Hermann Helmholtz is considered psychology’s first true genius due to two great contributions including measuring the speed of neural impulses and the trichromatic theory of color vision (Lapointe, 2018). Helmholtz’swork on propagation of nervous stimuli paved the way for a branch of research that later became known as the nerve and muscle physics and more recently as neurophysiology. Before Helmholtz’s discoveries, experts believed that neural impulses were instantaneous and travelled at infinite speeds (Lapointe, 2018). Helmholtz was against such unscientific notions and developed an experiment that would prove neural impulses were based on reaction time. The experiment involved strapping a frog’s foot onto a galvanometer (Lapointe, 2018). The electric current would travel through the frog’s thigh and trigger a kick that would offset the current. Helmholtz discovered that zapping the frog closer to the food yielded faster impulses than zapping higher up on the thigh. He repeated the same experiment with human beings and obtained similar inferences (Lapointe, 2018). Psychologists in the 20 th and 21 st centuries used his reaction time method to estimate the speed of impulses in response to various stimuli.
Helmholtz further contributed to contemporary psychology through the trichromatic theory of color vision. Color is an important part of human perceptions because it can influence moods and reactions (Cherry, 2020). The trichromatic theory explains both retinal and cortical color processing in which there are three receptors in the retina responsible for the perception of color. Every receptor has a specific sensitivity to either color red, green or blue (Cherry, 2020). Helmholtz identified that the entire color spectrum could be reconstructed into the three primary colors (Parker, 2019). Thomas Young had made prior findings on a similar theory, but Helmholtz developed it further into knowledge currently adapted into photography systems. Paired with the opponent theory processes theory, trichromatic theory has facilitated the understanding the color system functionality and genes that are responsible for absorbance of photo-pigments (Cherry, 2020).
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References
Cherry, K. (2020, January 16). The Trichromatic Theory of Color Vision. Verywell Mind . Retrieved May 2, 2020, from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-trichromatic-theory-of-color-vision-2795831
Lapointe, S. (2018). Philosophy of Mind in the Nineteenth Century . Routledge.
Parker, D. (2019). Color Perception . SAGE Publications.
