Psychophysics Day (Fechner Day)

The relationship between the spiritual and physical world underlies the scientific work of philosophers, neurophysiologists, psychiatrists and scientists of other specialties Some of them, Gustav Theodor Fechner in particular, came to the conclusion that matter in the Universe is the shadow side of the psyche One of the branches of psychology deals with the study of the interaction between objectively measurable physical processes and the subjective sensations of the individual October 22 is the Day of Psychophysics, a science that studies the body's responses to environmental influences The holiday is also called Fechner Day, as it pays tribute to his work in finding the relationship between human mental reactions and material incentives In the middle of the 19th century The German scientist, together with his teacher from the University of Leipzig, Ernst Weber, laid the foundations of a new science - psychophysics Fechner established that in the human body the strength of perception of any sensation is directly proportional to the intensity of the stimulus Previously, this pattern was discovered by the French physicist Pierre Bouguer, whose experiments did not attract the attention of his contemporaries 70 years later, his experiments were repeated by Gustave Fechner To express the main law of the new science, he came up with a logarithmic formula, which contains, in addition to other variables, the value of the absolute threshold of sensation for external influence To measure sensory sensitivity, the scientist developed three methods - minimal changes, average error and constant stimuli Fechner's psychophysical law can be considered using the example of the impact on a person of sound and light - the main stimuli that are present in the environment The scientist has proven that the higher the exposure to sound, the more sensitive a person reacts to it In 1834, as a result of experiments using an aesthesiometer (Weber compasses), Fechner came to the conclusion that the sense organs have limited susceptibility The scientist also discovered that a person reacts differently to an old and a new stimulus, depending on the intensity of the latter In the 20th century Fechner's ideas were developed by the American psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens, founder of the Psychoacoustics Laboratory at Harvard University Another scientist from the USA, Louis Leon Terston, using the method of paired comparisons, developed a metric scale of exposure intervals The importance of Fechner's work for the development of experimental psychology is difficult to overestimate In addition to external influences on the senses, psychophysics studies the relationship between experiences and neural processes Fechner proved that all sensory phenomena are caused by physical stimuli and can be measured experimentally The methods he developed are still used today In honor of the discoveries of Weber, Fechner and other researchers, Psychophysics Day was established