Sensation as a process is a mental reflection of individual properties and conditions of the external environment that directly affect our sense organs.
The stimulus (auditory, visual) affects the sense organs, the resulting nerve impulses through the nerve pathways enter the brain, as a result of processing, sensations are formed there.
Sensations as a result are the source codes that we receive from the receptors of the sense organs, the immediate that seems to us has not yet been processed by culture or the mind.
That is why sensations are often said to be more physiology than psychology. However, this is hardly true, if only because the cultural and intellectual processing of incoming, for example, visual signals in a person occurs even before the brain, already at the level of the eye.
In any case, sensations are distinguished from perceptions as something elementary is distinguished from something more complex. Sensations inform a person about the individual properties of objects and phenomena, perceptions (representations) give a complete picture of what is happening.
Sensations include light and color, sounds and smells, touch and sensation of temperature, sensation of vibration, kinesthetic sensations in muscles, proprioceptive and visceral sensations from internal organs. The emotional background of sensations is sometimes attributed to sensations, sometimes to feelings, distinguishing them from sensations.
Word usage
Synonyms for «sensation» are sensory processes and sensitivity. In the Soviet-Russian school of psychology, «sensation» and «feeling» are often considered synonymous, but for other psychological schools these concepts are fundamentally different. In modern psychological practice, feelings are often understood not as «cold» or «salty», but as a feeling of joy or shame, a feeling of fear or a feeling of love — the emotional attitude of a person.
On the other hand, sensations today often mean emotional imprinting.
For example, listen to the phrase: “I don’t remember the details, I only remember the feeling from a person” — replace the word “feeling” with “impression”, the meaning will remain the same.
In contrast to academic psychology, in the tradition of practical psychology, and even in the common sense, “sensation” often means something narrower, namely elementary kinesthetic sensations: everything that we directly receive at the output from the contact receptors of the body under direct influence on them.
Touch or muscle tension, pain or cold, sweet or bitter — these are all sensations, as opposed to sounds, pictures and images. I see — pictures, I hear — sounds, and I feel (feel) — sensations as kinesthetic sensations.
This article, however, speaks of sensations in a broad sense, of the very initial mental perception of any modality.
Types of sensations
According to the number of sense organs, five main types of sensations are distinguished: smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing. According to the subjective distinguishability (by modality) of sensations, visual, auditory, vestibular, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, motor (muscular), pain and visceral sensations are distinguished. According to the location of the receptors, exteroceptive, proprioceptive (kinesthetic) and interoceptive (organic) sensations are distinguished. From the point of view of the historical genesis of sensations, two types of sensitivity can be distinguished: protopathic and epicritical. Sensations can be contact and distant, real and metaphorical, real and phantom sensations. Usually sensations arise involuntarily, but with training the situation can change. See →
The power of sensation
We are far from being able to perceive every impact, that is, not every impact can become a sensation. We perceive those influences that lie above the threshold of sensitivity, that is, sensations of threshold force.
Try — do not try, but you will not be able to feel the difference in temperature by a tenth of a degree.
In addition to the threshold zone, there is a comfort zone, or a zone of adequate influences. This is the zone in which the influences that cause an adequate response lie. For the nerve endings of the fingertips, this is touch, stroking, etc. Impacts lying outside the zone of adequate impacts cause only pain and do not give an adequate response. The response to stroking, to creating a sensation of something warm and stroking, is adequate: here the receptor reacts in a regular way. And if, for example, in the same place you do not stroke, but prick, then the same receptor will give out a pain reaction and there will be a desire to pull your hand away.
Feelings in human life
Sensations signal us about certain events around us and in our body, and it is worth taking care that the sensations are subtle, attentive, do not deceive us and warn us in time about everything that is important to us. Feelings, like strokes of an artist, create the background for the picture of our life, and our task is to master our feelings in order to make the picture of our life even more beautiful. The sensations themselves can hardly be controlled, but the feeling of ourselves and our body can change if we get used to a certain image of our body, get used to walking with a light gait and with straightened shoulders. A particular sensation, for example, the sensation of a «light body», may be not just an involuntary sensation, but also a developed habit. Learn — you will always feel easy.
In addition, you can change the picture of sensations from the world around you and people if you learn to control your own attention. Paying attention to the glare of the sun, we can escape from the cold and wind.
By setting yourself such a task and training yourself, you can learn not to feel the cold. “I brought the cold out of my field of attention” is not just a phrase, it is the ability of a special forces soldier to pay his attention only to what the combat mission requires of him.
During autogenic training, paying attention to relaxation, heaviness and warmth in the muscles, we not only enhance these sensations, but we can also change the underlying objective functional processes.
Proprioception is a sense of position and a sense of power. Position Sense — the ability to sense the angle at which each joint is, and in total the position and posture of the entire body. The sense of position is almost unadaptable. The sense of strength is the ability to appreciate the amount of muscle effort required to move or hold a joint in a certain position.
Visceral sensations (lat. viscera — insides) — sensations formed from impulses from the receptors of internal organs, including reactions to stretching, compression, temperature changes, vibration, the influence of chemical substances. In contrast to the point of view, according to which visceral sensitivity is undifferentiated, another one is expressed, according to which there are many submodalities of visceral sensations (feelings of hunger, satiety, thirst, sexual arousal, urge to urinate and defecate, etc.), and all of them or any of them in a mental disorder can or can be manifested by a variety of psychopathological symptoms.