Von Helmholtz Research Articles

Hermann von Helmholtz und Carl Stumpf über Konsonanz und Dissonanz

The article juxtaposes Hermann von Helmholtz's work in the experimental physiology of hearing and Carl Stumpf's tone psychology, focusing on the problem of consonance and dissonance in music. It argues that the experimental set-up plays a major role in the approaches to hearing of both Helmholtz and Stumpf, shaping their redefinition of the musical concepts of consonance and dissonance. Helmholtz, however, explains dissonance as resulting from the beats that are heard when sound waves interfere, while Stumpf explains consonance from the fusion (Verschmelzung) of sounds, noting that two tones, depending on their distance cannot always be recognized as two but are heard as one single tone. Helmholtz's definition of dissonance eventually threatens his own theory of hearing, which is based on the mechanical principle of resonance and considers sound to be composed of sinusoidal waves. Both the physical and the mathematical tools he uses cannot easily be brought into accordance with his experimental findings on beats, which ask for a discrimination of fast changes in intensity. Dissonance thus becomes "unrecomendable" for Helmholtz, because it overstrains the ear. Stumpf's research, in contrast, has its point of departure in the historically given set of intervals and tries to find a principle that would explain this choice. His tests with experimental subjects who have no conscious knowledge of musical harmony and prove incapable to follow or reproduce music reveals to him a difference between the unity and multiplicity of tones.

Müller's Lab: The Story of Jakob Henle, Theodor Schwann, Emil du Bois‐Reymond, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Virchow, Robert Remak, Ernst Haeckel, and Their Brilliant, Tormented Advisor. By Laura Otis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. $55.00. xix + 316 p.; ill.; index. 978‐0‐19‐530697‐2. 2007.

Previous articleNext article No AccessNew Biological BooksMüller's Lab: The Story of Jakob Henle, Theodor Schwann, Emil du Bois‐Reymond, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Virchow, Robert Remak, Ernst Haeckel, and Their Brilliant, Tormented Advisor. By Laura Otis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. $55.00. xix + 316 p.; ill.; index. 978‐0‐19‐530697‐2. 2007.David A. BloomDavid A. BloomUrology, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, Michigan Search for more articles by this author Urology, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, MichiganPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Quarterly Review of Biology Volume 83, Number 2June 2008 Published in association with Stony Brook University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/590609 Views: 10Total views on this site © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Towards neuroscientific management? Geometric chronophotography and the thin-slicing of the labouring body

The conventional history of the labour process suggests that Taylorism played a key role in the development and popularization of production management techniques in general, and work science in particular.This paper argues that the work of Herman von Helmholtz, Eadweard Muybridge, and Etienne-Jules Marey helped establish a broader ideology of the labour process encompassing physiological, psychological and psychodynamic elements of human behaviour. Through the medium of chronophotography, this ideology offered a visual vocabulary of efficiency which predated the work of Frederick Taylor and continues to influence management research and practices today.

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (review)

