The Adequate Stimulus

2008

The term adequate stimulus describes that class of environmental phenomena that requires the least amount of energy to elicit a percept mediated by a particular sensory system, implying that the receptive organs of that sensory system are specialized to detect those phenomena. It was difficult to transfer this concept to the perception of pain and to the nociceptive system. Many different stimuli may cause pain (pin prick, burn injury, freeze injury, inflammation, etc.), none of which needs particularly low amounts of energy. The common denominator of those stimuli is that they threaten to cause tissue damage (in Greek: νoξη Noxe). Hence the adequate stimulus to elicit pain is traditionally…