Applied Psychology for Nurses | Page 8

slate clean. A new word
which serves our purpose well has come into common use these last
years, and we describe sleep as a state of rest of the conscious mind
made possible as weariness overpowers the censor, and this guard at
the gate naps. The censor is merely that mental activity which forces
the mind to keen, alert, constructive attention during our waking hours,
a guard who censors whatever enters the conscious mind and compares
it with reality, forcing back all that is not of immediate use, or that is
undesirable, or that contradicts established modes of life or thought. In
sleep we might say that the censor, wearied by long vigilance, presses
all the material--constantly surging from the unconscious into
consciousness, there to meet and establish relations with matter--back

into the unconscious realms, and locks the door, and lies and slumbers.
Then the half-thoughts, the disregarded material, the unfit, the
unexpressed longings or fears, the forbidden thoughts; in fact, the
whole accumulation of the disregarded or forgotten, good, bad, and
indifferent--for the unconscious has no moral sense--seize their
opportunity. The guard has refused to let them pass. He is now asleep.
And the more insistent of them pick the lock and slip by, masquerading
in false characters, and flit about the realms of the sleeping
consciousness as ghosts in the shelter of darkness. If the guard
half-wakes he sleepily sees only legitimate forms; for the dreams are
well disguised. His waking makes them scurry back, sometimes leaving
no trace of their lawless wanderings. So the unconscious thoughts of
the day have become sleep-consciousness by play acting.
CONSCIOUSNESS IN DELIRIUM
At this time of our study it will suffice to say that in delirium and in
insanity, which we might very broadly call a prolonged delirium, the
toxic brain becomes a house in disorder. The censor is sick, and
sequence and coherence are lost as the thronging thoughts of the
unconscious mind press beyond the portals into consciousness,
disordered and confused. We shall later find, however, that this very
disorder falls into a sort of order of its own, and a dominant emotion of
pain or ecstasy, of depression or fear, of exaltation or depreciation calls
steadily upon the stored away incidents and remembered, related
feelings of the past and interprets them as present reality. The censor of
the sick brain is stupefied by toxins, shock, or exhaustion, and the
citadel he is supposed to guard is thronged with besiegers from every
side. The strongest--i. e., those equipped with most associations
pertinent to the emotional status at the time--win out, occupy the brain
by force, and demand recognition and expression from all the senses,
deluding them by their guise of the reality of external matter.
We find consciousness, then, determined by all past experience, by an
external world, and by its organ of expression--the brain.
Consequently, our psychology leads us into anatomy and physiology,
which, probably, we have already fairly mastered. In rapid review, only,

in the following chapter we shall consider the organs of man's
consciousness, the brain, spinal cord, and the senses, and try to
establish some relation between the material body and its mighty
propelling force--the mind.
CHAPTER III
ORGANS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Nothing is known to us until it has been transmitted to the mind by the
senses. The nerves of special sense, of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch,
the temperature sense ("hot or cold" sense), the muscular sense (sense
of weight and position), these, and the nerves controlling voluntary
motion, form the peripheral, or surface, nervous system. This acts as a
connecting medium between the outside world and the central nervous
system, which is composed of the brain and spinal cord. We might
liken the nerves, singly, to wires, and all of them together to a system
of wires. The things of the external world tap at the switchboard by
using the organs of special sense; the nerves, acting as wires, transmit
their messages; at the switchboard is the
operator--consciousness--accepting and interpreting the jangle of calls.
The recognition by the brain of the appeals coming by way of the
transmitting sense, and its interpretation of these appeals, is the mind's
function of consciousness, whether expressed by thinking, feeling, or
willing.
THE CENTRAL AND PERIPHERAL NERVOUS SYSTEMS IN
ACTION
I am passing the open door of a bake-shop, and a pervading odor fills
the air. I think "hot rolls," because my organ of smell--the nose--has
received a stimulus which it transmits along my olfactory nerves to the
brain; and there the odor is given a name--"hot rolls." The recognition
of the stimulus as an odor and of that odor as "hot rolls" is
consciousness in the form of thinking. But the odor arouses desire to
eat--hunger; and this is consciousness in the form of feeling. The
something which