The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

The only hypothesis, in short, to which the facts of inward experience give countenance is that the brain-tracts excited by the event proper, and those excited in its recall, are in part different from each other. If we could revive the past event without any associates we should exclude the possibility of memory, and simply dream that we were un dergoing the experience as if for the first time.* Wheiever, * The only fact which might plausibly be alleged against this view is the familiar one that we may feel the lapse of time in an experience so monot onous that its earlier portions can have no ' associates ' different from its later ones. Sit with closed eyes, for example, and steadily pronounce some vowel-sound, thus, a — a — a — a— a — .... thinking only of the sound. Nothing; changes during the time occupied by the experiment ; and yet at the end of it you know that its beginning was far away. I think, how ever, that a close attention to what happens during this experiment shows that it does not violate in the least the conditions of recall laid down in the text ; and that if the moment to which we mentally hark back lie many seconds behind the present instant, it always has different associates by which we define its date. Thus it was when I had just breathed out. or in ; or it was the ' first moment ' of the performance, the one ' pre ceded by silence ; ' or it was ' one very close to that ; ' or it was ' one when we were looking forward instead of back, as now ; ' or it is simply repre sented by a number and conceived symbolically with no definite image of its date. It seems to me that I have no really intuitive discrimination of the different past moments after the experience has gone on some little time, but that back of the ' specious present ' they all fuse into a single

in fact, the recalled event does appear without a definite setting, it is hard to distinguish it from a mere creation of fancy. But in proportion as its image lingers and recalls as sociates which gradually become more definite, it grows more and more distinctly into a remembered thing. For example, I enter a friend's room and see on the wall a painting. At first I have the strange, wondering consciousness, ' surely I have seen that before,' but when or how does not become clear. There only clings to the picture a sort of penumbra of familiarity, — when suddenly I exclaim : " I have it, it is a copy of part of one of the Era Angelicos in the Floren tine Academy — I recollect it there ! " But the motive to the recall does not lie in the fact that the brain-tract now excited by the painting was once before excited in a similar way ; it lies simply and solely in the fact that with thai brain-tract other tracts also are excited : those which sus tain my friend's room with all its peculiarities, on the one hand , those which sustain the mental image of the Florence Academy, on the other hand, with the circumstances of my visit there ; and finally those which make me (more dimly) think of the years I have lived through between these two times. The result of this total brain-disturbance is a thought with a peculiar object;, namely, that 1 who now stand here with this picture before me, stood so many years ago in the Florentine Academy looking at its original.

M. Taine has described the gradual way in which a mental image develops into an object of memory, in his usual vivid fashion. He says : "I meet casually in the street a person whose appearance I am acquainted with, and say to myself at once that I have seen him before. Instantly the figure recedes into the past, and wavers about there vaguely, without at once fixing itself in any spot. It persists in me for conception of the kind of thing that has been going on, with a more or less clear sense of the total time it has lasted, this latter being based on an automatic counting of the successive pulses of thought by which the process is from moment to moment recognized as being always the same. Within the few seconds which constitute the specious present there is an intuitive perception of the successive moments. But these moments, of which we have a primary memory-image, are not properly recalled from the past, our knowledge of them is in no way analogous to a memory prop erly so called. Cf . supra, p. 646.

fcome time, and surrounds itself with new details. * When I saw him he was bare-headed, with a working-jacket on, painting in a studio ; he is BO-and-so, of such-and-such a street. But when was it ? It was not yesterday, nor this week, nor recently. I have it : he told me that he was waiting for the first leaves to come out to go into the country. It was before the spring. But at what exact date ? I saw, the same day, people carrying branches in the streets and omnibuses : it was Palm Sunday ! ' Observe the travels of the internal figure, its various shiftings to front and rear along the line of the past ; each of these mental sentences has been a swing of the balance. When confronted with the present sensation and with the latent swarm of indistinct images which repeat our recent life, the figure first recoiled suddenly to an indeterminate distance. Then, completed by precise details, and con fronted with all the shortened images by which we sum up the proceed ings of a day or a week, it again receded beyond the present day, be yond yesterday, the day before, the week, still farther, beyond the ill-defined mass constituted by our recent recollections. Then some thing said by the painter was recalled, and it at once receded 'again beyond an almost precise limit, which is marked by the image of the green leaves and denoted by the word spring. A moment afterwards, thanks to a new detail, the recollection of the branches, it has shifted again, but forward this time, not backward; and, by a reference to the calendar, is situated at a precise point, a week further back than Easter, nnd five weeks nearer than the carnival, by the double effect of the contrary impulsions, pushing it, one forward and the other backward, and which are, at a particular moment, annulled by one another." *

