scared or paranoid.

.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D. Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed. Former Principal.A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

-Albert Camus

Sleep is a  natural periodic state of rest for the mind and body, in which the eyes usually close and consciousness is completely or partially lost, so that there is a decrease in bodily movement and responsiveness to external stimuli. During sleep the brain in humans and other mammals undergoes a characteristic cycle of brain-wave activity that includes intervals of dreaming.

According to a simple behavioral definition, sleep is a reversible behavioral state of perceptual disengagement from and unresponsiveness to the environment. It is also true that sleep is a complex amalgam of physiologic and behavioral processes. Sleep is typically (but not necessarily) accompanied by postural recumbence, behavioral quiescence, closed eyes, and all the other indicators one commonly associates with sleeping. In the unusual circumstance, other behaviors can occur during sleep. These behaviors can include sleepwalking, sleep-talking, teeth grinding, and other physical activities. Anomalies involving sleep processes also include intrusions of sleep—sleep itself, dream imagery, or muscle weakness—into wakefulness

There is no sharp line between sleep and waking. Though in sleep we commonly lie relaxed in body, and sometimes, it would seem, entirely inactive in mind, at other times we move and even walk about in sleep, and frequently we think, or are mentally active, in the peculiar way we call dreaming. For many of us, sleep is the sweet balm that soothes and restores us after a long day of work and play. But for those for whom sleep is elusive or otherwise troubled, the issue is far more fraught. Most people, at some point in their lives, experience difficulty falling asleep. Other parasomnias—such as sleep apnea, night terrors, , and sleep paralysis—are surprisingly common There is no physiological condition known  to be invariably present in, or necessary to sleep.

Conditions conducive to sleep

There can be various conditions that conduce to sleep without being essential to it. Such are :

v  The most important single condition of sleep is, perhaps peace of mind. Without this we may, if tired, fall asleep; but we are then apt to waken when but partially refreshed. If we go to bed with a guilty conscience, or with some project” seething in the brain, “ or thinking of some object we strongly desire but can not attain, or reflecting upon recent triumphs or humiliations, or on any other emotionally exiting topic, we do not easily fall asleep, and we readily waken again. Under such conditions, even though we be tired, the ratio of resistances to free energy remains low, because the free energy is so abundantly maintained by the endogenous activities of the brain. In such cases we may lie long hours thinking mainly of the exiting topic; until at last a deeper-lying form of fatigue sets in; the instinctive source of energy that sustains our involuntary thinking seems to dry up from exhaustion and we sink into profound sleep.

v  A diminished flow of blood to the brain (as by food to the stomach, attracting blood to the digestive organs )

v  The absence of strong sensory stimuli: a healthy man may sleep in a brightly lit room full of rattle and uproarious music parties ; yet strong sense-stimuli may conduce.

v  General relaxation of muscles conduces to sleep; yet some times when we are very tired we can not sleep, and some man can sleep at will when not fatigued.

v  The general-fatigue factor is, in the main, the general chemical factor which may be increased by alcohol.

v  Sensations of fatigue favors sleep; and among such fatigue-sensations those of the eyelids, and perhaps the eyeballs, have the greatest influence.

v  The most obscure facto conducing to sleep is the desire or will to sleep. We have a certain power both to sleep and to waken; some can exercise it much more effectively than others.

v  ‘Suggeestion’ may aid or hinder sleep; and confident expectation of sleep, aided by the familiar surroundings of the bedroom is of no small influence.

All this goes to show that the onset of sleep is not, is not always, a passive lapsing of mental activity when conditions favour sleep; it suggests rather that in falling asleep there is, or may be on some occasions, a conative factor at work.If falling asleep is subject to the will and is to some extent a purposive activity or process, one which tends to occour under certain external bodily conditions, and yet is subject in some degree to the will, we may rightly suspect that it is an instinctive process.

As in normal circumstances sleep precedes exhaustion, and as in many cases exhaustion produces insomnia, we infer that sleep is a function of defense, an instinct which has for  its goal, in striking the animal with inertia, to forbid it to arrive at the stage of exhaustion, it is not because we are intoxicated or exhausted that we sleep, but we sleep in order to avoid becoming intoxicated or exhausted.

All these facts indicates that falling asleep is an instinctive process. We can find confirmation of this theory in analogies with hypnosis and various animal phenomena, more especially the undoubtly instinctive process of hibernation.

This way sleep is the consequence of a functional activity of continuous nature and demanding in order to be initiated, to be put in train a more considerable energy than to be continued, once the impulsion has been given.But that is the case with all our activities, voluntary actions are most commonly voluntary only at their inception, the effot consists in deciding upon them, in beginning them, and thereafter the movements continue of themselves in a quasi-automatic fashion.

To conclude, we may suppose that this obscure instinctive process has, like others, its sensory cues, this obscure instinctive process has, like others, itssensory cues, and these cues seem to be fatigue-sensations in general, and more especially those localized in the muscles of eyelids and eyeballs. The primary effect of bringing the instinct into play is an impulse to close the eyes, with correlated inhibition of the muscles that keep them open, and perhaps of all other muscles of the skeletal system, and perhaps there are corresponding nervous current sent to various visceral organs, currents that bring the circulation of the blood and other organic processes into a state favourable to sleep. Perhaps also there is actual inhibition of all higher brain-processes.

Condition of the Brain in Sleep

Whether or no we accept this theory of the instinctive factor in the process of falling asleep, we may with some confidence describe the state of the brain of the queitet sleeper as one of relative general dissociation. There are fatigue products in the blood which maintain the synaptic resistances at a comparatively when the curve of sleep (as measured by the intensity of stimuli required to waken the sleeper) is commonly deepest. This curve of sleep normally rises gradually in the morning hours; that is to say, sleep becomes less profound, more easily interrupted; a fact we may attribute in the main to the passing away of the poisonous waste-products of activity.

But the high resistances of the synapses, the relative dissociation of neurons and neuron systems, is due to a second factor also. When sleep has been attained, the mind is relatively at rest; in sound sleep our instinctive emotional activities are normally in abeyance, or at very low ebb; that is to say, little if any energy is liberated from the instinctive dispositions. During waking hours energy is constantly liberated from the various instinctive dispositions and floods the brain, discharging itself in various efferent channels. There is good reason to believe that the presence of free energy in any neurone system keeps down the resistances of the synapses within that system. When, then, in sleep the instinctive activities dispositions located mainly in the thalamus of the lower brain. The flood of free energy subsides from the cerebrum like a ebbing tide, leaving its channels comparatively empty of free energy and its resistances relatively high; that is to say, it leaves the cerebrum in a state of relative dissociation, in which its various functional units cannot easily play upon one another. After a long sleep, when all waste products are removed and the partially exhausted stores of latent energy are renewed, the afferent energies liberated by sense-stimuli begin again to penetrate to the cerebrum and thus to bring the state of sleep to an end.

Sleep is triggered by a complex group of hormones that are active in the main, and that respond to cues from the body itself and the environment.

It is true that the movements we dream of making are sometimes realized, incipiently and partially, or completely as in the somnabulists; just as the sense-impressions we receive do someti8mes penetrate to the cerebrum and affect the course of our dreaming. At present no satisfactory answer is to be found along the following lines. In dreaming the instinctive dispositions are at work and energy circulates in the cerebrum; in waking life; all activity proceeds on a lower plane of activity, and the dream-activity involves only relatively restricted tracts of the brain; hence the efferent outflow also is relatively feeble, insufficient to overcome the raised resistances of the synapses leading to the pyramidal tract and other efferent channels.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Se. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

“A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.”

