I was pleased to see Terry Sinnot speaking up for sea bathing and reminding us it is bigger than the council appreciates (Letters, September 24).

As he points out, the swimmers in the old postcard have indeed entered the water not from the beach but from the bathing station on the West Pier.

They are there because, according to contemporary records, being in deep water was something which could only be enjoyed at Brighton.

And when the Palace Pier first opened, much was made of its provision for bathers to be able to face the challenge of "blue water".

That is what Brighton had always been about. In 1779, Fanny Burney, one of the influential Streatham Park set who stayed in the enlarged Thrale family residence in West Street, which Henry Thrale inherited from his father, wrote of the seafront being "the sole ornament and support and cause of the Town of Brighthelmstone".

Yet only a short time before taking the sea plunge with the Thrale family, she had been afraid of the sea. Her stay with the Thrales and her friendship with Dr Johnson had changed her perceptions.

Brighton's reputation as "the place to be" was established as soon as Dr Johnson had spelled out to Henry Thrale, a fellow member of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, that sea bathing was integral to the process of achieving self-understanding.

Johnson went on to show that the processes of thought engendered by having to cope with the unconstrained forces of the sea, with the body pitted against the waves, had helped make the body an instrument of observation, with the mind being deployed so as to best organise the sensations going with immersion in turbulent waters.

Johnson seems to have recognised a convergence between the mental processes employed by a sea bather and those adopted by the "natural philosophers" - Newton and his contemporaries.

The culmination of their work is present today in the shape of machines which can be made to "think". And thanks to the work of Jean Piaget and more recent cognitive scientists, it is possible to understand, through being in the sea, how the unique human mind-body union constructs meanings out of raw impressions such as those encountered in the rough-and-tumble of the waves.

This facility for making sense out of raw sensations is uniquely human, providing man with a self-programming capability no machine or other animal can possess.

The sea is as much a "playground for the mind" today as it was in the 18th Century. This time around, those making use of it as such, and exploiting the technological advances made by the development of science that sea bathing originally contributed to, can do things with their body and the natural forces around them undreamt of in the 18th Century.

-David Sawyers, Brighton