Reviewed by: In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind Laura Otis Eric R. Kandel . In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. xv + 510 pp. Ill. $29.95 (0-393-05863-8). In Search of Memory will join James Watson's The Double Helix and Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Recollections of My Life as one of the most readable scientific life stories. Superbly written, Eric Kandel's narrative "interweaves" his own emergence as a scientist with the development of contemporary neuroscience (p. xv). It is simultaneously a moving autobiography, a lucid introduction to neuroscience, and a persuasive argument that mind is inseparable from brain. [End Page 238] As Kandel describes his quest to understand consciousness through history, medicine, psychoanalysis, and molecular neurobiology, he demonstrates the interdependence of science, politics, and personal life. His search for memory begins with his family's flight from Nazi-occupied Austria and ends with his demand that the Austrians acknowledge their role in expelling and murdering Jews. Although he presents his motivation as scientific curiosity, he frames his search with episodes illustrating what we must never forget. In Search of Memory celebrates science, especially American science, as a free, egalitarian realm in which anything can happen. He presents it as a group activity that proceeds through collaborations in an international community. In his narrative, some fields develop in the most exciting ways when they merge with others perceived as different but trying to answer similar questions. Other disciplines, such as psychoanalysis, stagnate when they refuse to acknowledge their affinities to different ways of studying human thought. While Kandel says disappointingly little about the day-to-day practice of science, he offers a highly informative overview of the way that sciences of mind have developed throughout the twentieth century. For those starting careers in science, Kandel has invaluable wisdom. Describing his decision to leave mammalian brains and use the marine snail Aplysia as a model system, he writes that he had learned from marriage "to trust one's instincts, one's unconscious, one's creative urge" (p. 149). When his long hours in the laboratory threatened his marriage, he learned that "hard thinking . . . is much more valuable than simply running more experiments" (p. 162). In his final advice to young scientists, he writes that it is better to "lose some years trying something new" than to do the same experiments everyone else is doing (p. 427). The entire story of his scientific life conveys the benefits of taking risks. Kandel has not written a history of neuroscience, and his picture of science past distorts the record somewhat by focusing on a few great individuals rather than on complex collaborations. No one would quarrel with his choices of Hermann Helmholtz and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, but Emil du Bois-Reymond's electrophysiology and Wilhelm His's neuroembryology should be mentioned in conjunction with those scientists' work. For the most part, Kandel succeeds in combining his personal and scientific narratives. His life story provides the driving force in the opening and conclusion but languishes in the middle, when the book becomes an introduction to the science of mind. If anything, the story flows too smoothly. It is hard to believe that any scientist's life could have been so untroubled, and one wishes that Kandel had described the dead ends, the waste, the feuds, and the frustrations so that readers could learn from them as well as from his successes. Overall, however, his story strikes the reader as optimistic, not censored. He has experienced science as exhilarating, and that is what he wants to convey. In an era in which science has received more than its share of criticism, he shows us that there really is such a thing as progress. While reminding readers not to forget the past, In Search of Memory urges us to consider what neuroscience may achieve in this century. Laura Otis Emory University Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Sublime,"Über den Granit," and the Prehistory of Goethe’s Science

The Sublime,"Über den Granit," and the Prehistory of Goethe’s Science Elizabeth Powers His scientific pursuits and writings have merited Goethe a place in histories of science in the eighteenth century,1 and there is a great body of scholarship that documents his work in various scientific fields.2 Recent studies, part of a wider reevaluation of the development of science in Europe in the eighteenth century,3 have greatly assisted our understanding of the intellectual and sociological milieu in which Goethe's scientific pursuits took place and have largely erased the image of Goethe as a dilettante. Alongside studies of contemporary science in his various poetic works4 are those investigating the conceptual basis of Goethe's scientific thinking, thus amplifying "what connections he drew between art and the careful observation and assessment of the natural world."5 Recent investigations have also focused on the interpenetration of philosophy, science, and art.6 A general consensus exists that the literary pursuits and the scientific ones cannot be separated,7 and few contemporary scholars would agree with Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), who argued that Goethe would have done better to follow the advice the mathematician Clairant gave to Voltaire, namely, to leave science to those who were not also great poets.8 Nevertheless, largely absent in these studies is an investigation of what Hermann von Helmholtz, writing in 1853 in connection with Goethe's morphological works, characterized as the "dichterische Richtung geistiger Tätigkeit."9 In considering what, exactly, is poetic about Goethe's science, I am interested in the specific influence of aesthetics, including literary conventions, on the shape or substance of the science. An exception, addressing precisely this issue, again in connection with Goethe's theory of morphology, is The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, by Robert A. Richards, a far-ranging study reaching from the young Goethe to Charles Darwin's Romantic affinities.10 Stressing the effect of personal and intimate entanglements on art, science, and philosophy, Richards claims that nature exercised "erotic authority" over Goethe and that each of his relationships with a woman "became a passional means by which he explored the aesthetic and the universal in nature, yielding with each encounter...a different modality in his art" (326). An important theme of this study is "the deep emotional and aesthetic connection between Goethe's experience of female forms—in literature and in life—and his ideal biological structures" (396). Thus, in Sicily, while Goethe contemplated "the lovely [End Page 35] Nausicaa" in Palermo's public gardens, the notion of the Urpflanze erupted into his meditations (395). For Richards, this combination of "[b]eautiful nature, a beautiful woman, and the primal plant" (397) is an example of "the erotic power of nature" to transmute into an artistic force and realize beauty in another medium (400). Richards uses a felicitous term to describe the result of this interplay, namely, "artistic instantiation" (400).11 Wolf von Engelhardt, in Goethe im Gespräch mit der Erde, attempts something similar, probing the links between the poetic oeuvre and geology, the field of Goethe's first scientific endeavours.12 Engelhardt, a geologist himself as well as editor of the sections of the Leopoldina edition of Goethe's scientific writings devoted to the earth sciences, is in a favorable position to launch such an attempt. This impressive edition has advanced so far as to offer all scholars, scientist and non-scientist alike, a definitive resource, with essential commentary, for investigating the interpenetration of Goethe's literary activities and his scientific work.13 In particular, this edition makes possible an evaluation of the relationship between the two prior to the period with which most investigations of this relationship begin, namely, the Italian journey of 1786. In this connection I would like to offer some speculations concerning what might be called the prehistory of Goethe's scientific pursuits, in particular the influence of the aesthetic category of the sublime, evident in the 1772 essay "Von Deutscher Baukunst," on the formation of Goethe's scientific views. The sublime, like the cathedral at the center of that essay, resists measurement, thus presaging Goethe's later disapproval...