― W.H. Auden

To Prof Freud belongs the honour of having thrown a flood of light upon dreaming. By the publication of his best known work,’Die Traumdeutung’, he showed that dreaming is not merely a chaotic rumbling of the brain cells, of no interest to science, but rather that dreaming is a peculiar and complex form of mental activity well worthy of the most careful study from the point of view both of pure science and of psychological medicine.

The dreaming in sleep is commonly accepted as falling within the bounds of normal. Perhaps dreaming does serve as a safety-valve for our repressed tendencies, and thus facilitate a more complete voluntary control of our mental life during waking hours.. However there is no clear evidence in support of the notion, day-dreaming or fantasy formation would seem to be a step nearer to the definitely abnormal.

The extent to which normal persons indulge in day-dreaming cannot be estimated: first, because we cannot draw any sharp line between day-dreaming and other modes of imaginative activity; secondly, because day-dreaming is often more frequent than the subject supposes; like night-dreaming, it is apt to be forgotten. It is probable that in many cases it goes on as a sort of side-show, a collateral stream of mental life running parallel with the main stream of self-conscious activity; and in such cases it is especially liable to be ignored or denied by the conscious subject. It would be rash, then, to assert that day-dreaming is at its minimum in extrovert persons of great practical activity; that it is more frequent with introverted persons; and that in general it is more frequent in children than in adults. As we grow up, we become more deeply and constantly concerned with practical problems for the solution of which we need to conform our thinking to the logical and historical order of events; we build up systems of belief which, as they grow richer and more firmly knit, limit more and more the range of our imaginative activities.

In autistic thinking, a person creates a fantasy oriented mental environment and places himself at the central place there. Actually these are the expression of a sort of complexes created in him by unknowingly accepting his inability to excel in some specific behavior pattern. Thus some time he wishfully identifies himself with the person who possesses that attribute in abundance. In children, whose imaginations are less fettered by beliefs founded upon much experience of the actual and the probable, day dreaming seems to take more often than not, a compensatory form, and to be more constructive and less recollected than the adults. They build’ castles in the air’  which express and to some extent gratify the desires that remain ungratified by the course of real life. The weakly child pictures himself as the hero of battle field, the dullard pictures himself carrying of the prizes at school etc.

The day dreams of many children are renewed and continued from day to day over long periods of time, and then becoming developed and systematized, may play a very important role in their lives. It is impossible to say how real these day dreams figures and activities seem to the child, but they certainly engage his emotions in an active way. Literature, art cinema and likewise largely take the place of day dreaming for adults as hearing stories does in part, for children, and  it is probable that such substituted or readymade day dreams, if wisely selected, afford a more healthy, or at least a less dangerous, form of imaginative activity. For day-dreaming, though it may conduce to the development of imaginative power, may easily be carried to excess by some natures and thus prepare the way for mental disorder.

Autistic Thinking is a condition in which a person is morbidly self-absorbed and out of contact with reality.  BLEULER in Amer. Jrnl. Insanity LXIX. 874 describe it as” When we look more closely we find amongst all normal people many and important instances where thought is divorced both from logic and from reality. I have called these forms of thinking autistic, corresponding to the idea of schizophrenic autismus. Daydreaming.is an example of what is called ‘autistic thinking’, which means thinking that is sufficient unto itself, and not subjected to any criticism. Autistic thinking gratifies some desire and that is enough for it. “

The day-dreaming of normal subjects is one variety of a form of thinking which Prof. Bleuler has proposed to call “ Autistic.” It might perhaps with advantage be called rather “automatic thinking,” in order to mark its affinity with the sensory and motor automatisms, such as crystal visions and automatic writing. Bleuler insists on the essential similarity between the fantasy- formations that we call the day-dreaming of normal subjects and that of mentally disordered patients, more especially of those of the schizophrenic type.

Bleuler points out that most of us do a certain amount of autistic thinking, and adds: “ We stand, therefore, far nearer than would have at first sight appeared, to the lunatic, whose vagrant thoughts struck us just now so forcible. At any rate the difference is only a relative one. And when we look more closely we find amongst all normal people many and important instances where thought is divorced both from logic and from reality. I have called those forms of thinking ‘autistic’, corresponding to the idea of schizophrenic autismus, which, turning away from reality, sees life in fantastic pictures, and if founded precisely upon autistic thinking…The knowledge of this kind of thinking is a necessary foundation for the understanding of morbid formations”

Normally psychologists considers autistic thinking is the thinking of the unconscious. But though the recognition of autistic thinking is of extreme importance, it is profoundly unsatisfactory to dispose of it by simply ascribing it to ‘the unconscious’.Bleular treats the autistic thinking as though it were something radically different in kind from normal thinking ‘ How great the gap is between autistic and logical or realistic thinking will be clear to us when we realize what logical thinking really is. Firstly, it represents occurrences in the outer world and their associations. We have often heard thunder following lighten, therefore whenever we see lightning we expect thunder,’And there is no ‘ secondly ‘ in his account of logical thinking,, it remains for him merely  the sequence of ideas determined by associative reproduction according to the principle of temporal contiguity.

It is not totally true that normal mental life is merely the psychology of association. Our normal thinking is purposive. Bleular does not see that all mental life is purposive, that the higher form of mental activity differ from the lower, not in that purpose is added to them, but rather in that in the higher forms the goal is clearly defined in consciousness, while in the lower it remains obscure and vague. Hence he is led to regard autistic thinking as distinguished from normal thinking by lack of purpose.Acordingly he writes “One of the most important neurotic disturbances of sleep is undoubtedly based on the fact that emotionally accentuated complexes, which are more or less repressed by the day’s work make themselves felt as soon as purposive thinking ceases”.

Bleular distinction between autistic and logical thinking is, not to be identified with Freud distinction between the thinking of ‘the unconscious’ according to the pleasure principle and the thinking of the conscious according to the reality principle. He though appreciative of Freud’s real contribution, seems to have avoided the hedonic fallacy.

Besides associative reproduction and the logical operations of judging and reasoning, there is one all important factor is conation, which not only include conation of the form of self-conscious volition, but also the lower forms of conation, desires and impulses that determine largely the course of associative reproduction and play a large part in determining judgments and thus in building up beliefs. And it is not only wishes, or desires in strict sense of the word, that play this part, but any and every strong conative tendency, the tendencies of fear and disgust, no less than the tendencies of lust and hunger and love and ambition.

The conation factor is the predominant one in autistic thinging. There is no sharp line to be drawn between autistic and logical thinking, autistic thinking also makes use of logic and of associative reproduction, but, the more our train of thinking is dominated by motives, by desires and impulses, whose nature and goals remain obscure to us, the more does such thinking approximate to the type of autistic thinking. It is because the day-dreaming of normal persons, like their night-dreaming, is thus dominated by obscure desires and impulses, that it may be called autistic.

The basic difference between autistic thinking of sane person and that of insane is that in the mentally disordered person the repressed tendencies that dominate the autistic thinking are more completely repressed, perhaps in every case to the degree that some disassociation is effected. The repressed, and perhaps dissociated, system then works in relative isolation from the rest of the personality. It may work wholly subconsciously, or it may thrust the thought-products of its subconscious working into consciousness in the form of hallucinations, insane  beliefs, and uncontrollable strivings. The day-dreaming of normal children is largely the expression of unexpressed or ungratified tendencies. With advance of years, autistic thinking becomes increasingly the expression of repressed tendencies rather than merely of tendencies ungratified by the course of normal life. It is for this reason that the day-dreaming of children is less remote from the normal, and less dangerous, than that of adults.

It would be absurd to regard all day-dreaming as morbid. In children especially a certain amount of day-dreaming may be regarded as normal and healthy, and as contributing to the development of the powers of imaginations. If all day-dreaming by children were in some way prevented, it is possible that one consequence would be a lack of all poetic production, literature and the drama and perhaps science, would be improvised. Yet, even in children, day-dreaming may be excessive, and the boundry of the normal and the healthy would seem to be passed when the child tends to withdraw itself from active social life in order to enjoy its day-dreaming. An early symptom of autrism is such withdrawl, the  child, in many cases, prefer to stay in bed, and welcomes every mild indisposition as an excuse for seeking this retreat from the real world.

