Memory, p.29
Memory, page 29
On throwing these results into a common statistical hotchpot, I first examined into the rate at which these associated ideas were formed. It took a total time of 660 seconds to form 505 ideas; that is, at about the rate of 50 in a minute, or 3,000 in an hour. This would be miserably slow work in reverie, or wherever the thought follows the lead of each association that successively presents itself. In the present case, much time was lost in mentally taking the word in, owing to the quiet unobtrusive way in which I found it necessary to bring it into view, so as not to distract the thoughts. Moreover, a substantive standing by itself is usually the equivalent of too abstract an idea for us to conceive properly without delay. Thus it is very difficult to get a quick conception of the word ‘carriage’, because there are so many different kinds – two-wheeled, four-wheeled, open and closed, and all of them in so many different possible positions, that the mind possibly hesitates amidst an obscure sense of many alternatives that cannot blend together. But limit the idea to say a laudau, and the mental association declares itself more quickly. Say a laudau coming down the street to opposite the door, and an image of many blended laudaus that have done so forms itself without the least hesitation.
Next, I found that my list of 75 words gone over four times, had given rise to 505 ideas and 13 cases of puzzle, in which nothing sufficiently definite to note occurred within the brief maximum period of about four seconds, that I allowed myself to any single trial. Of these 505 only 289 were different. The precise proportions in which the 505 were distributed in quadruplets, triplets, doublets, or singles, is shown in the uppermost lines of Table 1. The same facts are given under another form in the lower lines of the table, which show how the 289 different ideas were distributed in cases of fourfold, treble, double or single occurrences.
TABLE I
Recurrent Associations
I was fully prepared to find much iteration in my ideas but had little expected that out of every 100 words 23 would give rise to exactly the same association in every one of the four trials; 21 to the same association in three out of the four, and so on, the experiments having been purposely conducted under very different conditions of time and local circumstances. This shows much less variety in the mental stock of ideas than I had expected, and makes us feel that the roadways of our minds are worn into very deep ruts. I conclude from the proved number of faint and barely conscious thoughts, and from the proved iteration of them, that the mind is perpetually travelling over familiar ways without our memory retaining any impression of its excursions. Its footsteps are so light and fleeting that it is only by such experiments as I have described that we can learn anything about them. It is apparently always engaged in mumbling over its old stores, and if any one of these is wholly neglected for a while, it is apt to be forgotten, perhaps irrecoverably. It is by no means the keenness of interest and of the attention when first observing an object, that fixes it in the recollection. We pore over the pages of a Bradshaw, and study the trains for some particular journey with the greatest interest; but the event passes by, and the hours and other facts which we once so eagerly considered become absolutely forgotten. So in games of whist, and in a large number of similar instances. As I understand it, the subject must have a continued living interest in order to retain an abiding place in the memory. The mind must refer to it frequently, but whether it does so consciously or unconsciously is not perhaps a matter of much importance. Otherwise, as a general rule, the recollection sinks, and appears to be utterly drowned in the waters of Lethe ….
[Galton’s Table II illustrated the frequency of specific sets of associations. He then returned to a particular group of words, beginning with ‘a’, which had occurred to him repeatedly.]
I found, after the experiments were over, that the words were divisible into three distinct groups. The first contained ‘abbey’, ‘aborigines’, ‘abyss’, and others that admitted of being presented under some mental image. The second group contained ‘abasement’, ‘abhorrence’, ‘ablution’, etc., which admitted excellently of histrionic representation. The third group contained the more abstract words, such as ‘afternoon’, ‘ability’, ‘abnormal’, which were variously and imperfectly dealt with by my mind. I give the results in the upper part of Table III, and, in order to save trouble, I have reduced them to percentages in the lower lines of the table.
TABLE III
Comparison between the Quality of the Words and that of the Ideas in Immediate Association with them
We see from this that the associations of the ‘abbey’ series are nearly half of them in sense imagery, and these were almost always visual. The names of persons also more frequently occurred in this series than in any other … Verbal memories of old date, such as Biblical scraps, family expressions, bits of poetry, and the like, are very numerous, and rise to the thoughts so quickly, whenever anything suggests them, that they commonly outstrip all competitors. Associations connected with the ‘abasement’ series are strongly characterised by histrionic ideas, and by sense imagery, which to a great degree merges into a histrionic character. Thus the word ‘abhorrence’ suggested to me, on three out of the four trials, an image of the attitude of Martha in the famous picture of the raising of Lazarus by Sebastian del Piombo in the National Gallery. She stands with averted head, doubly sheltering her face by her hands from even a sidelong view of the opened grave. Now I could not be sure how far I saw the picture as such, in my mental view, or how far I had thrown my own personality into the picture, and was acting it as actors might act a mystery play, by the puppets of my own brain, that were parts of myself. As a matter of fact, I entered it under the heading of sense imagery, but it might very properly have gone to swell the number of the histrionic entries.