Was Helmholtz a Bayesian?

Modern developments in machine vision and object recognition have generated renewed interest in the proposal for drawing inferences put forward by the Rev. Thomas Bayes (1701-1759). In this connection the epistemological studies by Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894) are often cited as laying the foundation of the currently popular move to regard perception as Bayesian inference. Helmholtz in his mature writings tried to reconcile the German idealist notions of reality-as-hypothesis with scientists' quests for the laws of nature, and espoused the view that we "attain knowledge of the lawful order in the realm of the real, but only in so far as it is represented in the tokens within the system of sensory impressions". His propositions of inferring objects from internal sensory signals by what he called 'unconscious inferences' have made Helmholtz be regarded as a proto-Bayesian. But juxtaposing Bayes's original writings, the modern formulation of Bayesian inference, and Helmholtz's views of perception reveals only a tenuous relationship.

From Helmholtz to the scanning laser ophthalmoscope. 150 years of ophthalmoscopy.

Abstract Purpose: To give a brief overview on Helmholtz and the history of ophthalmoscopy. Methods: Literature survey. Results: Hermann von Helmholtz (1821‐1894), although not an ophthalmologist but a physiologist, invented the ophthalmoscope, not yet 30 years old, and is thus one of the most important scientists in European ophthalmology.Yet Charles Bobbage may have preceeded Helmholtz. Unfortunately an "expert" gave him a negative critic and his work was only published in 1854, 3 years after Helmholtz's monography: "Beschreibung einer Augenspiegels zur Untersuchung des Netzhaut im lebenden Auge". Helmholtz's discovery as well as the first international congress of Ophthalmology exactly 150 years ago, introduced the modern era of ophthalmology. Within a few years several modifications of Helmholtz's ophthalmoscope were presented by Ruete (1852), Coccius (1853 and 1855), Anagnostakis (1854), Gillet de Grandmont (1859),Galezowski (1862), Beale (1869) and others. Marc‐Antoine Giraud‐Teulon (1861) designed the first binocular ophthalmoscope. The first coloured drawing of the fundus was published in Utrecht in 1853 (Van Tricht) and Fallon (1863) published the first atlas of ophthalmoscopy. Conclusions: Despite limitations due to poor illumination the introduction of ophthalmoscopy resulted in the discovery of a completely new field in ophthalmology.