In adolescence the dangers of day-dreaming are greater. It is then that the youth, confronting the task of adapting himself to his social world, and of earning for himself a recognized place in it, is peculiarly apt to find in fantasy-formation a substitute for real achievement and a compensation for his deficiencies, in place of facing his tasks and acknowledging and striving to make good his defects.

The danger of day dreaming is not confined to the retreat from reality. It may take more positive forms. First the excessive day-dreamer is liable to confuse in recollection his day-dreams with real events, so that the line between truth and fiction remains ill-defined for him. Secondly, he may imagine himself as the central figure in some line of action of a reprehensible or criminal nature.. Without subscribing to the exploded idio-motor theory of action, we may suppose that the thinking out in imagination of such a plan of action, and the repeated dwelling upon it, may facilitate the execution of such a plan, if circumstances arise similar to those imagined, it realization is also desired, the subject is impelled towards its realization by those desires which  have sustain the imaginative planning.

Daydreaming allows you to play out scenarios where you miraculously save the day. You play out scenarios in your head that are kind of crazy, and then you personally, heroically resolve them.

Mark Waters

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Se. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Jean Piaget explains his’ Theory of Intellectual Development ‘on the basis of certain basic concepts. These are generally known as:

• Concept of Schemes
• Concept of Assimilation
• Concept of Accommodation

Concept of Schemes , holds that, to know an object one must act upon it, either physically or mentally. These physical or mental actions can displace objects or connect, combine, take apart and reassemble them. The activities that people perform on objets are known as SCHEMES. Schemes are not particular actions or responses; they what can be repeated and generalized in particular acts.

Concept of Assimilation, holds that the child needs the environment in order to develop his intelligence. Intellectual assimilation is similar to biological assimilation. Piaget wrote: From a biological point of view, assimilation is the integration of external elements into evolving or completed structures of an organism. In its usual connection, the assimilation of food consists of a chemical transformation that incorporates it into organism.

The evolving or completed structures are the schemes. Assimilation is the process of extracting from the environment what is needed for developing and maintaining schemes. If the schemes are stable or completed,  assimilation operates as a simple digestive process in which the organs of digestion undergo relatively little change. Assimilation is not exclusively dependent upon what is available in the environment. It also depends upon the schemes already available even in the process of changing them The child’s response to the environment, therefore, is not unlimited-that is, it is not controlled only by the environment.

Thus assimilation accounts for the child’s ability to act on and understand something new in terms of already familiar( his available schemes ). If the child were limited to assimilation, he would not develop new schemes- new capacities for assimilating new objects and events.

Concept of Accommodation, Piaget considers accommodation as any change of a scheme by the elements it assimilates. The progressive modification of schemes through accommodation allows the child to develop his capabilities beyond the point of dealing with the immediate physical environment. The child can reach a stage where he can solve problems through mental calculation alone.

Concept of Equilibration-Piaget holds equilibration as the process that produces progressive equilibrium between assimilation and accommodation. It is the process of seeking mental balance. Equilibration functions as a thermostat that maintains a balance between cold and hot. In the body it functions to keep a balance between such states as activity and rest. Equibration is a dynamic, not a static function. It is a process of decent ration whereby the child moves from stages in which he is centered on his own actions and viewpoints to stages in which he can take the point of view of objects and other people. It moves development from simple to more complex schemes through the dual action of assimilation and accommodation.

Periods of Intellectual Development

The stage-by-stage nature of Piaget’s theory, with each stage linked to an age group for whom the stage is typical, strongly suggests to many people that at a particular age, children are supposed to be functioning at a particular stage. It’s important to keep in mind that Piaget’s theory is intended to talk about how an average child might be functioning at a particular age; it is not a pronouncement about how any particular individual child should be functioning. Children develop uniquely and at their own pace depending upon their temperament (the inherited component of their personalities), genetic makeup, supports available to them in their environments, and their learning experiences. Different children will show mastery of specific operations sooner than will others, or display them in some situations but not in others. Newer research also shows that context affects children’s abilities as well. Most children will display more advanced operations when in familiar or mandatory environments .They may tend to become confused and perform more poorly when confronted with novel situations.

Piaget divides the intellectual development into four periods:

A-     Sensorimotor Period

B-     Preoperational Period

C-     Concrete Operational Period

D-     Formal operations Period

Sensorimotor Period

The Sensorimotor Stage is the first stage Piaget uses to define cognitive development. The first period of sensorimotor period of intellectual development is the sensorimotor period that lasts to about one and a half years of age. In the first half of this period the child’s activity is centered on his own body. In the second half, the child develops schemes of practical intelligence that enable him to deal with objects in space.

During this period, infants are busy discovering relationships between their bodies and the environment. Researchers have discovered that infants have relatively well developed sensory abilities. The child relies on seeing, touching, sucking, feeling, and using their senses to learn things about themselves and the environment. Piaget calls this the sensorimotor stage because the early manifestations of intelligence appear from sensory perceptions and motor activities.

During the early stages, infants are only aware of what is immediately in front of them. They focus on what they see, what they are doing, and physical interactions with their immediate environment.

Because they don’t yet know how things react, they’re constantly experimenting with activities such as shaking or throwing things, putting things in their mouths, and learning about the world through trial and error. The later stages include goal-oriented behavior which brings about a desired result.

At about age 7 to 9 months, infants begin to realize that an object exists even if it can no longer be seen. This important milestone — known as object permanence — is a sign that memory is developing.

After infants start crawling, standing, and walking, their increased physical mobility leads to increased cognitive development. Near the end of the sensorimotor stage, infants reach another important milestone — early language development, a sign that they are developing some symbolic abilities.

During the Sensory Motor Stage, knowledge about objects and the ways that they can be manipulated is acquired. Through the acquisition of information about self and the world, and the people in it, the baby begins to understand how one thing can cause or affect another, and begins to develop simple ideas about time and space. Infants realize that an object can be moved by a hand (concept of causality), and develop notions of displacement and events. An important discovery during the latter part of the sensorimotor stage is the concept of “object permanence”.

Object permanence is the awareness that an object continues to exist even when it is not in view. In young infants, when a toy is covered by a piece of paper, the infant immediately stops and appears to lose interest in the toy (see figure above). This child has not yet mastered the concept of object permanence. In older infants, when a toy is covered the child will actively search for the object, realizing that the object continues to exist.

After a child has mastered the concept of object permanence, the emergence of directed groping“ begins to take place. With directed groping, the child begins to perform motor experiments in order to see what will happen. During directed groping, a child will vary his movements to observe how the results will differ. The child learns to use new means to achieve an end. The child discovers he can pull objects toward himself with the aid of a stick or string, or tilt objects to get them through the bars of his playpen. The child begins to recognize cause-and-effect relationships at this stage, allowing the development of intentionally. Once a child knows what the effects of his activities will be, he can intend these effects.

Mary Ann Spencer described the six stages of sensorimotor development periods as;

Stage 1- (0-1 month ) characterized by neonatal reflexes and gross, uncoordinated body movements. Stage of complete egocentricism  with no distinction between self and outer reality; no awareness of self as such.

Stage 2- ( 1-4 months) New response pattern are formed by chance from combination of  primitive reflexes. The  infant’s fist accidently finds its way into his mouth through a coordination of arm moving and sucking.

Stage 3-(4-8 months)  New response patterns are coordinated and repeated intentionally in order to maintain interesting changes in the environment.

