"Wirt Atmar"  wrote in message
news:bmdauj$vea$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> R. Norman answers John Sutherland's question:

> >There is physiological adaptation to
> >environmental circumstances that occurs on the time scale of seconds
> >or minutes to days and months.  There is evolutionary adaptation that
> >occurs over generations and is expressed as changes in the genetic
> >information.
>
> That's certainly true enough, although many people try not to use the word
> "adaptation" in this context much any more simply to reduce
confusion. If
the
> word is used at all in physiology, it's now commonly used as the phrase,
> "ontogenetic adaptation." The more common term for this phenomenon
nowadays is
> "habituation," which is defined to be an actively mediated feedback
process of
> quelling the response to a common stimulus. This definition is offered to
make
> it distinct from a more simple sensory fatigue response -- which will
always
> occur if stimulation goes on long enough..

That is right.
So my comment is just this: Habituation is typically described as something
like: active inhibition of relatively irrelevant responses to relatively
unimportant stimuli. (Or IOW a ditto dampening-down or "selective
Hibernation", only somewhat metaphorically so put, of sensory-motivational
brain states that representations of ditto aspects of the overall situation
that an indivudual happens to be in.)

It is a very popular and happily dealt with function.;-)

However what is less easy to intellectually integrate than the concept of
"habituation" is those aspects and occassions of life and living when the
the irrelevant stimulation tends towards becoming (or *is* - if allowed to
be processed to a conscious extent) unbearably painful. The label most
commonly used to cover this last kind of inhibitory function is (I believe)
"repression".

I have a settled for that it is best to view habituation as important and
crucial, and repression as even more crucially important versions of the
same function.

P
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