Akkommodationsmechanismus am jungen menschlichen Auge - einige neue Aspekte

The basics of the model of accommodation were described by Hermann von Helmholtz 150 years ago and are accepted until today. Twenty-five healthy young phakic test persons (age range 14 to 28 years) were examined using the IOL Master (Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH), slit lamp photography (Scheimpflug camera EAS 1000, Nidek) and pupillography (AMTech GmbH). Measurements were taken of disaccommodated and accommodated eyes. The mesopic and photopic pupil size are statistically significant (p < 0.05) smaller in accommodated eyes than in disaccommodated. Also, a significantly shorter reaction time of the light-induced pupil reaction with accommodation could be shown compared to disaccommodation. The central vertical and horizontal radii of curvature of the cornea increased with accommodation. This is likewise a decrease of the central anterior corneal curvature by near fixation. Due to the axial lens thickening, the anterior chamber angle and the anterior chamber depth decreased. Consequently, a decrease of the lens transparence resulted with accommodation. As a result of our measurements the existing model of accommodation, developed by Hermann von Helmholtz 150 years ago, can be modified.

The emergence of genomic psychology

To say that psychology was born out of biology is not a huge overstatement. Many of the founders of modern psychology were trained in medicine, physiology or the natural sciences, and regarded psychology as the physiology of behaviour. Wilhelm Wundt, who founded modern experimental and cognitive psychology, and published the Principles of Physiological Psychology in 1874, studied medicine and worked as an assistant to the physicist Herrmann von Helmholtz. William James, who is widely regarded as a founder of psychology in the USA, earned a medical degree and, in 1890, published the influential Principles of Psychology , which starts with a chapter on brain function. Ivan Pavlov, whose work in the 1890s on the conditioning of reflexes in dogs gave rise to behaviourism, received his doctorate in the natural sciences. ![][1] Given its roots in the biological sciences, it is not surprising that psychology has absorbed many technical innovations from biological research, although their incorporation has been confined largely to the subfield of biological psychology. This has changed notably over the past 15 years, as investigators have begun to use non‐invasive functional neuroimaging technologies to study human behaviour and psychological processes. Today, this type of analysis cuts across all domains of psychology—clinical, cognitive, developmental and social/health—and represents the lowest level of the reductionist ladder, as it descends from behaviour to neurons. Here, I suggest that the field of psychology is about to undergo another transformation that will affect all of its subfields, and that will push analyses further down to the level of the genome. This transformation is inspired by genomics—defined as the molecular study of the entire genome, as opposed to the genetics of single genes—and by the interactions among genes, and those between genes and the environment. Genomics is more powerful than quantitative genetics—which has produced studies based on … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

Speech encoding in a model of peripheral auditory processing: Quantitative assessment by means of automatic speech recognition

Our notion of how speech is processed is still very much dominated by von Helmholtz’s theory of hearing. He deduced that the human inner ear decomposes the spectrum of sound signals. However, physiological recordings of auditory nerve fibers (ANF) showed that the rate-place code, which is thought to transmit spectral information to the brain, is at least complemented by a temporal code. In our paper we challenge the rate-place code using a complex but realistic scenario: speech in noise. We used a detailed model of human auditory processing that closely replicates key aspects of auditory nerve spike trains. We performed quantitative evaluations of coding strategies using standard automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools. Our test data was spoken letters of the whole English alphabet from a variety of speakers, with and without background noise. We evaluated a purely rate-place-based encoding strategy, a temporal strategy based on interspike intervals, and a combination thereof. The results suggest that as few as 4% of the total number of ANFs would be sufficient to code speech information in a rate-place fashion. Rate-place coding performed its best for speech in clean conditions at normal sound level, but broke down at higher-than-normal levels, and failed dramatically in noise at high levels. Low-spontaneous rate fibers improved the rate-place code, mainly for vowels and at higher-than-normal levels. At high speech levels, and in particular in the presence of background noise, combining rate-place coding with the temporal coding strategy greatly improved recognition accuracy. We therefore conclude that the human auditory system does not rely on a rate-place code alone but requires the abundance of fibers for precise temporal coding.