Stage4- (8-12 months) More complex coordination of previous behavior patterns, both motor  and perceptual. Baby pushes aside obstacles or uses parent’s hand as a means to a desired end.Emergence of anticipatory and intentional behavior; beginning of search for vanished articles.

Stage 5 (12-18 months) Familiar behavior patterns varied in different ways as if to observe different results. Emergence of directed grouping toward a goal, and of new means-end manipulations for reaching desired objects.

Stage6-(11/2 to 2 years ) Internalization of sensorimotor behavior patterns and beginning of symbolic representation. Invention of new means through internal experimentation  rather than external trial and error.

To illustrate threes stages, consider the infant’s reactions to the presence and disappearance of objects.

In the 1^st stage the infant is passive to the world of objects. The newborn infant will close his hand on anything that lightly touches it. He grasps passively, but he does not search actively for any objects. In a random effort to assimilate the object environment the new born makes impulsive movements of his limbs, but there  is no attempt to direct these movements towards the grasping of particular objects. This passive release by stimulation gives way to  active grouping, as we see in the infants sucking behavior. Very early in the infant’s life he learns to group with his mouth for the nipple of the breast. He assimilates the nipple to innate sucking scheme.

At the 2^nd stage the world of objects is still only an extension of the infants needs and movements. As an object the nipple has no permanence or constancy. When it disappears, he  made no active effort to find it. Out of sight  ,out of mind. By the 2^nd stage however, the infant knows when he is in the vicinity of the nipple. He is sensitive to the smooth breast skin surrounding the nipple. He is, therefore, more actively engaged in the nipple search than when he merely awaited its insertion.

At the 3^rd stage there is still more progress from passive responding to active search. The infant’s behavior becomes intentional-centered or producing some result in the environment. In this stage the child begins to develop primitive notions of space, causality and time and shows the beginning of imitation. The child in short, begins to construct a basic reality.

At the 4^th stage the infant’s behavior becomes even more intentional and active. This is illustrated most graphically in the child’s search for vanished objects.. The infant no longer behaves as if an object ceases to exist when it disappears from sight.

At the 5^th stage there is more active experimentation by the infant. The child discovers new means for attaining various goals. When the infant does not witness an event, it lacks reality for him. Aside from attaining a somewhat better scheme for object performance, in this stage the child develops a greater interest in novelty and in the imitation of new models and gains better understanding of space time and cause effect relationships.

In the 6^th stage the infant develops schemes that allow him to represent mentally objects and events. He can imagine actions as well as execute them.

The process of making new schemes out of old schemes  involve both assimilation and accommodation. When the infant’s old schemes of objects as simple extensions of his motion proves to be inadequate for his growing physical potential, assimilation of new aspects of the environment results in the accommodation of the old scheme and the development of new ones. The new schemes are more inclusive and absorb the old schemes in a kind of intellectual hierarchy. This way the infant’s schemes for sucking and object permanence contain all of the schemes of earlier stage but become subordinate to the new, more general schemes that enable the child to manipulate his environment more fully.

In short the sensorimotor period begins with the infant entering its attention on its own body, a period lasting from 7 to 9 months. It is followed by a period of approximately equal length in which the child becomes aware of the independent of objects and space outside his own body.

Preoperational Period

This second period begins around 11/2 to 2 years of age and extend to the age of 7 or 8 years. During this stage, children’s thought processes are developing, although they are still considered to be far from ‘logical thought’, in the adult sense of the word. The vocabulary of a child is also expanded and developed during this stage, as they change from babies and toddlers into ‘little people’.

Piaget calls this period of representational intelligence because the child  is able to represent reality as language and mental imagery. For the child, it is the period of magic during which words, pictures, emotions, fantasies and dreams all seem part of an external reality. The child is not decentered in this thinking. He sees everything from a single point of view, his own. During this period assimilation appears to overweigh accommodation. There is pleasure in activities themselves; real objects become symbolic( using wooden cubical blocks to build a tower) ; and in rule games symbols are defined by social convention.

This period can be devided into two stages. Pulaski described these stages as follos:

A- Preconceptual Stage (2 to 4 years)  Development of perceptual constancy and representation through drawing, dreams, and symbolic play. Beginning of first overgeneralized attempts at conceptualization, in which representative of a class are not distinguished from the class itself ( e.g., all dogs are called by the name of the child,s own dog).

B-         – Perceptual or Intuitive Stage (4 to 7 years). Prelogical reasoning appears. Based on perceptual appearances untempered by reversibility (e.g., Grand father wearind a new type of dress is not recognized as Grandfather). Ttial and error may lead to an intuitive discovering of correct relationships, but the child is unable to take more than one attribute into account at one time.

Characteristics of Preoperational Period

A.The preoperational stage, Piaget’s second stage, is marked by rapid growth in representational, or symbolic, mental activity.

B.Advances in Mental Representation . Language is our most flexible means of mental representation. . Piaget believed that sensorimotor activity provides the foundation for language, just as it under lies deferred imitation and make-believe play.

C. Make-Believe Play . Make-believe play increases dramatically during early childhood. Piaget believed that through pretending, young children practice and strengthen newly acquired representational schemes. . Development of Make-Believe Play. a. Over time, play becomes increasingly detached  from the real-life conditions associated with it. b. Make-believe play gradually becomes less selfcentered as children realize that agents and recipients of pretend actions can be independent of  themselves. c. Play also includes increasingly more complex scheme combinations. .

Sociodramatic play is the make-believe play with peers that first appears around age 2 1/2 and  increases rapidly until 4 to 5 years. e. The emergence of sociodramatic play signals an awareness  that make-believe play is a representational activity.

Advantages of Make-Believe. . Today, Piaget’s view of make-believe- as mere practice of representational schemes is regarded as too limited. b. In comparison to social nonpretend activities, during social pretend preschoolers’ interactions last longer, show more  involvement, draw larger numbers of children into the activity, and are more cooperative. Preschoolers who spend more time at sociodramatic play are advanced in general intellectual  development and seen as more socially competent by their teachers. d. In the past, creating  imaginary companions, invisible characters with whom children form a special relationship, was  viewed as a sign of maladjustment. Yet recent research demonstrates that children who have  them display more complex pretend play, are advanced in mental representation, and are more  sociable with peers.

D. Spatial Representation .Spatial understanding improves rapidly over the third year of life. With this representational capacity, children realize that a spatial symbol stands for a specific state of affairs in the real world. Insight into one type of symbol-real world relation, such as that represented by a photograph, helps preschoolers understand others, such as simple maps.  Providing children with many opportunities to learn about the functions of diverse symbols, such as picture books, models, maps, and drawings, enhances spatial representation.

E. Limitations of Preoperational Thought . Piaget described preschool children in terms of what they cannot, rather than can, understand. Operations are mental representations of actions that obey logical rules.  In the preoperational stage, children’s thinking is rigid, limited to one aspect of a situation at a time, and strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment. Egocentric and Animistic Thinking. a. Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish the symbolic viewpoints of others from one’s own.

Important Features of Pre-operational stage

Pre-operational children are usually ‘ego centric’, meaning that they are only able to consider things from their own point of view, and imagine that everyone shares this view, because it is the only one possible. Egocentrism refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. According to Piaget, the egocentric child assumes that other people see, hear and feel exactly the same as the child does.  Piaget wanted to find out at what age children decenter – i.e. become no longer egocentric.

In psychology, egocentrism is defined as a) the incomplete differentiation of the self and the world, including other people and b) the tendency to perceive, understand and interpret the world in terms of the self. The term derives from the Greek egô, meaning “I.” An egocentric person has no theory of mind, cannot “put himself in other people’s shoes,” and believes everyone sees what he sees (or that what he sees in some way exceeds what others see.)