The remembered fact being n, then, the path N — O is what arouses for n its setting when it is recalled, and makes it other than a mere imagination. The path M — N, on the other hand, gives the cue or occasion of its being recalled at all. Memory being thus altogether conditioned on brain- ] pathi, its excellence in a given individual will depend partly on \ v the number and partly on the persistence of these paths. The persistence or permanence of the paths is a physi ological property of the brain-tissue of the individual, whilst their number is altogether due to the facts of his mental experience. Let the quality of permanence in the paths be called the native tenacity, or physiological retentiveness. This tenacity differs enormously from infancy to old age, f and from one persorTto another. Some minds are like wax

under a seal — no impression, however disconnected with others, is wiped out. Others, like a jelly, vibrate to every touch, but under usual conditions retain no permanent mark. These latter minds, before they can recollect a fact, must weave it into their permanent stores of knowledge. They have no desultory memory. Those persons, on the contrary, who retain names, dates and addresses, anecdotes, gossip, poetry, quotations, and all sorts of miscellaneous facts, without an effort, have desultory memory in a high degree, and certainly owe it to the unusual tenacity of their brain-substance for any path once formed therein. No I one probably was ever effective on a voluminous scale with- ; out a high degree of this physiological retentiveness. In the practical as in the theoretic life, the man whose acquisi tions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing, whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own. A Charlemagne, a Luther, a Leibnitz, a Walter Scott, any example, in short, of your quarto or folio editions of mankind, must needs have amazing retentiveness of the purely physiological sort. Men without this retentiveness may excel in the quality of their work at this point or at that, but will never do such mighty sums of it, or be influ ential contemporaneously on such a scale.*

*!Sot that mere native tenacity will make a man great. It must be coupled with great passions and great intellect besides. Imbeciles some times have extraordinary desultory memory. Drobisch describes (Empirische Psychol., p. 95) the case of a young man whom he examined. He had with difficulty been taught to read and speak. "But if two or three minutes were allowed him to peruse an octavo page, he then could spell the single words out from his memory as well as if the book lay open before him. . . . That there was no deception I could test by means of a new Latin law-dissertation which had just come into my hands, which he never could have seen, and of which both subject and language were unknown to him. He read off [mentally] many lines, skipping about too, of the page which had been given him to see, no worse than if the experi ment had been made with a child's story." Drobisch describes this case as if it were one of unusual persistence in the visual image ['primary memory,' vide supra, p. 643]. But he adds that the youth ' remembered his pages a long time.' In the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for Jan. 1871 (vr. 6) is an account by Mr. W. D. Ileukle (together with the stock classic examples of preternatural memory) of an almost blind Pennsylvania farmer who could remember the day of the week on which any date had

But there comes a time of life for all of us when we can do no more than hold our own in the way of acquisitions, when the old paths fade as fast as the new ones form in our brain, and when we forget in a week quite as much as we can learn in the same space of time. This equilibrium may last many, many years. In extreme old age it is upset in the reverse direction, and forgetting prevails over acquisition or rather there is no acquisition. Brain-paths are so tran sient that in the course of a few minutes of conversation the same question is asked and its answer forgotten half a dozen times. Then the superior tenacity of the paths formed in childhood becomes manifest : the dotard will retrace the facts of his earlier years after he has lost all those of later date.

