Higher mental functions, their manifestation and significance

To study the higher mental functions, scientists were still at the initial stages of the development of science. But for the first time this concept was used in scientific terminology by the prominent Soviet psychiatrist L.S. Vygotsky in the course of scientific polemics with the Frenchman J. Piaget on the priority of human development.

The concept of higher mental functions reflects a complex of complex psychic phenomena and processes that are determined by psychophysical and social factors, but manifest exclusively as social. It is this asymmetry in the manifestation of these phenomena that determines their possible arbitrary course. According to L. Vygotsky, the human mental processes have 2 main sources of their genesis. Some of them are determined by genetic factors that are formed and manifested over generations. The genesis of others occurs solely under the influence of social factors. Moreover, the formation of social functions goes by their "stratification" into genetic, and therefore the whole complex, which represent the highest mental functions, is the result of a long process of socio-historical development.

One of the most important mental functions is human speech. This function not only provides communication between people, but also gives the whole society, as a system, its main property - sociality. On the other hand, it is sociality that mediates the realization of these functions in the activity. Among the most important mental functions include perception, memory and thinking.

The process of deploying a function is a rather complex phenomenon, involving a number of successive stages. They are relatively autonomous, and each of them is a separate mental and activity process.

At the first stage, there is an interpsychologization; Simple interaction between people. Then there is an intrapsychology - a phenomenon characterizing a person's awareness of his activities directed to the external environment. And then comes the internalization - external factors that mediate human activity and are transformed into internal ones. Interiorization turns some human activities into a set of automatic motor actions, skills, which for the most part, are committed unconsciously, being, nevertheless, quite significant social practice. An example of such a process can be, for example, the process of learning something when a person, having a certain knowledge, during a repeated repetition of them in practice, gradually transforms them into skills.

The most important problem is how the higher mental functions manifest themselves in the daily life of people. Everyday psychic self-regulation has as its goal not only a social correction of human behavior, but itself acts as a mental function, which, in fact, determines the difference between a person and other biological species. Considering it in this context, it should be understood that self-regulation functions at the level of the psyche, providing a harmonious adaptation of the entire human body to dynamic changes in the external natural and social environment. It is a process of correction of the psychoemotional state, which is realized through the influence of a person on himself in various ways. These can be words (speech), an appeal to any images, memory, control of the physical state of the organism. Sufficiently widely used and familiar to everyone are such methods as sleep, laughter, memories of a pleasant, watching the nature, relaxing, sipping, and others.

Specialists who investigate the higher mental functions and the nature of their realization argue that it is the active participation of the person himself in the regulation of emotional states that gives the greatest effect for the process of socialization, the harmonious adaptation of it to the changing conditions of the social environment.

The roles of these functions can not be overemphasized in human life. They bring us knowledge, skills, and ensure the normal inclusion in complex processes of social interactions, which are filled with modern society.