Similarities of Inhibition in the Different Sense Organs

Abstract

I would like to show in the following text the scientific framework of observations that made me interested in inhibition. Since I worked for many years in telephone engineering, the input and output system as represented in Figure 1 was, at that time, the basis of all my thinking. It is almost an electrical model of the causality principle. Unfortunately, the simple input-output model does not hold for many situations. For instance, the sound of a speaker is reflected from all the walls of a room and the listener hears two types of sounds, first the direct sounds representing the simple input-output system, and then the reflections from the walls. To localize the speaker correctly, all the reflected sounds coming from the walls have to be suppressed. I would like to call this suppression inhibition.

Invited lecture presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, September 1, 1968, in San Francisco. The research was supported in part by the American Otological Society Grant M-14, the National Science Foundation Grant GB-5768, and the National Institute of Health Grant NB-06890.

Reprinted from American Psychologist Vol. 24, No. 8, August 1969, pp. 707–719.

Prior to his death in June 1972, Professor von Békésy dedicated this paper to S. S. Stevens for the Festschrift then being planned. The original article contained no abstract; the editors decided not to attempt to write one, since the article’s title and Professor von Békésy’s reputation provide adequate notice to the reader of the article’s contents.