Tactile information, according to many studies, has a direct impact on a person’s perception of a situation. Unpleasant sensations in the body or an uncomfortable posture can even affect our attitude to the interlocutor, although neither one nor the other is directly connected with him. The meaning of tactile information in everyday life, what are its sources and features, will be discussed below.
Briefly about the main thing
Let us dwell primarily on the definition of the term “information”. Its most general interpretation is found in philosophy. Information is defined as one of the properties of the material world, essentially intangible. It exists independently of our consciousness and is inherent in all objects of animate and inanimate nature.
In physics, any changes in the state of a system occur with the transmission of a signal from one object to another. Thus, heating and cooling, braking and movement, and so on. A set of signals constitutes a message. The term “information” in physics generalizes the concepts of “message” and “signal”.
Types of information
There are many approaches to classifying information. One of them is based on the way of perception. On this basis, information is divided into five types:
audial;
visual;
tactile (tactile);
olfactory;
flavoring.
The vast majority of information about the world around a person receives through vision. Hearing also plays a prominent role. The last of these types of information - tactile, olfactory, and taste - make up only a small percentage of the information perceived by a person. In animals, this ratio is somewhat different. It is known that tactile information plays a much more important role in the life of many of them than vision.
Organs of touch
Despite the fact that touch, at first glance, plays a relatively small role in life, people are not able to do without it. A person receives tactile information through nerve endings located on the skin, in muscles and joints, on the surface of mucous membranes. Receptors perceive temperature, touch, vibration, change in body position, texture, and so on.
Information from nerve endings through nerve fibers is transmitted to the brain. There it is processed, and a signal is received to the organs of the body, for example, to pull the hand away from a hot object.
Biological meaning
What is the source of tactile information? The answer is very simple: everything that affects the corresponding receptors. Through the organs of touch we feel the temperature, humidity, texture (surface character), vibration. Receptors give us information about the position in space of the whole body or a specific part of it.
As already mentioned, despite the relatively small percentage of information that we receive through touch, it is necessary for a normal person. Various disorders - loss of sensitivity, damage to the nerve channels that transmit information from receptors to the brain and others - lead to dangerous situations and the inability to navigate. A simple example: in the absence of tactile receptors, it is easy to earn a severe burn, because it is through them that tactile information is transmitted to the brain about the heating temperature of the object, on which, for example, a hand was laid. The organs of touch save us in the dark when the eyes cannot tell what is ahead. Tactile receptors play an important role in transmitting information about the state of the body. They participate in the formation of the so-called muscle feeling, which plays an important role in the process of movement.
Animal touch
Tactile information is more important for animals than for humans. There are many examples of this. There are animals in which touch actually replaces eyesight. These include the inhabitants of the deep sea, where the light simply does not reach. The sense of touch helps the spider to feel that its victim has already become entangled in the separated "networks."
Bees transmit information about the location of the flower through a special dance, which includes touch.
Superbly tactile skin receptors are developed in animals climbing trees. Many representatives of the fauna have vibrissae - special organs of touch, capable of responding not only to touch, but also to air vibrations. In appearance, they resemble hairs. Vibrissas, however, are more stiff, long and thick.
The development of tactile feeling
In modern society it is not difficult to find people with a more developed sense of touch. The sensitivity of some skin areas increases as a result of the characteristics of the profession. For example, craftsmen who constantly deal with small details increase their ability to distinguish between tiny elements, cracks, etc. with their fingertips.
And of course, touch is aggravated in visually impaired or blind people. Tactile information for the visually impaired compensates for the lack of visual. Particularly strong sense of touch develops in deaf-blind people.
Braille
A person receives tactile information through touch. For deaf-mute people this is the only source of information about the world. Visually impaired people also have a hearing, but our world is so arranged that the vast majority of information is transmitted and stored in the form of text. Today, blind and visually impaired people use Braille for reading and writing.
Louis Braille developed the dot-dot tactile font in 1824. The future French teacher was then 15 years old.
A bit of history
Ways to present tactile information were not a favorite topic of young Louis. The invention of the font became a logical consequence of the blindness of the boy. Louis Braille at the age of 3 injured his eyes with a saddle knife and lost his sight by the age of five. At that time, there were many books in special institutions for visually impaired children. They were written using relief-linear writing. Its main drawback was cumbersomeness, which did not allow a lot of information to fit on one page.
During the training, Braille learned about the existence of the "night alphabet" of Charles Barbier. The French officer designed it for military purposes: the font allowed reading reports at night. Information was recorded on cardboard with a puncture. Inspired by Barbier's invention, Louis Braille created his embossed dot font.
Braille Features
As the name implies, the dotted font is written using dots. Braille used six points arranged in two columns. There is also a variant of the font, in which eight points are applied, placed respectively four in a column. The first letters of the Latin alphabet are written using upper and middle points. For those following them, points are added in a certain order: first, a dot is placed from the bottom right, then right and left, then right. Braille also allows you to display numbers, various signs of mathematical operations and notes.
The features of the invention of the French teacher are manifested both in the reading process and during writing. Information recorded using the font is read by convex points. Accordingly, they must be applied on the back of the sheet. In this case, reading occurs from left to right, as in the case of plain text. Writing with braille is from right to left. It makes writing easier the numbering of points in columns from top to bottom. When writing, they are in the reverse order.
The initial braille consists of 64 characters, one of which is a space. Eight-point allows you to write 256 different characters. Of course, this is a very small set. Often the limitations of the font are overcome through the use of double characters, which are a combination of two simple, separately having their own meaning. Moreover, the received characters often have more than one value (sometimes up to ten).
The prevalence of the invention
Today, braille is used all over the world. It is adapted for many languages, including Russian. In our country, the printing of books using the invention of the French teacher was started in 1885. There is a variant of the braille for Chinese, as well as such rare languages ​​as guarani, Tibetan and dzong-ke.
The main achievement of Braille is that he created not only a way of writing and reading text for the blind, but made it quite convenient to use. Information printed on a sheet according to certain rules is easily read with the index finger of one or both hands. The reading speed is 150 words per minute. For comparison: a person with normal vision is able to read at a speed of 250 words over the same period of time.
Thus, tactile information for living beings is no less important than visual or auditory. Mammals, insects, and other representatives of the fauna, through touch, orient themselves in space, establish contacts between individuals, learn about danger, and so on. A person has a less developed tactile sensitivity, but its role in life is difficult to overestimate.