Hermann von Helmholtz
German physician, physiologist and physicist who studied sensory perception
German physiologist and physicist who measured the speed of nerve signals and wrote major handbooks on the physiology of vision and hearing. Wilhelm Wundt is described as his student.
Why this person matters
Helmholtz showed that nerve conduction could be timed, when most contemporaries thought it immeasurably fast. His handbook on vision defended an empiricist account of perception, including unconscious inference, against nativists such as Ewald Hering.
Main contributions
Timing nerve conduction
In the early 1850s at Königsberg he measured conduction in a frog's nerve. Sources date the work from 1849 to 1851; his first reports gave speeds of about 24.6 to 38.4 metres per second, and later accounts give about 27 to 30.
Physiological optics
His Handbuch der physiologischen Optik appeared in three volumes from 1856 to 1867. The third volume defends the empiricist theory of perception, using the idea of unconscious conclusions to explain how sensations become perceptions of objects.
Sensations of tone
Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (published 1863, completed 1862) applied his physics and physiology to hearing and music, and it influenced musicologists into the twentieth century.
Context and limits
Helmholtz was a physician and physicist, not a psychologist. His empiricism was opposed by nativists such as Hering, and the nature of space perception stayed disputed after him. He amended Thomas Young's colour-vision theory, which is why it is called the Young-Helmholtz theory. Sources disagree on the date of the nerve measurements and of the Tonempfindungen.
In your introductory course
Sensation and perception.Appears in sensation and perception chapters through colour vision, hearing and unconscious inference, and in history chapters as a precursor of the Leipzig laboratory.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 5.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1849
He became associate professor of physiology at Königsberg.
- 1856
The first volume of the Handbuch der physiologischen Optik appeared.
- 1858
He became professor of physiology at Heidelberg, where he stayed for about thirteen years.
- 1867
The third volume of the Handbuch appeared.
- 1871
He became professor of physics at Berlin.
Sources
- MacTutor, Hermann von HelmholtzUniversity. Institutional biography inspected.
- Encyclopedia.com, Helmholtz, Hermann vonReference work. Reference article inspected.
- EBSCO Research Starters, Hermann von HelmholtzReference work. Reference article inspected.
- Wikipedia, Hermann von HelmholtzReference work. Reference article inspected.