The Glands Regulating Personality eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 414 pages of information about The Glands Regulating Personality.

The Glands Regulating Personality eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 414 pages of information about The Glands Regulating Personality.

The ante-pituitary has been depicted as the gland of intellectuality (to use that term for lack of better).  By intellectuality we mean the capacity of the mind to control its environment by concepts and abstract ideas.  The frontal lobes of the brain are the central offices for higher thought.  Their cells are the most complex, have the most numerous branches and association fibres.  They store the fruits of abstract thinking, mathematics, for example.  The anterior pituitary is in the closest relation and contact with them.  Its secretion is tonic to them.  Now the instinct that is the forerunner of intellectuality is the instinct of curiosity, with its emotion of wonder, and its expression in the various constructive and acquisitive tendencies.  Studies of intellectual men, and of those with a keen instinct of curiosity and a constructive-acquisitive trend prove them to be ante-pituitary dominant in their make-up.  The administration of ante-pituitary extract to some defectives increases intellectual activity and self-control.  The future of intelligence may expect a great deal from the newer chemistry of the secretions of the ante-pituitary.

Two most important instincts, therefore, which in the complexity of their sublimations have created most of the institutions of society, the maternal and the intellectual, are connected directly with a proper function of the pituitary endocrines.  So it happens that disturbances of these instincts, reaching far into the normal and intellectual spheres of the mind, are definitely connected with disturbances of the pituitary.  As we shall note in reviewing the essentials of the pituitary-centered or pituito-centric personality, the personality governed by the fluctuations of activity within the pituitary, people with injured, diseased or mechanically limited pituitaries (because of the smallness of the bony case enclosing them) exhibit defects and perversions of conduct and intelligence directly attributable to affections of the very instincts and functions the pituitary governs.  Children with small, mechanically cramped pituitaries lie and steal, are bed-wetters, have poor control over themselves, and a low learning capacity.

THE THYROID AND INSTINCT

The chemical mechanism of the instincts described:  sex libido, passion and jealousy in relation to the ovaries and testes, fear and anger in relation to the adrenals, sympathy and curiosity in relation to the pituitaries, suggests that a similar explanation will hold for the dynamics of the other instincts.  In the closest relation to the thyroid appear the instincts first isolated, so to speak, by McDougall as the instincts of self-display and self-effacement, accompanied by emotions of pride and shame respectively.  In certain states of excessive thyroid activity there is an extra stimulation of the instinctive display of the person which may go on to boasting, mania and

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Glands Regulating Personality from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.