It appears that this is shown mostly in younger children. They are unable to separate their own beliefs,thoughts and ideas from others. For example, if a child sees that there is candy in a box, he assumes that someone else walking into the room also knows that there is candy in that box. He reasons that “since I know it, you should too”. As stated previously this may be rooted in the limitations in the child’s theory of mind skills. However, it does not mean that children are unable to put their selves in someone else’s shoes. As far as feelings are concerned, it is shown that children exhibit empathy early on and are able to cooperate with others and be aware of their needs and wants.

Jean Piaget claimed that young children are egocentric. This does not mean that they are selfish, but that they do not have the mental ability to understand that other people may have different opinions and beliefs from themselves. Piaget did a test to investigate egocentrism called the mountains study. He put children in front of a simple plaster mountain range and then asked them to pick from four pictures the view that he, Piaget, would see. Younger children picked the picture of the view they themselves saw.

Gradually during this stage, a certain amount of ‘decentering’ occurs. This is when someone stops believing that they are the centre of the world, and they are more able to imagine that something or someone else could be the centre of attention.

According to Piaget, egocentrism of the young child leads them to believe that everyone thinks as they do, and that the whole world shares their feelings and desires. This sense of oneness with the world leads to the child’s assumptions of magic omnipotence. Not only is the world created for them, they can control it. This leads to the child believing that nature is alive, and controllable. This is a concept of egocentrism known as”animism”, the most characteristic of egocentric thought.

‘Animism’ is also a characteristic of the Pre-operational stage. This is when a person has the belief that everything that exists has some kind of consciousness. Another key feature which children display during this stage is animism. Animism is the belief that inanimate objects (such as toys and teddy bears) have human feelings and intentions.

. A reason for this characteristic of the stage, is that the Pre-operational child often assumes that everyone and everything is like them. Therefore since the child can feel pain, and has emotions, so must everything else.

Closely related to animism is artificialism, or the idea that natural phenomena are created by human beings. Such as the sun is created by a man with a match. “Realism” is the child’s notion that their own perspective is objective and absolute. The child thinks from one perspective and regards this reality as absolute. Names, for example, are real to the child. The child can’t realize that names are only verbal labels, or conceive the idea that they could have been given a different name.

During the pre-operational period, the child begins to develop the use of symbols (but can not manipulate them), and the child is able to use language and words to represent things not visible. Also, the pre-operational child begins to master conservation problems.

By the age of four children are developing a more complete understanding of concepts and tend to have stopped reasoning tranductively (Lefrancois, 1995). However their thought is dominated more by perception than logic. This is clearly illustrated by conservation experiments. In such an experiment a pre-operational child may be shown two balls of clay, that the child acknowledges are equal in size, one of which is then squashed. The child is now asked if both lots of clay are equal. A child at this stage will say they are no longer equal.

Although the child is still unable to think in a truly logical fashion, they may begin to treat objects as part of a group. The pre-operational child may have difficulty with classification. This is because, to a pre-operational child, the division of a parent class into subclasses destroys the parent group (Lefrancois, 1995). For example, a child has a pile of toy vehicles which are then split into trucks and cars. Next the child is asked ‘Tell me, are there more trucks than vehicles, or less, or the same number?’ the child will almost always say there are more trucks than vehicles!

Another aspect of the Pre-operational stage in a child, is that of ‘symbolism’. This is when something is allowed to stand for or symbolise something else. ‘Moral realism’ is a fourth aspect of this stage, this is the belief that the child’s way of thinking about the difference between right and wrong, is shared by everyone else around them. One aspect of a situation, at one time, is all that they are able to focus on, and it is beyond them to consider that anything else could be possible. Due to this aspect of the stage, children begin to respect and insist on obedience of rules at all times, and they are not able to take anything such as motives into account.

During this stage, young children are able to think about things symbolically. Their language use becomes more mature. They also develop memory and imagination, which allows them to understand the difference between past and future, and engage in make-believe.

But their thinking is based on intuition and still not completely logical. They cannot yet grasp more complex concepts such as cause and effect, time, and comparison.

Concrete Operations Stage

The Concrete Operations Stage, was Piaget’s third stage of cognitive development in children. The concrete operational stage includes those who are approximately in-between ages 7 to 11 years old.

At this time, elementary-age and preadolescent children demonstrate logical, concrete reasoning. Children’s thinking becomes less egocentric and they are increasingly aware of external events. They begin to realize that one’s own thoughts and feelings are unique and may not be shared by others or may not even be part of reality. Children also develop operational thinking — the ability to perform reversible mental actions.

During this stage, however, most children still can’t tackle a problem with several variables in a systematic way. During this stage children are able to reason logically as long as the reasoning can be applied to concrete and specific examples. In this stage they are also able to observe and understand the idea of conservation. During this stage, children begin to reason logically, and organize thoughts coherently. However, they can only think about actual physical objects, and cannot handle abstract reasoning. They have difficulty understanding abstract or hypothetical concepts.

For example, if a specific amount of water is poured into a tall, skinny glass and then poured into a short, wide glass, concrete operational thinkers are able to understand that the volume of the water did not change. Overall, logical reasoning is present in this stage, but cannot be utilized unless applied to concrete examples

During this stage, the thought process becomes more rational, mature and ‘adult like’, or more ‘operational’, Although this process most often continues well into the teenage years. The process is divided by Piaget into two stages, the Concrete Operations, and the Formal Operations stage, which is normally undergone by adolescents.

In the Concrete Operational stage, the child has the ability to develop logical thought about an object, if they are able to manipulate it. By comparison, however, in the Formal Operations stage, the thoughts are able to be manipulated and the presence of the object is not necessary for the thought to take place.

A mental operation, in the Piagetian way of thinking, is the ability to accurately imagine the consequences of something happening without it actually needing to happen. During a mental operation, children imagine “what if” scenarios which involve the imaginal transformation of mental representations of things they have experienced in the world; people, places and things. The ability to perform mental arithmetic is a good example of an operation. These sorts of operations are “concrete” because they are based on actual people, places and things that children have observed in the environment. Children’s mental representations remain concretely linked to things they have seen and touched throughout the middle childhood period. Because their representations are limited to the tangible, touchable and concrete, their appreciation of the consequences of events is similarly limited, local and concrete in scope. At this age, children can easily tell you that if the fence breaks open, that the dog will be able to get out. However, they cannot easily think about more abstract things like what it will really mean for the family if a parent loses her job. In the Piagetian theory, it is not until children enter adolescence that they become capable of more abstract “formal” operations involving representations of things that are intangible and abstract (without any tight link back to a tangible person, place or thing), such as “liberty”, “freedom” or “divinity”.

Belief in animism and ego centric thought tends to decline during the Concrete Operational stage, although, remnants of this way of thinking are often found in adults

Piaget described multiple operations that children begin to master in middle childhood, including conservation, decent ration, reversibility, hierarchical classification, seriation, and spatial reasoning. These are technical terms, all of which will be described below in greater detail. Obviously, children do not learn the names of these various operations or proudly point out to their parents that they’ve mastered these skills. Children just start doing these things without having realized what they’ve accomplished. However, these new skills are often noticeable by outside observers familiar with children’s progress. In their own subtle way, children’s mastery of these operations is a tremendous accomplishment, easily as impressive a feat as any physical accomplishment children might learn.

This stage is also characterized by a loss of egocentric thinking. During this stage, the child has the ability to master most types of conservation experiments, and begins to understand reversibility. Conservation is the realization that quantity or amount does not change when nothing has been added or taken away from an object or a collection of objects, despite changes in form or spatial arrangement. The concrete operational stage is also characterized by the child’s ability to coordinate two dimensions of an object simultaneously, arrange structures in sequence, and transpose differences between items in a series. The child is capable of concrete problem-solving. Categorical labels such as “number” or “animal” are now available to the child.

