James Walsh - Psychotherapy

This experience is familiar to everyone. It is especially frequent with public speakers. Certain words have a habit of slipping away just when we want them. At times by beginning a sentence confidently, even though there is a feeling that there is a missing word ahead, the word will turn up in time. Often it will not, and then a weak circumlocution must be indulged in. If it is a proper name, a description may have to be substituted, sometimes a confession may have to be made that the name will not come and the audience, unless it is very young, will sympathize with the speaker.

If we accept the idea that the memory has a definite location in the brain, the process is easily understood. Just how we cannot say, but somehow brain cells serve as the media by which our memory processes revert to knowledge that has been previously stored up. If now we assume that the repetition of things known is accomplished by bringing brain cells into connection with one another, and with the organs of speech, it is easy to understand that somehow the connection with a particular cell or set of cells cannot be secured at a given moment. This delay prevents us from being able to repeat things that we know, and know that we know, though we cannot somehow get at them. The will fails to reach the proper insulating plug of a neuroglia cell, which, if acted upon, would put a cell or group of cells in communication with others. As a result the message from it cannot flow down. We feel that we have it on the tip of our tongue, as we say, that a little effort may bring it to us and sometimes that effort succeeds. If there is any disturbance of consciousness by secondary motives, however, as by the excitement of public speaking or the flustering that comes to some people when they try to introduce even old-time friends and forget their names, then we cannot control the brain processes and memory fails. We do not for a moment think of attributing this failure of memory to the faculty of memory itself. We have the feeling that there is some mechanical obstacle. Ramon y Cajal's theory enables us to understand this obstacle better, perhaps, than any other.

An interesting phase of this lapse in memory helping us to a revelation of something of the physical process which underlies the faculty, is the fact that it implies a very intricate machine. Recalling has become such an obvious incident that we do not think of the complexity of action involved. Many things are brought together, and relations of all kinds serve to recall various facts and names and dates. Some of these relations are most bizarre. Particular names recall a definite series of facts. A color will bring up a scene or the memory of an individual. An odor will recall scenes long since apparently forgotten and will set trains of thought at work that are quite unexpected. Sometimes we wake in the morning with a name or a fact on our lips that we have been looking for for several days.

Some people actually learn to depend on unconscious cerebration. A man, for instance, who has to make an address on a particular subject or to write an article, will record that fact on a tablet and after gathering a few basic thoughts in connection with the subject proposed, will put it aside for the time being. He is confident that various illustrations and thoughts in connection with the subject will occur to him at intervals during the next few days, and that he will thus without direct labor accumulate an amount of material for use. In the early morning hours he may find that thoughts on it come to him unbidden. Sometimes he will find these thoughts precious germs, that will develop during the course of the following days, and will be of great help to him. If he is worried and preoccupied with other things very much, this may not happen, but under ordinary circumstances he can continue routine occupations which demand practically all of his time, yet continue to develop the subject selected for his paper or address. The more he has occupied his mind with the subject at the beginning, the more will this unconscious cerebration continue.

Features of the mechanism of mental operations are brought out in certain phenomena of abstraction of mind, which show how the attention can be so short-circuited that sensations from the periphery utterly fail to penetrate to the consciousness. Most men have had the experience of taking out their watches, looking at them, and then putting them back. Presently somebody asks what time it is. Unable to recollect what it was that they saw, they have to look again. There is no doubt that they meant to observe the time.

The same thing is true for practically all the senses. A pickpocket takes advantage of our being occupied with many other feelings in the midst of the jostling in a crowd on a car, or before a show window, or he has a confederate add to the sensations already streaming up to us, calling attention particularly to the other side of the body, and then inserts his hand into our pocket and extracts what he finds. Sometimes we have a faint memory of something having happened to that pocket, but our attention was occupied elsewhere.

In hearing we have the same experience. When thoroughly occupied with a book, a person may talk to us or ask us a question and we have no idea of what was said, sometimes utterly failing to hear the voice; sometimes we hear the sound of the voice, but do not comprehend the meaning of the words.

When we are unprepared for a question we nearly always have to have it repeated to us. Sitting in a railroad train, if the person behind us, whom we did not expect to talk to us, asks a question, it is very probable that on the first asking we shall not notice it at all, considering that it is addressed to someone else. On its repetition, it may appeal to us as addressed to ourselves, but even then we readily lose its significance because our attention has not been called to the wording of it soon enough to enable us to comprehend it thoroughly. These experiences, so familiar that we have probably all had them at some time or other, indicate how universal is the power of the mind to concentrate itself upon itself to the extent of neglecting sensations from the outer world, even though they may pass the periphery of the organism and manifestly affect the first neuron of the chain that leads up to our brain and consequently to consciousness. They do not reach the center with sufficient intensity to be understood, and a conscious act of attention must be made before we comprehend their meaning.

This is true, not only for ordinary sensations, but even for such as would ordinarily be presumed to be so insistent in their call that they could not be neglected. The concentration of mind necessary for this is not common to all mankind; it is possessed only by a few individuals whose intellect represents the larger portion of their personality. Certain of the great investigating scientific geniuses have had the faculty of so concentrating their attention upon the questions with which their intellects were engaged, that even the call of appetite did not make itself felt. Newton was one of these. Over and over again, he was known to neglect to take his meals, even though they were brought to him, and, occasionally, he would entirely forget whether he had taken a meal or not. But Newton is not an extreme exception. Most of the great mathematicians have had experiences of this kind and, indeed, mathematics seems to be that special branch of intellectual work which most readily brings about a preoccupation of mind sufficient to completely shut out the outer world for the time being. Archimedes, the great ancient mathematician, lost his life because of preoccupation with mathematical problems that kept him from telling the Roman soldiers, who had strict orders to spare him, who he was.