Tactile information: types and methods of obtaining. Tactile information for the disabled

Tactile information, according to many studies, has a direct impact on a person's perception of the situation. Unpleasant sensations in the body or uncomfortable posture can even affect our attitude to the interlocutor, although neither directly nor directly related to it. About what tactile information means in everyday life, what are its sources and features, and will be discussed below.

Briefly about the main

Let us dwell first on the definition of the term "information". The most general interpretation of it is found in philosophy. Information is defined as one of the properties of the material world, in essence, non-material. 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 the system occur with the transmission of a signal from one object to another. Thus, there is heating and cooling, braking and motion and so on. The set of signals is a message. The term "information" in physics generalizes the concepts of "message" and "signal".

Types of information

There are many approaches to the classification of information. One of them is based on the method of perception. On this basis, the information is divided into five types:

• Audial;

• Visual;

• Tactile (tactile);

• Olfactory;

• Flavoring.

The overwhelming part of the information about the world around us is obtained by sight. Also, a noticeable role is played by hearing. The last of these types of information - tactile, olfactory and gustatory - constitute only a small percentage of information perceived by a person. In animals, this ratio is somewhat different. It is known that tactile information in the life of many of them plays a much more important role than vision.

The organs of touch

Despite the fact that touch, at first glance, plays a relatively small role in life, people can not do without it. Tactile information a person receives through nerve endings, located on the skin, in the muscles and joints, on the surface of the 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 comes to the organs of the body, for example, pulling the hand away from the 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 (the nature of the surface), vibration. Receptors give us information about the position in the space of the whole body or a specific part of it.

As already mentioned, despite the rather small percentage of information that we receive through touch, it is necessary for a person's normal life. Various violations - loss of sensitivity, damage to the nerve channels that transmit information from the receptors to the brain and others - lead to the emergence of 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 about the heating temperature of an object is transmitted through the brain to which, for example, a hand was placed. The organs of touch save us in the dark, when our eyes can not tell what lies ahead. Tactile receptors play an important role in the transmission of 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.

Taste in animals

For animals, tactile information is more important than for humans. There are many examples. There are animals whose touch actually replaces vision. These include the inhabitants of the sea depths, where the light simply does not reach. Touch helps the spider to feel that its victim has already become entangled in the spaced "networks". Bees transmit information about the location of the flower with the help of a special dance, which includes touching.

Superb tactile receptors of the skin are developed in animals climbing trees. Many representatives of the fauna have vibrissae - special organs of touch, capable of reacting not only to touch, but also to air fluctuations. They look like hairs in appearance. Vibris, however, is more rigid, long and thick.

Development of tactile feelings

In modern society, it is not difficult to find people with a more developed sense of touch. The sensitivity of some areas of the skin increases as a result of the characteristics of the profession. For example, masters constantly dealing with small details increase the ability to distinguish tiny elements, cracks and other with fingertips.

And of course, the sense of touch is exacerbated in visually impaired or blind people. Tactile information for the visually impaired compensates for the lack of visual. Particularly strong touch develops in deaf and deaf people.

Braille

Tactile information a person receives by touching. For deaf-blind people this is the only source of information about the world around us. Visually impaired people have a hearing, but our world is so arranged that the vast majority of information is transmitted and stored as text. Today, blind and visually impaired people use Braille for reading and writing.

Louis Braille developed the relief-point tactile font in 1824. The future French typhlo-pedagogue was then 15 years old.

A bit of history

Ways of presenting tactile information were not the favorite theme of the young Louis. The invention of the font became a logical consequence of the boy's blindness. Louis Braille wounded his eyes with a sledge knife at the age of 3 and lost sight by the age of five. At that time in the special institutions for children with disabilities, there were many books on sight. They wrote by means of a relief linear letter. The main drawback of his was the unwieldiness, which did not allow to fit a lot of information on one page.

During the training, Braille learned about the existence of Charles Barbier's "nocturnal alphabet." The French officer developed it for military purposes: the font allowed to read the reports at night. The information was recorded on the cardboard by puncturing. Inspired by the invention of Barbier, Louis Braille created his relief-dotted font.

Features of Braille

As you can see from the title, the relief-dotted font is written using points. Braille used six points, arranged in two columns. There is also a variant of the font, in which eight points are used, each corresponding to four in the column. The first letters of the Latin alphabet are written with the help of upper and middle points. For the following, points are added according to a certain order: first the bottom is placed on the right, then the right and left, then the right. The Braille font also allows you to represent numbers, various signs of mathematical operations and notes.

The peculiarities of the invention of the French typhlo-pedagogue are manifested both in the process of reading and at the time of writing. Information recorded using a font is read by convex points. Accordingly, they should be applied from the back of the sheet. In this case, reading occurs from left to right, as in the case of plain text. Write the same with the Braille font from right to left. It makes it easier to write the numbering of points on the columns from top to bottom. When writing, they are arranged in the reverse order.

Braille in the original version 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, font limitations are overcome by using double signs, which are a combination of two simple ones that have their own meaning separately. In this case, the received symbols often have more than one value (sometimes up to ten).

Prevalence of the invention

Today, Braille is used throughout the world. It is adapted for many languages, including Russian. In our country, the printing of books using the invention of the French typhlo-pedagogue began in 1885. There is a variant of Braille for Chinese as well as rare languages such as Guarani, Tibetan and Dzongkha.

Braille's main achievement is that he created not just a way of writing and reading the text for the blind, but made it quite easy to use. The information printed on the sheet according to certain rules can be 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 for the same period of time.

Thus, tactile information for living beings is no less important than visual or audible information. Mammals, insects and other fauna with the help of touch orient in space, establish contacts between individuals, learn about the danger and so on. A person has less developed tactile sensitivity, but its role in life is difficult to overestimate.