Let’s now explore the various concrete operations children start to master during this middle childhood stage of their development:

Conservation

Conservation involves the ability to understand when the amount of something remains constant across two or more situations despite the appearance of that thing changing across those situations. The idea of conservation can be applied to any form of measurement, including number, mass, length, area, volume, etc. Piaget’s famous example of conservation was performed using liquids poured into different shaped containers. Though the volume of liquid remains constant across the two containers, each container has a very different visual appearance, with one being tall and thin, while another was short and wide. Using this setup, Piaget was able to show that middle childhood-aged children were able to appreciate that the total amount of liquid was unchanged despite being poured into differently shaped containers. Younger children were characteristically fooled by the appearance of the containers and tended to conclude that wider, shorter containers held less water than taller, thinner containers.

Logic:

Piaget determined that children in the concrete operational stage were fairly good at the use of inductive logic. Inductive logic involves going from a specific experience to a general principle. On the other hand, children at this age have difficulty using deductive logic, which involves using a general principle to determine the outcome of a specific event.

Reversibility:

A second new ability gained in the concrete operational stage is reversibility. This refers to the ability to mentally trace backwards, and is of enormous help to the child in both their problem solving and the knowledge they have of their own problem solving. For the former this is because they can see that in a conservation task, for example, the change made could be reversed to regain the original properties. With respect to knowledge of their own problem solving, they become able to retrace their mental steps, allowing an entirely new level of reflection.

Once children have learnt to conserve, they learn about ‘reversibility’. This means that they learn that if things are changed, they will still be the same as they used to be. For example, they learn that if they spread out the pile of blocks, there are still as many there as before, even though it looks different!

One of the most important developments in this stage is an understanding of reversibility, or awareness that actions can be reversed. An example of this is being able to reverse the order of relationships between mental categories. For example, a child might be able to recognize that his or her dog is a Labrador, that a Labrador is a dog, and that a dog is an animal.

A large portion of the defining characteristics of the stage can be understood in terms of the child overcoming the limits of stage two, known as the pre-operational stage. The pre-operational child has a number of cognitive barriers which are subsequently broken down, and it is important to note that overcoming these obstacles is not due to gradual improvement in abilities the child already possesses. Rather the changes are genuine qualitative shifts, corresponding to new abilities being acquired.

Perceptual domination

A second limitation which is overcome in the concrete operational stage is the perceptual domination of one aspect of a situation. Before the stage begins, the child’s perception of any situation or problem will be dominated by one aspect; this is best illustrated by the failure of pre-operational children to pass Piaget’s conservation tasks

These shifts in the child’s thinking lead to a number of new abilities which are also major, positively defined characteristics of the concrete operational stage. The most frequently cited ability is conservation. Now that children are no longer perceptually dominated by one aspect of a situation, they can track changes much more easily and recognize that some properties of an object will persevere through change. Conservation is always gained in the same order, firstly with respect to number, followed secondly by weight, and thirdly by volume.

Concrete operational children also gain the ability to structure objects hierarchically, known as classification. This includes the notion of class inclusion, e.g. understanding an object being part of a subset included within a parent set, and is shown on Piaget’s inclusion task, asking children to identify, out of a number of brown and white wooden beads, whether there were more brown beads or wooden beads

seriation

seriation is another new ability gained during this stage, and refers to the child’s ability to order objects with respect to a common property. A simple example of this would be placing a number of sticks in order of height. An important new ability which develops from the interplay of both seriation and classification is that of numeration. Whilst pre-operational children are obviously capable of counting, it is only during the concrete operational stage that they become able to apply mathematical operators, thanks to their abilities to order things in terms of number (seriation) and to split numbers into sets and subsets (classification), enabling more complex multiplication, division and so on.

Finally, and also following the development of seriation, is transitive inference. This is the name given to children’s ability to compare two objects via an intermediate object. So for instance, one stick could be deemed to be longer than another by both being individually compared to another (third) stick.

Flavell summarized three limitation of the period of concrete operations:

(1) The operations are oriented toward concrete things and events in the immediate present, so movement toward the nonpresent, or potential, is limited. The child during this period acts as if his primary task were to organize and order what is immediately present; the real does not become a special case of the possible.

(2) The child has to relinquish the various physical attributes (such as mass, weight, volume) of objects and events one by one. If, for example, he understands that there is as much clay in object A as in object B (mass0, despite the difference in shape, the child will still need considerable time to understand that the weight and the volume of the clay also remain the same.

(3) Each of the groupings which the child develops in this period remains an isolated organization and does not form and integrated system of thought. All three of these limitations are removed in the period of formal operations.

Formal Operation period

The formal operational stage is the fourth and final stage of cognitive development in Piaget’s theory. This stage, which follows the Concrete Operational stage, commences at around 11 or 12 years of age (puberty) and continues into adulthood. In this stage, individuals move beyond concrete experiences and begin to think abstractly, reason logically, and draw conclusions from the information available as well as apply all these processes to hypothetical situations.

During the period from 11 to 15, the adolescent acquires the adult capacity for abstract thought. In the previous period the child is only beginning to extend his thought from the actual to the potential. Adolescents who reach this fourth stage of intellectual development are able to logically use symbols related to abstract concepts, such as algebra and science. They can think about multiple variables in systematic ways, formulate hypotheses, and consider possibilities. They also can ponder abstract relationships and concepts such as justice.

Although Piaget believed in lifelong intellectual development, he insisted that the formal operational stage is the final stage of cognitive development, and that continued intellectual development in adults depends on the accumulation of knowledge

Characteristics of Formal Operation Period

These characteristics explain ‘ adolescent’s taste for theorizing and criticizing.’

A-Possible versus the real-

No longer exclusively preoccupied with the sober business of trying  to stabilize and organize just what comes directly to the senses, the adolescent has, through this new orientation, the potentiality og imagining all that might be there- both the very obvious and the very subtle- and thereby of much better insuring the finding of all that is there. The adolescent, therefore, theorizes about and criticizes the present operation of the world because he conceives of many possible ways in which it could operate and many alternative ways in which it could be better.

B-The Hypothetical-deductive-

To discover the real among the possible requires that the possible be cast as hypotheses, which may be confirmed or rejected. They use hypothetical-deductive reasoning, which means that they develop hypotheses or best guesses and systematically deduce, or conclude, which is the best path to follow in solving the problem. However, Suppes (1982) found that deductive reasoning can be present before Piaget suggests formal operations begin When faced with a problem, adolescents come up with a general theory of all possible factors that might affect the outcome and deduce from it specific hypotheses that might occur. They then systematically treat these hypotheses to see which ones do in fact occur in the real world. Thus, adolescent problem solving begins with possibility and proceeds to reality.

C- Propositional thinking-

The adolescent does not consider only raw data but also sentences which contain these data, he takes the results, and puts them in sentence form ,and begins to find relationships among the sentences. . Adolescents can focus on verbal assertions and evaluate their logical validity without making reference to real-world circumstances. In contrast, concrete operational children can evaluate the logic of statements by considering them against concrete evidence only.

D- Ability to reason contrary to fact

Another characteristic of the individual is their ability to reason contrary to fact. That is, if they are given a statement and asked to use it as the basis of an argument they are capable of accomplishing the task. For example, they can deal with the statement “what would happen if snow were black

In the period of formal operation the adolescent engages in his first scientific reasoning. He is capable of planning truly scientific investigations and he can vary the factors in all possible combinations and in an orderly fashion. infect, he appears to be capable of discovering the basic laws of physics with the help of simple apparatuses.. Unlike the younger child, who lives in the world of the possible and the hypothetical- the world of future. Since he is capable of reflective thought, he can consider his future and the future of the society in which he lives. He develops a special ego-centricism, in which he combines an extravagant belief in thought with sweeping disregard for the practicality of the designs and the reforms he proposes.