Darwinism, Doxology, and Energy Physics: The New Sciences, the Poetry and the Poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Darwinism, Doxology, and Energy Physics:The New Sciences, the Poetry and the Poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins Marie Banfield (bio) In our day grand generalisations have been reached. The theory of the origin of species is but one of them. Another, of still wider grasp and more radical significance, is the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy.1 The scientific revolution of the mid nineteenth century in its double aspect provided a matrix for the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins which nurtured his development as a poet responding to nature and as a religious poet. The scientific context of Hopkins' work, firmly established by Gillian Beer, Daniel Brown, Jude V. Nixon, and Tom Zaniello, makes manifest the challenge and the opportunities offered to the poet by the new sciences. In a recent article for Victorian Poetry, Nixon has stressed the significance for Hopkins' poetry of energy tropes drawn from thermodynamics: the anxiety as well as the attraction that the new physical science created for the poet. The tropes are described as admitting a dialogue between the domains of science and literature, across the vast distances which contiguity does not allow.2 The dialogue between literature and science in Hopkins' writing forms a broad debate that crosses cultural as well as temporal barriers, creating new syntheses and paradoxes as the claims of modern science are placed against those of classical philosophy, scholasticism, and aesthetics, while all are set against the demands of religion. In what follows, I will argue that the effort and energy generated by Hopkins' response to the new sciences, to energy physics and to evolutionary biology, produced not only a polarity between attraction and reaction within his work but also a subtle counter-challenge to the perceived hegemony of scientific materialism which transformed not only his poetry but also his poetics. The theories of Darwinian evolution and thermodynamics together imply a dynamic world of constant change, of flux, of new relations within nature; it is a world that provided Hopkins with both image and energy. The [End Page 175] "grand generalisations," spoken of by John Tyndall, offered new perspectives to his generation as Lyell's geology had done to an earlier one when it opened up alternative viewpoints to Darwin and to Tennyson. In the evolutionary theories of Darwin an "unknown plan of creation" was replaced by a visible "community of descent," a richly diverse, highly individuated, and self-sustaining material world: a biological continuum in which all of animate nature is closely linked in an "inextricable web of affinities."3 The science of thermodynamics developed from a growing awareness in the nineteenth century that various forces were not separate and distinct but manifestations of a single force. Its first law, developed by Hermann Helmholtz and Rudolf Clausius in Germany and by James Joule and William Thomson in Britain, stated that the total energy of a system or a body could neither be increased nor decreased though it could be transformed.4 The fluency of its transformations was described by Tyndall: "Light runs into heat; heat into electricity; electricity into magnetism; magnetism into mechanical force; and mechanical force again into light and heat. The Proteus changes, but he is ever the same" (2:4). The second law, the dissipation of energy, discovered by Thomson and formulated by Clausius, who renamed the process entropy, stated that the availability of energy decreases as it is degraded and wasted in nature (Cropper, p. 101). The gradual dissipation of useful energy throughout the universe was seen to set its limits; it could be perceived to be "running down." The first law of thermodynamics created little general anxiety, seeming to uphold the idea of divine superintendence of the universe; the second law of entropy was more unsettling, appearing to give material substance, through scientific corroboration, to apocalyptic claims (Nixon, p. 132). The second law not only seemed to exclude design but to eliminate "the possibility of human intervention in its relentless processes."5 The temporal limits of the material world set down in hard figures, obtained through calculation, now seemed less negotiable through image and parable. In his poetry, Hopkins engages with the dense materiality and diversity of the evolutionary world and with...

Harvard academic tree leading back to Helmholtz

From 1946 to 1971, 30 Harvard Ph.D. degrees were earned in F. V. (Ted) Hunt’s Acoustics Research Laboratory. Although Hunt was on my committee, and I’ll always consider myself one of ‘‘Hunt’s boys,’’ William P. Raney was my Ph.D. (Harvard, 1960) supervisor. My direct ancestral line thus begins with Raney, who did his doctoral research at Brown University (Ph.D. 1955) under Peter J. Westervelt. The lineage going further down the tree is as follows: Westervelt (MIT, 1951), Richard H. Bolt (UCLA, 1939), Vern O. Knudsen (University of Chicago, 1922), Robert A. Millikan (Columbia, 1895), Michael I. Pupin (Berlin, 1887), Hermann von Helmholtz (Berlin, medicine, 1842). Now go up the tree. I had two Ph.D. students at the University of Rochester, Donald B. Cruikshank (1968) and James C. Lockwood (1971). My first Ph.D. graduate from the University of Texas at Austin was F. Michael Pestorius (1973); eight younger siblings followed. A bonus was being stepfather for Mark F. Hamilton (Penn State, 1983) when his Penn State supervisor, Frank Fenlon, died in 1981. I was also blessed with 22 master’s students at Texas.

