« Charles in space | Main | Meetings of the minds » Elmer GatesI ran across a web site about inventor Elmer Gates, who invented " the foam fire extinguisher, an improved electric iron, a climate-controlling air conditioner, and the educational toy “Box and Blocks.” He was productive in the fields of X-ray, alloy casting, electrically operated looms, and magnetic separation devices for mining." He devised instruments for developing muscular skill; he created indoor replications of weather systems; in the late 1800s he invented an electronic music synthesizer. A 1904 Synopsis of his work listed thirty-five lines of inventive research in which results had been obtained. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Elmer Gates Laboratory in Chevy Chase, MD, was the largest private laboratory in the United States. Evidently his inventions were just by-products of his focus on mental process. He had a process he called psychotaxis, "the integrated hierarchy of sensory discriminations required to create a valid and complete mental representation of a given part of the physical world." Gates used psychotaxis to invent. First, he would experience through each of his senses every piece of sensory data that the subject at hand could impart, letting his mind classify each datum naturally according to its perceived likeness to or difference from the other data. Having thus acquired and categorized all the subject’s sensations, he would then, in psycho-taxonomic order, recreate each sensation in his mind—moving through the series over and over until he could execute it at great speed. This might take several weeks. Finally, he would work his way through the psycho-taxonomic hierarchy of sensory associations—which associations gave rise to images, concepts, ideas, and thoughts. Repeated recollection of the psycho-taxonomic hierarchy increased the blood flow to the areas of the brain where its data were enregistered and processed. This “refunctioning” brought into dominance those neurological structures through which subconscious connections were made. The result was new insights into the subject. jon posted this at 7:39 AM |
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