So much for the permanence of the paths. Now for their number. It is obvious that the more there are of such paths as M — N in the brain, and the more of such possible cues or occasions for the recall of n in the mind, the prompter and surer, on the whole, the memory of n will be, the more fallen for forty-two years past, and also the kind of weather it was, and what he was doing on each of more than iifteen thousand days. Pity that such a magnificent faculty as this could not have found more worthy appli cation I

What these cases show is that the mere organic retentiveness of a man need bear no definite relation to his other mental powers. Men of the highest general powers will often forget nothing, however insignificant. One of the most generally accomplished men I know has a memory of this sort. He never keeps written note of anything, yet is never at a loss for a fact which he has once heard. He remembers the old addresses of all his New York friends, living in numbered streets, addresses which they them selves have long since moved away from and forgotten. He says that he should probably recognize an individual fly, if he had seen him thirty years previous— he is, by the way, an entomologist. As an instance of his desultory memory, he was introduced to a certain colonel at a club. The conversation fell upon the signs of age in man. The colonel challenged him to estimate his age. He looked at him, and gave the exact day of his birth, to the wonder of all. But the secret of this accuracy was that, having picked up some days previously an army-register, he had idly turned over its list of names, with dates of birth, graduation, promotions, etc., attached, and when the colonel's name was mentioned to him at the club, these figures, on which he had not bestowed a moment's thought, involuntarily surged up in his mind. Such a memory is of course a priceless boon.

frequently one will be reminded of it, the more avenues of approach to it one will possess. In mental terms, the more other facts a fact is associated with in the mind, the better pos session of it our memory retains. Each of its associates be comes a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up by when sunk beneath the surface. Together, they form a network of attachments by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. The ' secret of a good mem ory ' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain. But this forming of associations with a fact, what is it but thinking about the fact as much as possible ? Briefly, then, of two men with the same outward experiences and the same amount of mere native tenacity, the one ivho THINKS over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic rela tions with each other, will be the one with the best mem ory. We see examples of this on every hand. Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits. The college athlete who remains a dunce at his books will astonish you by his knowledge of men's * records ' in various feats and games, and will be a walking diction ary of sporting statistics. The reason is that he is con stantly going over these things in his mind, and comparing and making series of them. They form for him not so many odd facts, but a concept-system — so they stick. So the merchant remembers prices, the politician other politicians' speeches and votes, with a copiousness which amazes out siders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on these subjects easily explains. The great memory for facts which a Darwin and a Spencer reveal in their books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a brain with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness.

Let a man early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them fast ; and the more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him and forgotten as soon as heard. An almost as encyclopaedic as his erudition may coexist with [ the latter, and hide, as it were, in the interstices of its web. Those who have had much to do with scholars and savant* will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean.

In a system, every fact is connected with every other by , some thought-relation. The consequence is that every fact is retained by the combined suggestive power of all the other facts in the system, and forgetfulness is well-nigh impossible. The reason why cramming is such a bad mode of study is now made clear. I mean by cramming that way of pre paring for examinations by committing ' points ' to memory | during a few hours or days of intense application immedi ately preceding the final ordeal, little or no work having been performed during the previous course of the term. Thrigs learned thus in a few hours, on one occasion, for ( one purpose, cannot possibly have formed many associations with other things in the mind. Their brain-processes are led into by few paths, and are relatively little liable to be awakened again. Speedy oblivion is the almost inevitable fate of all that is committed to memory in this simple way. Whereas, on the contrary, the same materials taken in gradually, day after day, recurring in different contexts, considered in various relations, associated with other exter- \ nal incidents, and repeatedly reflected on, grow into such a system, Jorm such connections with the rest of the mind's fabric, lie open to so many paths of approach, that they remain permanent possessions. This is the intellectual rea son why habits of continuous application should be enforced in educational establishments. Of course there is no moral turpitude in cramming. If it ,led to the desired end of secure learning it would be infinitely the best method of study. But it does not ; and students themselves should understand the reason why.