The acoustic origins of harmonic analysis

In music, harmony refers to a pleasant combination of sounds. In mathematics, a harmonic function is a sine function obtained by projecting a circular motion on a diameter, and harmonic analysis is the theory of the development of periodic functions into harmonic components, or the theory of similar developments. The occurrence of the same word in musical and mathematical contexts is neither a coincidence nor a purely metaphorical effect. As is well known, in the mid-nineteenth century Hermann Helmholtz connected the two meanings through the idea that the ear functions as a harmonic analyzer in a physico-mathematical sense.1 This formulation of Helmholtz’s achievement suggests that harmonic analysis preceded its acoustic and musical application. So does too the fact that Joseph Fourier’s foundation of this kind of analysis had to do with heat rather

The New Zeitschrift für Psychologie / Journal of Psychology

Starting with this, the first issue in 2007, the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie is appearing in a new format and style. There are two main changes. First, the Journal is now being published in English – and accordingly, the original title has been extended to include the English form of the title. It will from now on be called Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology. Second, in the future each issue will be devoted to a particular topic. The need for these changes in the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie results from the changed journal landscape in the field of psychology. There are of course many reasons for the changes. For one, there are few German-speaking researchers who do not wish to publish in English, as English-language papers are necessary for research to be accepted and read by the international psychological community. And for another, through the change in language to one that is more widely understood, and also through the inclusion of the online version of the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology in the PsycARTICLESTM database and Hogrefe’s own PsyCONTENT system, readers worldwide can be reached even more easily. PsycARTICLESTM is a database of full-text articles from more than 50 journals published by the American Psychological Association, the APA Educational Publishing Foundation, and the Canadian Psychological Association, as well as the Hogrefe & Huber group’s English-language journals. PsyCONTENT is the Hogrefe and Huber group’s own online journal system, including some 28 psychology journals. As has happened with other German-language journals that have changed to the English language and been integrated into both the PsycARTICLESTM and PsyCONTENT systems, the readership and impact of the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology, we hope, will increase substantially. The Zeitschrift fur Psychologie, originally called Zeitschrift fur Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, was established in 1890. In other words, it is the second oldest psychology Journal in the world (Gundlach, 1991). Hermann Ebbinghaus was one of the founding editors, with Hermann von Helmholtz, Georg Elias Muller, and Carl Stumpf, among others, serving as co-editors. Karl Buhler, Wolfgang Kohler, Otto Selz, and Max Wertheimer are just some of the psychologists whose pioneering work was originally published in the early days of the Journal. It was because of this long and proud tradition of the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie that we were reluctant to abandon the original title, and so led us to the slightly unusual step of simply adding what librarians call the parallel title: Journal of Psychology. During its long history, the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology has always been an outlet for all disciplines within the field of psychology, and not only for a particular specialization or branch of psychology. This tradition will be maintained – although, as indicated earlier in this editorial, only thematic or topical issues will be published in the future. This will ensure that the individual contributions are more homogeneous and, we hope, will increase the attractiveness of the Journal for readers. When the Journal was founded, German was the lingua franca of science. In many disciplines, scientists from around the world published their findings in journals such as Annalen der Chemie (with Justus von Liebig as cofounder), Annalen der Physik (in which, for instance, Max Planck first published a paper on quantum physics), Zeitschrift fur Physik (with Albert Einstein in the founding committee) and, well, Zeitschrift fur Psychologie, in which, for example, Raymond Dodge, David Katz, Kurt Lewin, Hugo Munsterberg, and Charles Spearman published some of their influential work. As was the case then, the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology will continue to publish research from all branches of empirical psychology that is clearly of international interest and relevance. Guest editors – in many, but not all cases drawn from the Journal’s editorial team – will deal with each specific subject or topic. The typical issue of the journal will commence with an introductory overview article on the topic