The ‘afternoon’ series suggested a great preponderance of mere catch-words, showing how slowly I was able to realise the meaning of abstractions; the phrases intruded themselves before the thoughts became defined. It occasionally occurred that I puzzled wholly over a word, and made no entry at all; in thirteen cases either this happened, or else after one idea had occurred the second was too confused and obscure to admit of record, and mention of it had to be omitted in the foregoing table. These entries have forcibly shown to me the great imperfection in my generalising powers; and I am sure that most persons would find the same if they made similar trials. Nothing is a surer sign of high intellectual capacity than the power of quickly seizing and easily manipulating ideas of a very abstract nature. Commonly we grasp them very imperfectly, and cling to their skirts with great difficulty.
In comparing the order in which the ideas presented themselves, I find that a decided precedence is assumed by the histrionic ideas, wherever they occur; that verbal associations occur first and with great quickness on many occasions, but on the whole that they are only a little more likely to occur first than second; and that imagery is decidedly more likely to be the second than the first of the associations called up by a word. In short, gesture-language appeals the most quickly to my feelings.
It would be very instructive to print the actual records at length, made by many experimenters, if the records could be clubbed together and thrown into a statistical form; but it would be too absurd to print one’s own singly. They lay bare the foundations of a man’s thoughts with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy with more vividness and truth than he would probably care to publish to the world.
It remains to summarise what has been said in the foregoing memoir. I have desired to show how whole strata of mental operations that have lapsed out of ordinary consciousness, admit of being dragged into light, recorded and treated statistically, and how the obscurity that attends the initial steps of our thoughts can thus be pierced and dissipated. I then showed measurably the rate at which associations spring up, their character, the date of their first formation, their tendency to recurrence, and their relative precedence. Also I gave an instance showing how the phenomenon of a long-forgotten scene, suddenly starting into consciousness, admitted in many cases of being explained. Perhaps the strongest of the impressions left by these experiments regards the multifariousness of the work done by the mind in a state of half-unconsciousness, and the valid reason they afford for believing in the existence of still deeper strata of mental operations sunk wholly below the level of consciousness, which may account for such mental phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained. We gain an insight by these experiments into the marvellous number and nimbleness of our mental associations, and we also learn that they are very far indeed from being infinite in their variety. We find that our working stock of ideas is narrowly limited and that the mind continually recurs to the same instruments in conducting its operations, therefore its tracks necessarily become more defined and its flexibility diminished as age advances.
From I.P. PAVLOV, Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes (1927), translated by W. Horsley Gantt (1928)
The general characteristic of living substance consists in this, that it responds with its definite specific activity not only to those external stimulations with which connections have existed from the day of birth, but to many other stimulations, connections with which have developed in the course of the individual’s life; or in other words, that the living substance possesses the function of adaptability ….
Reflexes are always of two kinds: the constant reflex to a definite stimulus, existing in each animal from the day of birth, and the temporary reflex, formed to the most diverse kinds of stimuli which the organism meets during its life. Concerning the higher animals, for example the dog, to which all our investigations refer, these two sorts of reflexes are applicable to the various parts of the central nervous system. The constant reflexes, those which have always been known as reflexes, are connected with all parts of the central nervous system, even with the cerebral hemispheres. But the hemispheres are especially the seat of formation of temporary connections, of transient relations of the animal to the surrounding world, the organ of conditioned reflexes.
You will know that until recently, until the end of the last century, these provisional relations, the transitory connections of the animal organism with the surroundings, were not even considered physiologically, and they were designated as psychical relations. Recent work has shown, however, that there is no reason whatever to exclude them from the scope of physiological investigation.
From these general statements I now pass over to a series of special facts.
Take some injurious influence, some harmful agent such as fire, which the animal avoids and which burns the animal if he happens within its sphere of action or comes into contact with it. This, of course, is a usual inborn reflex, the work of the lower parts of the central nervous system. But if the animal is guarded by the distance from a red light and the representation of the fire, then this reaction, formed during the life of that animal, will be a temporal connection. This impermanent acquired reflex may be present in one animal, but in another which has not come into contact with fire, it may be entirely absent.