Those who are in this stage are roughly 11 to 15 years old and are advancing from logical reasoning with concrete examples to abstract examples. The need for concrete examples is no longer necessary because abstract thinking can be used instead. In this stage adolescents are also able to view themselves in the future and can picture the ideal life they would like to pursue. Some theorists believe the formal operational stage can be divided into two sub-categories: early formal operational and late formal operation thought. Early formal operational thoughts may be just fantasies, but as adolescents advance to late formal operational thought the life experiences they have encountered changes those fantasy thoughts to realistic thoughts.

This brief description concludes our consideration of the periods of  intellectual development as identified by Piaget’s and his associates.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Se. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Sociology as a social science has been trying to develop its own method of study. Sociology has to face greater problems in evolving a satisfactory method in the comparison with other social sciences. Man’ s social life is complex and multi-faceted. It is highly a challenging task for sociologists to collect, analyse, synthesis and finally generalise social data which are too numerous, complex and illusive.

Comte’s Formulation of Sociological Methods Comte was the first social thinker to take methodological questions seriously—that is, how are facts about the social world to be gathered and used to develop, as well as to test, theoretical principles.

The resources upon which sociology can draw when it sets itself the task of explaining the laws of progress and of social order are, first of all, the same that have been used so successfully in the natural sciences

He advocated four methods in the new science of social physics:

(1) Observation,

(2) Experimentation,

(3) Comparison, and

(4) Historical analysis.

Method of Observation

Observation methods are used to gather information about a social skills in natural settings,. Observation methods can be highly structured wherein defined behaviors are measured for frequency of occurrence or measured for occurrence during specified time periods or intervals. Observation methods often include focus on the environmental variables that may increase or decrease a child’s social skills, such as the reactions of peers and adults to initiating conversation. Observations also can be conducted in what is known as analogue assessment, which involves having a  role-play social scenarios and observing the  performance..

Observation does not mean the unguided quest for miscellaneous facts. “But for the guidance of a preparatory theory,” the observer would not know what facts to look at.” “No social fact can have any scientific meaning till it is connected with some other social fact” by a preliminary theory. Hence, observation can come into its own only when it is subordinated to the static and dynamic laws of phenomena. But within these limits it remains indispensable. For Comte, positivism was based on use of the senses to observe social facts —a term that the next great French theorist, Émile Durkheim, made the center of his sociology.

Much of Comte’s discussion of observation involves arguments for the “subordination of Observation to the static and dynamical laws of phenomena” rather than a statement on the procedures by which unbiased observations should be conducted. He argued that observation of empirical facts, when unguided by theory, will prove useless in the development of science. He must be given credit, however, for firmly establishing sociology as a science of social facts, thereby liberating thought from the debilitating realm of morals and metaphysical speculation.

Method of Experimentation,

The second scientific method of investigation, experimentation, is only partly applicable in the social sciences. Direct experimentation is not feasible in the human world. But “experimentation takes place whenever the regular course of the phenomenon is interfered with in any determinate manner. . . . Pathological cases are the true scientific equivalent of pure experimentation.” Disturbances in the social body are “analogous to diseases in the individual organism,” and so the study of the pathological gives, as it were, privileged access to an understanding of the normal. Comte recognized that artificial experimentation with whole societies, and other social phenomena, was impractical and often impossible. But, he noted, natural experimentation frequently “takes place whenever the regular course of the phenomenon is interfered with in any determinate manner.” In particular, he thought that, much as is the case in biology, pathological events allowed “the true equivalent of pure experimentation” in that they introduced an artificial condition and allowed investigators to see normal processes reassert themselves in the face of the pathological condition. Much as the biologist can learn about normal bodily functioning from the study of disease, so also social physicists can learn about the normal processes of society from the study

of pathological cases. Thus, although Comte’s view of “natural experimentation” was certainly deficient in the logic of the experimental method, it nonetheless fascinated subsequent generations of scholars.

In experimental method, the researcher manipulates or varies an independent variable and measures its effects on one or more dependent variables. In a true experimental design, the researcher randomly assigns the participants who are being studied (also called the subjects) to two or more comparison groups.

Method of Comparison

Sociologists have embraced what is known as the comparative method as the most efficient way to expose taken-for-granted ‘truths’ or laws that people have adopted. Comte used it to try to show that different societies were developing along similar lines . The comparative method, simply put, is the process of comparing two things (in our case societies, or the people that make up society) and seeing if the result of the comparison shows a difference between the two.

The comparative method attempts to clarify (the process of exposing misinterpreted norms. This a methods of comparing different societies or groups within the same society to show weather and why they are similar or different in certain respects”. To tackle the problems of society effectively and to make fruitful discoveries, sociology has to employ precise and well tested methods of investigation.

The scientific method of inquiry of central importance to the sociologist is comparison, above all, because it “performs the great service of casting out the . . . spirit [of absolutism].” Comparisons of human with animal societies will give up precious clues to “the first germs of the social relations” and to the borderlines between the human and the animal. Yet comparisons within the human species are even more central to sociology. The chief method here “consists in a comparison of the different co-existing states of human society on the various parts of the earth’s surface–these states being completely independent of each other. By this method, the different stages of evolution may all be observed at once.” Though the human race as a whole has progressed in a single and uniform manner, various populations “have attained extremely unequal degrees of development”,  from  causes still little understood. Hence, certain phases of development “of which the history of [Western] civilization leaves no perceptible traces, can be known only by this comparative method,” that is, by the comparative study of primitive societies. Moreover, the comparative method is of the essence when we wish to study the influence of race or climate on human affairs. It is indispensable, for example, to combat fallacious doctrines, “as when social differences have been ascribed to the political influence of climate, instead of that inequality of evolution which is the real cause.”

Just as comparative analysis had been useful in biology, comparison of social forms with those of lower animals, with coexisting states, and with past systems could also generate considerable insight into the operation of the social universe. By comparing elements that are present and absent, and similar or dissimilar, knowledge about the fundamental properties of the social world can be achieved

Method of Historical Analysis.

Although all three conventional methods of science must be used in sociology, it relies above all on a fourth one, the historical method. “The historical comparison of the consecutive states of humanity is not only the chief scientific device of the new political philosophy. . . it constitutes the substratum of the science, in whatever is essential to it.”

Historical comparisons throughout the time in which humanity has evolved are at the very core of sociological inquiry. Sociology is nothing if it is not informed by a sense of historical evolution. A study of events, processes and institutions of past civilizations, for the purpose of finding the origins of antecedents of contemporary social life and thus understanding its nature and working”. Historical method in sociology is a particular kind of comperative study of social groups; their compositions, their interrelationships and the social conditions which support or undermine them.

Comte originally classified historical analysis as a variation of the comparative method (i.e., comparing the present with the past). But his “law of the three stages” emphasized that the laws of social dynamics could ultimately be developed only with careful observations of the historical movement of societies.

In sum, then, Comte saw these four basic methods as appropriate to sociological analysis. His formulation of the methods is quite deficient by modern standards, but we should recognize that before Comte, little attention had been paid to how social facts were to be collected.

Thus, although the specifics of Comte’s methodological proposals are not always useful, their spirit and intent are important. Social physics was, in his vision, to be a theoretical science capable of formulating and testing the laws of social organization and change. His formulation of sociology’s methods added increased credibility to this claim.

In short Comte believed that sociology could be modeled after the natural sciences. Sociology could seek and discover the fundamental properties and relations of the social universe, and like the other sciences, it could express these in a small number of abstract principles. Observations of empirical events could be used to generate, confirm, and modify sociology’s laws. Once well-developed laws had been formulated, they could be used as tools or instruments to modify the social world.

