Swimming Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Swimming - Essay Example In addition, a literature review allows for the experience of swimming to be further examined and then related back to the interviews in order to provide more context for the act of swimming laps. Introduction and Literature Review The sport of swimming is defined by the luxury of water as it creates sensations of pleasure through the defined experiences of the physical exertion of swimming. In addition, there is a social component as public swimming areas provide a temporary, but somewhat closed system of society in which a natural hierarchy is experienced. The following literature review provides context for the exploration of the topic of pleasure as it relates to the event of swimming through primary research that has been done from interviews with two female swimmers who participate in the event of swimming on a regular basis. The discovery of pleasure centers in the brain give some meaning to the experience of pleasure as it is felt within biological creatures. Pleasure and sen sation are not the same thing because pleasure is a definition of a type of sensation. The philosophy of pleasure is tied to the physiology of sensation, but sensation is not always required for pleasure. Puccetti (1969) conducted experiments trying to define the pleasure centers and concluded that pleasure was within the brain and could be located. Despite the fact that he also found the center of punishment, and that a monkey would deteriorate quickly if the punishment center was stimulated repeated over the course of hours, indicates that there is more to punishment and pleasure through physical understanding of the event than can be found in philosophical discourse. Without the development of a way to understand how and why something creates pleasure, the idea that a physical component is involved is almost moot. Pleasure is a discourse as much as an experience (Puccetti 1969). It is the framing of ideas that result in something that extends into the social and cultural experien ce. For the purposes of this study, understanding that the physiological concept of pleasure is less important than the philosophical informed the research on the meaning of the experience over the sensation. The researcher could discern the difference between understanding why it create a feeling in contrast to what is involved in creating the sensation of pleasure in reference to the event. According to Busch (2007), the Hudson River is a place of deep history. In the late 1990s a team of scientists decided to create a sonar map of the river bed floor in order to investigate data relevant to marine life habitation. However, what they discovered was more than 200 wrecks that catalogued centuries of history from the time of the American Revolution, through the subsequent river tragedies. In addition, a 3000 year old wall that had been built at a time when the river was at a lower level was also found. In placing oneself into the water, leaving one’s own DNA trailing behind as one cuts a path through the water, a connection is made to the past and to the future. Each side of the river can be defined through space and time. The bank that one leaves is gone as the body moves through the water, reaching and striving for the other side in order to make a statement that