Consider another kind of stimulation, such as the food reflex, i.e. the seizing of food. First of all, this is a constant reflex and children and new-born animals make special movements to take the food into the mouth. But there is also the response seen when the animal runs toward food at a distance on account of some of its aspects, perhaps a sound which is emitted, as, for example, from small animals serving as food for others. This is also a food reflex, but one which is formed during that individual’s life with the help of the cerebral hemispheres. It is a temporary reflex which from the practical point of view might be called a signalling reflex. In such a case the stimulus signals the real object, the actual purpose of the simple inborn reflex.
At present, the investigation of these reflexes has gone far. Here is a common example which we constantly see: You give or show to a dog food. A reaction to this food begins: the dog tries to get it, seizes it in his mouth, saliva begins to flow, etc. In order to call out this same motor and secretory reaction, we can substitute for the food any accidental stimulus, whatever we will, as long as it has with the food a connection in time. If you whistle, or ring a bell, or raise the hand, or scratch the dog – whatever you will – and now give the dog food and repeat this several times, then each one of these stimuli will evoke the same food reaction: the animal will strive toward the stimulus, lick his lips, secrete saliva, etc. – there will be the same reflex as before.
Obviously it is highly important for the animal under the circumstances of his life to be physiologically connected thus distantly and variedly with the favourable conditions which are necessary for his existence or with the injurious influences which threaten him. If some danger, for example, is signalled by a sound from a distance, then the animal will have time to save himself, etc. It is clear that the higher adaptability of animals, the most delicate equilibrations with the surrounding medium, are unfailingly connected with this kind of temporarily formed reflex. The two kinds of reflexes we are accustomed to designate by two adjectives: the inborn, constant ones we call unconditioned reflexes, but those which are built up on the inborn reflexes during the individual’s life, conditioned reflexes.
From F.C. BARTLETT, Remembering (1932)
The general problem was to attempt to carry through a study of ways of perceiving, and of the factors influencing those ways and their results. It soon became evident that this would involve a study of the nature of imaging, for the two processes are commonly found together in a single act of observation, although they are of course to be discriminated …
Variety in interpretation tended to increase throughout with increase in the amount of detail presented. The greater the detail the greater is the tendency to pass from what is seen actually to a construction of what is seen only imperfectly, or is not noticed at all. Imaging comes in more and more. The pictures now used were all rather full of detail; the subjects knew that they were expected to make something of them, for they represented concrete scenes, while the fact that the experiments took place in a dark room meant that there was practically nothing beside the presented picture to attract the subject’s attention. All this may have tended to increase greatly the part played by acts of imaging.
Perhaps the most striking illustrations of this were given in the different interpretations placed upon a representation of the well-known painting of Hubert and Arthur by W. F. Yeames. Every person who was given this picture to describe made of it something different from everybody else. A few illustrations may be given. Repeated observation was always found necessary.
At the first glance one observer said: ‘It is a woman in a white apron with a child standing by her knee. She is sitting down and has her legs crossed. She is on the right of the picture as I see it, and the child is looking at her.’
At the second attempt he said that the woman was standing up, and then, during thirteen trials, made few alterations and added very little detail. At trial sixteen he said: ‘I had a vague feeling that I have seen it all before somewhere, but I don’t know where, and I am not sure what it is.’ At the next attempt he spoke of a ‘girl’, leaning forward and stretching upwards towards her mother, ‘well, towards the woman’. Further details were given, and then, at trial twenty-five, he remarked: ‘Now I can see. The picture is that of a little girl saying her prayers on the other side of her mother’s knee. She is dressed in a nightgown. The length of the nightgown made it look as if she is standing.’
The picture was given thirty-eight times in all, but there was no further change in the general idea of the interpretation, though additional details were given. The subject said that he had seen the picture in somebody’s bedroom a long time before, and that when he really made it out to his own satisfaction he had a definite visual image of this picture.
Another observer at first simply saw two figures, but at the third attempt he said: ‘Yes, there are two figures. One of them seems to be leaning back a little, and the other is struggling with him, or is about to struggle.’ Thereafter the story was one of the development of this idea that two people were wrestling. A ‘dark fellow’ was made out, and was said to be ‘getting the worst of it’. The subject saw the same picture fifty-five times.
A third observer began in much the same way: ‘I saw nothing definite, but merely a sort of contrast of black and white. There was something very like a white shape wrestling with a black one.’ At the second attempt he got his general setting: ‘Evidently it is a room with a black or shaded side to the right, and windows, or else a highly illuminated part, to the left. There was a black figure turning towards a white one. It was like a representation of Othello saying to Desdemona: “Come, fly with me”.’ There were alterations and many additions of detail, but the subject stuck to his general description throughout fifty-seven different observations.