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Se. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

The study of social statics and dynamics are the two fundamentals of Comte’s study of the organic phase or  social stability . The study of social statics and dynamics are not two distinct classes of facts but are two components of a theory. These studies are not separate but are complementary to each other as static is the study when society is in equilibrium and dynamics is the study of evolution which is a slow and steady process. This slow and steady process can only occur during the phase in which the society is in equilibrium and not disequilibrium or critical phase. Despite the fact that it seemed desirable for methodological and heuristic purposes to separate the study of statics and dynamics, in empirical reality they were correlative.  Comte believed that social structures could not be reduced to the properties of individuals. Rather, social structures are composed of other structures and can be understood only as the properties of, and relations among, these other structures

Social Statics and Social Dynamics

Comte considers Sociology into two Theoretical Aspects;

Social Statics and Social Dynamics

Social static focuses on how order is maintained in the society and social dynamic focuses on how society changes over time.

Comte separated social statics from social dynamics. Social statics are concerned with the ways in which the parts of a social system (social structures) interact with one another, as well as the functional relationships between the parts and to the social system as a whole. Comte therefore focused his social statics on the individual, as well as such collective phenomena as the family, religion, language, and the division of labor.

Comte placed greater emphasis on the study of social dynamics, or social change. His theory of social dynamics is founded on the law of the three stages; i.e., the evolution of society is based on the evolution of mind through the theological, metaphysical, and positivist stages. He saw social dynamics as a process of progressive evolution in which people become cumulatively more intelligent and in which altruism eventually triumphs over egoism. This process is one that people can modify or accelerate, but in the end the laws of progressive development dictate the development of society. Comte’s research on social evolution focused on Western Europe, which he viewed as the most highly developed part of the world during his times.

This distinction between social statics and social dynamics is one of his lasting contributions to sociology. His aim was to create a naturalistic science of society, which would explain the past development of mankind and predict its future course.

Social Statics

Comte separated social statics from social dynamics. Social statics are concerned with the ways in which the parts of a social system (social structures) interact with one another, as well as the functional relationships between the parts and to the social system as a whole. Comte therefore focused his social statics on the individual, as well as such collective phenomena as the family, religion, language, and the division of labor.

Social statics is a branch of social physics that deals with the fundamental laws of the social order and the equilibrium of forces in a stable society, It is an approach to sociology focusing on the distinctive nature of human societies and social systems in abstract rather than empirical terms.

It is the study of social systems as they exist at a given time. that examines human societies as they exist in a certain time that is relative to the level of development.

Comte defined social statics as the study of social structure, its elements, and their relations. He first analyzed “individuals” as the Elements of social structure. Generally, he viewed the individual asa series of capacities and needs, some innate and others acquired through participation in society. He did not view the individual as a . “true social unit”; indeed, he relegated the study of the individual to Biology—an unfortunate oversight because it denied the legitimacy of psychology as a distinct social science. The most basic social unit, he argued, is “the family.” It is the most elementary unit, from which all other social units ultimately evolved:

Comte believed that social structures could not be reduced to the properties of individuals. Rather, social structures are composed of other structures and can be understood only as the properties of, and relations among, these other structures. Comte’s analysis of the family then moves to descriptions of its structure—first the sexual division of labor and then the parental relation. The specifics of his analysis are not important because they are flawed and inaccurate.

Main Features of Social Statics

• It is concerned with the present structure of the society. Social Statics refers to the study of the conditions and pre-conditions of social order.
• It studies the issues of social stability and social order.
• It studies the current laws, rules and present conditions of the society. It observes how these laws and rules are affecting the present society.
• It investigates the law of action and reaction of the different parts of the social system.
• It is concerned with the study of major institutions, which preserve the social order. For example, family; it occupies an important position in social structure. It provides the base for the social order and progress of the society.
• Individual, family and social combinations are three levels of society. Family is the smallest and basic unit of sociology.

Factors of Social Statics:

Auguste Comte refuses to place individuals as the base of the society. It is erroneous to derive man’s social tendencies out of his utilitarian considerations as it makes the existence of social state impossible. He places family at the base of society and allows resizing it if necessary to a couple. Family curbs the egoistic nature of a person to make him adaptable to the society this makes it the base of a social feeling causing stability. According to his thought of collective organism he places families at the level of an element, classes and caste of a tissue and cities and towns of an organ. Aware of the limitations of such analogy Comte concluded them by stating language, religion and division of labour as the unifying or binding forces of society.

He finds language, religion and division of labour as the three key factors for the stability of the body social According to Comte, there are three factors of social statics. They are;

• Language;language is the “easiest and common way of communication”, making it an essential tool for binding people closely to each other in a community. Language is a common mode of communication between generations. It helps impart the future generations with the knowledge and skills of the older generation, providing it with a base to progress on. It is the means of storing thoughts and culture for proceeding generations. Without a common language, attaining solidarity and social order is not possible.
• Religion;religion compensates the weaknesses of language by binding the society on the basis of a few common beliefs, acting as a “positive guide”. It ties the society by morality not letting it fall apart because of the disparities among peopleIt provides the guidance for behaviour and it is the root of social order.
• Division of Labor; labor binds the society together on basis of “similarity of classes” but is feared of distancing men from a larger mass as they are more driven towards their personal interests over the societies. Men in this stage become more conscious of their personal needs and feebly relate them to the needs of society It is essential for the success of the state cooperation as it creates interdependence among the people in the society.

In presenting this analysis, Comte felt that he had uncovered several laws of social statics because he believed that differentiation, centralization of power, and development of a common morality were fundamentally related to the maintenance of the social order.

Far more important is the view of structure that he implied: social structures are composed of substructures and develop from the elaboration of simpler structures.

Social Dynamics

Social dynamics is a branch of social physics that deals with the laws, forces, and phenomena of change in society ,it is an approach to sociology focusing on the empirical studies of societies and social systems in the processes of change in years gone by.  The processes and forces of change at work in any social group.. Social dynamics is a mathematically inspired approach to analyses societies, building upon systems theory and sociology.

Social dynamics looks at all of the things that can change a social group. It is the study of the ability of a society to react to inner and outer changes and deal with its regulation mechanisms. It deals with the forces in society that provide for change and or conflict., and with those aspects of social life that pattern institutional development and have to do with social change

Comte placed greater emphasis on the study of social dynamics, or social change. For the dynamical view is not only the more interesting . . . , but the more marked in its philosophical character, from its being more distinguished from biology by the master-thought of continuous progress, or rather of the gradual development of humanity.

Social dynamics studies the “laws of succession,” or the patterns of change in social systems over time..

His theory of social dynamics is founded on the law of the three stages;

the evolution of society is based on the evolution of mind through the theological, metaphysical, and positivist stages.

He saw social dynamics as a process of progressive evolution in which people become cumulatively more intelligent and in which altruism eventually triumphs over egoism. This process is one that people can modify or accelerate, but in the end the laws of progressive development dictate the development of society.

Main Features of Social Dynamics

• Ø Dynamics begin when the functions of the social institutions are altered or changed. It begins with the study of the process of social changes. Therefore, it is concerned with the matter of social progress.
• Ø Social dynamics refers to the pattern of the revolutionary progress in which the sequence of the development is necessary and inevitable. The term ‘Progress’ refers to the orderly development of the society, which are according to the natural law. Hence, the order and progress or statics and dynamics are co-related to each other.
• Ø According to Comte, social dynamics describe the successive and necessary stages in the development in the human mind and the society. Moreover, it is natural that the social systems, such as institutions are interrelated and interdependent, so they can make a harmonious whole
• Ø Further, he opined that the social dynamics should depend on the historical perspectives in order to study the process of social change and progress. Thus, the social dynamics are found in all the aspects of the society, such as physical, moral and intellectual. However, the intellectual is the most important.