J.J.Waterston 1843: A neglected pioneer in physiological psychology – with some comments on recognition in science

Abstract

Waterston’s 1843 book is a pioneering text on physiological psychology. It attempts a nerve fibre connectionist account of association with electrical activity passing through the equivalent of ‘nerve nets’. It describes a spatial co-ordination system of visual, tactile and muscle nerve fibres with cerebral endings spatially arranged so as to map their peripheral body endings, and it postulates re-afferent paths and muscle length detectors. It describes hearing and voice as another coordinated nerve fibre system, and discusses the nature of loudness, pitch, musical scale, and timbre, with composite auditory fibre activity for pitch detection possibly involving the cochlea. It analyses emotional expressions as facial, vocal and whole body actions, with internal and external re-afference of all three for sympathetic recognition of expressions of others. Finally it considers mental calculation and reviews phrenology’s ‘mental faculties’ as compound associations of lower level associations.The book ends with two notes – one on a kinetic theory of gases and the other on the nature of heat and temperature. Unlike the psychology, these were truly fundamental to physics and chemistry but when expanded and submitted to the Royal Society in 1845 the paper was deemed ‘nonsense’ and rejected. Fifteen years later others, including Clerk-Maxwell, developed the same kinetic theory. The history of J.J. Waterston illustrates some of the factors that are involved in the acceptance of scientific ideas.