Understanding Food Chains and Food Webs, 1700–1970

Understanding Food Chains and Food Webs, 1700–1970

THE WAYS OF METAPHOR IN NEUROSCIENCE, OR BEING ON THE RIGHT OR WRONG TRACK

In the 19th century progress in communication systems induced Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond to compare nervous fibres to telegraph wires aiming to familiarize the neural net already independently described. Owing to neurophysiological developments, this metaphorical way of speaking collapsed. In the 1820's Edgar Adrian chose the Morse code, shifting the paradigm from a mechanical to a semantical model: the fibre served to communicate information by means of a code based on frequencies of impulses. Later the term 'neural code' became simply a metaphor, thus helping to fill a cognitive gap: this move, however, could lead to snags neurophysiologists might encounter adopting it.

The “Imperial Chancellor of the Sciences”: Helmholtz between Science and Politics

David Cahan The “Imperial Chancellor of the Sciences”: Helmholtz between Science and Politics INTRODUCTION By the last third of the nineteenth centuiy, German universities were widely perceived as the w orld’s leading institutions of higher learning, as sites where science and scholarship of the highest level flourished.* It had not always been so. From their emergence during the fourteenth century down through the Enlightenm ent, German universities had largely been devoted to teaching and so were w ithout distinction in research. Following a m ovem ent in the m id-eighteenth century to enhance research at select institutions, they suffered severe disrup­ tion during the Napoleonic wars. As a consequence, in the early nine­ teenth centuiy the German states reconstituted their universities: they variously endowed them w ith new legal standing, consolidated them where necessary (Breslau, Halle, and Munich), founded two im portant new ones (Berlin and Bonn), raised the qualifications for those who hoped to study and teach in them , and built new or renovated older facilities. Further, led by Prussia, the provincial state cultural ministries, under whose aegis the universities fell, gradually fostered a research im perative in their institutions, changing their ethos from one domi­ nated by teaching needs and local personalities to th at of a com peti­ tive, German-wide system w herein research publication and scientific social research Vol 73 : No 4 : W inter 2006 1093 distinction became the prim e hallm arks of performance, and thus of hiring and prom otion. Especially after 1865, as m any new institutes and laboratories opened and as the size of the German student bodies and teaching staffs increased noticeably, German research came to set the pace in m any disciplines of the natural and social sciences as well as in the hum anities. German universities m aintained preem inence in science and scholarship until about 1914; after the w ar the gradual rise of American (and other) university systems, the financial difficulties of the W eimar Republic, and the political ideology of National Socialism eroded Germany’s leadership. It was during the nineteenth century, then, that the German states (Länder), their universities, and their scien­ tists and scholars learned to compete and cooperate fruitfully w ith one another, to set new norm s of perform ance and new understandings of perm itted conduct that enabled the system as a whole to succeed (Turner, 1971; McClelland, 1980). Herm ann von Helmholtz was both a beneficiaiy of and contrib­ utor to the expansive institutional changes that occurred w ithin the German university system and the new standards and enhanced spirit of research. He was born in 1821 in Potsdam, the son of a disgruntled gymnasium teacher, who could not provide the financial means for his extraordinarily talented son to attend a university and become a physi­ cist. This led father and son to decide that Helmholtz should instead becom e a m edical doctor—at Prussia’s expense—and this in tu rn brought Helmholtz into early and direct contact w ith the state. In 1838, Helmholtz began four years of training at the Prussian army medical institute (M edizinisch-chirurgisches Friedrich-W ilhelms-Institut) in Berlin. This was followed by a year’s hospital internship at the Charité in Berlin, and then three m ore years as an army physician w ith regi­ m ental units in Potsdam. Helmholtz came to know the Prussian arm y’s sense of order, discipline, and duty firsthand. Nearly a decade’s w orth of m ilitary experience and service (1838-1848) helped bind him to the state and its ethos (Cahan, ed., 1993c). During the subsequent half-century, until his death in 1894, Helm holtz becam e one of Germ any’s m ost successful scientists. He achieved renown above all as a physiologist and physicist, often using 1094 social research physical and m athem atical m ethods and instrum ents to attack seem­ ingly intractable physiological problems. He became especially known for his work in nerve physiology and physiological heat, for his inven­ tion of the ophthalm oscope, for color theory, for physiological optics and acoustics, and, on the physics side, for thermodynamics (his discov­ ery of...