It will now appear clear that all improvement of the memory lies in the line of ELABOKATING THE ASSOCIATES of each of the several things to be remembered. No amount of culture would seem capable of modify ina a man's GENERAL retentiveness. This is a physiological quality, given once for all with his organization, and which he can never hope to change. It differs no doubt in disease and health ; and it is a fact of observation that it is better in fresh and vigorous hours than when we are fagged or ill. We may say, then, that a man's native tenacity will fluctuate some what with his hygiene, and that whatever is good for his tone of health will also be good for his memory. We may even say that whatever amount of intellectual exercise is bracing to the general tone and nutrition of the brain will also be profitable to the general retentiveness. But more than this we cannot say ; and this, it is obvious, is far less than most people believe.

It is, in fact, commonly thought that certain exercises, systematically repeated, will strengthen, not only a man's remembrance of the particular facts used in the exercises, but his faculty for remembering facts at large. And a plausible case is always made out by saying that practice in learning words by heart makes it easier to learn new words in the same way.* If this be true, then what I have just said is false, and the whole doctrine of mem* ory as due to ' paths ' must be revised. But I am dis posed to think the alleged fact untrue. I have carefully questioned several mature actors on the point, and all have denied that the practice of learning parts has made any such difference as is alleged. W^hat it has done for them is to improve their power of studying a part systematically. Their mind is now full of precedents in the way of intona tion, emphasis, gesticulation ; the new words awaken dis tinct suggestions and decisions ; are caught up, in fact, into a pre-existing net-work, like the merchant's prices, or the athlete's store of ' records,' and are recollected easier, al though the mere native tenacity is not a whit improved, and is usually, in fact, impaired by age. It is a case of better remembering by better thinking. Similarly when school boys improve by practice in ease of learning by heart, the improvement will, I am sure, be always found to reside in

* Of. Ebbinghaus: Ueber das Gedachtniss (1885), pp. 67, 45. One may hear a person say: ' ' I have a very poor memory, because 1 was never sys tematically made to learn poetry at schooi.' the mode of study of the particular piece (due to the greater interest, the greater suggestiveness, the generic similarity with other pieces, the more sustained attention, etc., etc.), and not at all to any enhancement of the brute retentive power. The error I speak of pervades an otherwise useful and judicious book, ' How to Strengthen the Memory,' by Dr. Holbrook of New York.* The author fails to distinguish between the general physiological retentiveness and the re tention of particular things, and talks as if both must be benefited by the same means.

" I am now treating," he says, " a case of loss of memory in a per son advanced in years, who did not know that his memory had failed most remarkably till 1 told him of it. He is making vigorous efforts to bring it back again, and with partial success. The method pursued is to spend two hours daily, one in the morning and one in the evening, in exercising this faculty. The patient is instructed to give the closest attention to all that he learns, so that it shall be impressed on his mind clearly. He is asked to recall every evening all the facts and expe riences of the day, and again the next morning. Every name heard is written down and impressed on his mind clearly, and an effort made to recall it at intervals. Ten names from among public men are or dered to be committed to memory every week. A verse of poetry is to be learned, also a verse from the Bible, daily. He is asked to remem ber the number of the page in any book where any interesting fact is recorded. These and other methods are slowly resuscitating a failing memory." t

I find, it very hard to believe that the memory of the poor old gentleman is a bit the better for all this torture except in respect of the particular facts thus wrought into it, the occurrences attended to and repeated on those days, the names of those politicians, those Bible verses, etc., etc. In another place Dr. Holbrook quotes the account given by the late Thurlow Weed, journalist and politician, of his method of strengthening his memory. "My memory was a sieve. I could remember nothing. Dates, names, appointments, faces— everything escaped me. I said to mj wife, ' Catherine, I shall never make a successful politician, for I can not remember, and that is a prime necessity of politicians.' My wife

*How to Strengthen the Memory; or, The Natural and Scientific Methods of Never Forgetting. By M. H. Holbrook, M.D. New York (no date), t Page 39. told me I must train my memory. So when I came home that night, 1 sat down alone and spent fifteen minutes trying silently to recall with accuracy the principal events of the day. I could remember but little at first; now I remember that I could not then recall what I had for breakfast. After a few days' practice I found I could recall more. Events came back to me more minutely, more accurately, and more vividly than at first. After a fortnight or so of this, Catherine said. 4 Why don't you relate to me the events of the day, instead of recalling them to yourself ? It would be interesting, and my interest in it would be a stimulus to you.' Having great respect for my wife's opinion, I began a habit of oral confession, as it were, which was continued for almost fifty years. Every night, the last thing before retiring, I told her everything I could remember that had happened to me or about me during the day. I generally recalled the dishes I had had for break fast, dinner, and tea; the people I had seen and what they had said; the editorials I had written for my paper, giving her a brief abstract of them. I mentioned all the letters I had sent and received, and the very language used, as nearly as possible; when I had walked or ridden — I told her everything that had come within my observation. I found I could say my lessons better and better every year, and instead of the practice growing irksome, it became a pleasure to go over again the events of the day. I am indebted to this discipline for a memory of somewhat unusual tenacity, and I recommend the practice to all who wish to store up facts, or expect to have much to do with influencing men." *

I do not doubt that Mr. Weed's practical command of his past experiences was much greater after fifty years lof this heroic drill than it would have been without it. Expecting to give his account in the evening, he attended better to each incident of the day, named and conceived it differently, set his mind upon it, and in the evening went over it again. He did more thinking about it, and it stayed with him in consequence. But I venture to affirm pretty confidently (although I know how foolish it often is to deny a fact on the strength of a theory) that the same matter, casually attended to and not thought about, would have stuck in his memory no better at the end than at the beginning of his years of heroic self-discipline. He had acquired a better method of noting and recording his experiences, but his physiological retentiveness was probably not a bit im proved, f

f In order to test the opinion so confidently expressed in the text, I have tried to see whether a certain amount of daily training in learning poetry All improvement of memory consists, then, in the inprovement of one's habitual methods of recording facts. by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different kind of poetry. During eight successive days I learned 158 lines of Victor Hugo's ' Satyr.' The total number of minutes required for this was 131£ — it should be said that I had learned nothing by heart for many years. I then, workkig for twenty-odd minutes daily, learned the entire first book of Paradise Lost, occupying 38 days in the process. After this training I went back to Victor Hugo's poem, and found that 158 additional lines (divided exactly as on the former occasion) took me 151 1 minutes. In other words, I commit ted my Victor Hugo to memory before the training at the rate of a line in 50 seconds, after the training at the rate of a line in 57 seconds, just the opposite result from that which the popular view would lead one to expect. But as I was peceptibly fagged with other work at the time of the second batch of Victor Hugo, I thought that might explain the retardation ; so I persuaded several other persons to repeat the test.

Dr. W. H. Burnham learned 16 lines of In Memoriam for 8 days ; time, 14-17 minutes — daily average 14f. He then trained himself on Schiller's translation of the second book of the JEneid into German, 16 lines daily for 26 consecutive days. On returning to the same quantity of In Memo riam again, he found his maximum time 20 minutes, minimum 10, average 14ff „ As he feared the outer conditions might not have been as favorable this time as the first, he waited a few days and got conditions as near as possible identical. Tne result was . minimum time 8 minutes ; maximum 19^ ; average 14^.

Mr. E. S. Drown tested himself on Virgil for 16 days, then again for 16 days, after training himself on Scott. Average time before training, 13 minutes 26 seconds ; after training, 12 minutes 16 seconds. [Sixteen days is too long for the test ; it gives time for training on the test-verse.] Mr. C. H. Baldwin took 10 lines for 15 days as his test, trained himself on 450 lines 'of an entirely different verse,' and then took 15 days more of the former verse 10 lines a day. Average result: 3 minutes 41 seconds before, 3 minutes 2 seconds after, training. [Same criticism as before.]