The optic nerve

Evaluating pathologic changes in the brain during life has always been an indirect process at best, largely shielded from view by the barrier of the bony skull. Even MRI provides only a computer-analyzed picture of electromagnetic radiation from the nuclei of hydrogen atoms in the brain, excited by radiofrequency pulses in a magnetic field. In a sense, we are viewing the “ shadows thrown by firelight on the wall of the Cave” described by Plato,1 rather than the reality itself. Yet, part of the brain is directly visible: through the window of the eye, the optic nerve can be seen, and with modern techniques, the integrity of the nerve fibers and their area of origin from retinal ganglion cells can now be precisely visualized during life. In 1850, Hermann von Helmholtz constructed the first “modern” ophthalmoscope capable of directly—if crudely—visualizing the retina and optic nerve. In 1972, William Hoyt et al.2 emphasized how permanent damage to the optic nerve could be identified in many patients using a simple, hand-held direct ophthalmoscope, allowing detection of early, asymptomatic damage from disorders such as glaucoma and permitting prevention of permanent visual loss. But ophthalmoscopy is a highly subjective technique, and more objective and precise ways to assess early retinal and optic nerve changes were needed. In recent years, several objective techniques for the evaluation of the optic disc and the peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (PRNFL) (the layer of axons from retinal ganglion cells …

History of experimental psychology from an Estonian perspective

A short review of the development of experimental psychology from an Estonian perspective is presented. The first rector after the reopening of the University of Dorpat (Tartu) in 1802, Georg Friedrich Parrot (1767-1852) was interested in optical phenomena which he attempted to explain by introducing the concept of unconscious inferences, anticipating a similar theory proposed by Herman von Helmholtz 20 years later. One of the next rectors, Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann (1800-1878) was regarded by Edwin Boring as one of the founding fathers of the experimental psychology. Georg Wilhelm Struve (1793-1864) played an essential part in solving the problem of personal equations. Arthur Joachim von Oettingen (1836-1920) developed a theory of music harmony, which stimulated his student Wilhelm Friedrich Ostwald (1853-1932) to study colour harmony. Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), the founder of modern psychiatry, is by far the most important experimental psychologist who has worked in Estonia. His successor Wladimir von Tchisch (1855-1922), another student of Wilhelm Wundt, continued Kraepelin's work in experimental psychology. The lives of Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967), who was born in Reval (Tallinn), and Oswald Külpe (1862-1915), who graduated from the University of Dorpat, extended the link between the history of experimental psychology and Estonia. Karl Gustav Girgensohn (1875-1925), the founder of the Dorpat School of the psychology of religion, stretched the use of experimental methods to the study of religious experience.

Historical Surprises1

The capsule histories of physics that students learn in their physics courses stem basically, I believe, from a linear view of history – that physicists in making fundamental discoveries follow a Royal Road to them, as Hermann von Helmholtz put it in 1892. The actual routes they follow, however, are generally nonlinear, and when historians display these routes to students, they express surprise. Such historical surprises could constitute one or more units of instruction in physics-education or other courses. As illustrations, I discuss historical surprises that I have uncovered in my own researches on Isaac Newton’s work on diffraction, Robert A. Millikan’s photoelectric-effect experiments, Arthur H. Compton’s X-ray scattering experiments, James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron, George Gamow’s creation of the liquid-drop model of the nucleus, and Lise Meitner’s and Otto Robert Frisch’s interpretation of nuclear fission. Teachers and students can discover many more historical surprises as provocative as these by exploring the historical literature.