Mr. E. A. Pease tested himself on Idyls of the King, and trained himself on Paradise Lost. Average result of 6 days each time : 14 minutes 34 seconds before, 14 minutes 55 seconds after, training. Mr. Burnham Hav ing suggested that to eliminate facilitating effect entirely from the training verses one ought to test one's self a la Ebbinghaus on series of nonsensesyllables, having no analogy whatever with any system of expressive verses, I induced two of my students to perform that experiment also. The record is unfortunately lost ; but the result was a very considerable shortening of the average time of the second series of nonsense-syllables, learned after training. This seems to me, however, more to show the effects of rapid habituation to the nonsense-verses themselves than those of the poetry used between them. But I mean to prosecute the experiments farther, and will report in another place.

One of my students having quoted a clergyman of his acquaintance who had marvellously improved by practice his power of learning his In the traditional terminology methods are divided into the mechanical, the ingenious, and the judicious. The mechanical methods consist in the intensification, pro longation, and repetition oi the impression to be remembered. The modern method of teaching children to read by black board work, in which each word is impressed by the four fold channel of eye, ear, voice, and hand, is an example of an improved mechanical method of memorizing.

Judicious methods of remembering tilings are nothing but logical ways of conceiving them and working them into rational systems, classifying them, analyzing them into parts, etc., etc. All the sciences are such methods. Of ingenious methods, many have been invented, under the name of technical memories. By means of these systems it is often possible to retain entirely disconnected facts, lists of names, numbers, and so forth, so multitudinous as to be entirely unrememberable in a natural way. The method consists usually in a framework learned mechani cally, of which the mind is supposed to remain in secure and permanent possession. Then, whatever is to be re membered is deliberately associated by some fanciful analogy or connection with some part of this framework, and this connection thenceforward helps its recall. The best known and most used of these devices is the figurealphabet. To remember numbers, e.g., a figure-alphabet is first formed, in which each numerical digit is represented by one or more letters. The number is then translated into such letters as will best make a word, if possible a word suggestive of the object to which the number belongs.

sermons by heart, I wrote to the gentleman for corroboration. I append his reply, which shows that the increased facility is due rather to a change in his methods of learning than to his native retentiveness having grown by exercise : " As for memory, mine has improved year by year, except when in ill-health, like a gymnast's muscle. Before twenty it took three or four days to commit an hour-long sermon ; after twenty, two days, one day, half a day, and now one slow analytic, very attentive or adhesive reading does it. But memory seems to me the most physical of intellectual powers. Bodily ease and freshness have much to do with it. Then there is a great difference of facility in method. I used to commit sentence by sentence. Now I take the idea of the whole, then its leading divisions, then its subdivisions, then its sentences. "

The word will then be remembered when the numbers alone might be forgotten. "To briefly show its use, suppose it is desired to fix 1142 feet in a second as the velocity of sound : t, t, r, n, are the letters and order required. Fill up with vowels forming a phrase, like ' tight run ' and connect it by some such flight of the imagination as that if a man tried to keep up with the velocity of sound, he would have a tight run. When you recall this a few days later great care must be taken not to get confused with the velocity of light, nor to think he had a hard run which would be 3000 feet too fast." *

Dr. Pick and others use a system which consists in linking together any two ideas to be remembered by means of an intermediate idea which will be suggested by the first and suggest the second, and so on through the list. Thus, " Let us suppose that we are to retain the following series of ideas : garden, hair, watchman, philosophy, copper, etc. . . . We can combine the ideas in this manner : garden, plant, hair of plant — hair ; hair, bonnet, watchman ;— watchman, wake, study, philosophy ; philosophy, chemistry, copper; etc. etc." (Pick.)f

It is matter of popular knowledge that an impression is remembered the better in proportion as it is The effect of recency is all but absolutely constant. Of two events of equal significance the remoter one will be the one more likely to be forgotten. The memories of childhood which persist in old age can hardly be compared with the events of the day or hour which are forgotten, for these latter are trivial once-repeated things, whilst the \ This system is carried out in great detail in a book called ' Memory Training,' by Win. L. Evans (1889).