A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

This translation of perception into imagery of another mode has curious consequences. I may declare positively that I remember having heard Patti sing forty years ago, when all that I really remember is the statement itself, the form of words which carries my meaning. Nay more, if my mind is of the imaginal type, I may have taken my cue from the verbal statement, and have conjured up a mental picture of the performance, a picture now so familiar that I could swear to the pink dress,—were it not that a contemporary notice writes it down as cream! Words often repeated are in this way highly deceptive; and there is good psychology in the story of the traveller who told his romantic tales so often that he finally believed them himself. Many of us, if we would but confess it, remember things that happened before we were born; the account of them was impressed on us in childhood, and was later bodied forth in images; and now their ideas bear the memory-label. Here, then, is one source of the ‘untrustworthiness’ of memory, which is at the same time a possible source of the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence.

[§ 41]. Illusions of Recognition and Memory.—Psychologically, an illusory memory is a memory, just as an illusory perception is a perception. We speak of illusion when our experience fails to square with what, from our knowledge of external circumstances and of other like experiences, we might have expected; the distinction is therefore practical, not scientific. We shall avail ourselves of it, partly for convenience’ sake, and partly because certain cases of illusion offer special problems to the psychologist.

Most of us, probably, have an occasional acquaintance with what is called paramnesia or wrong recognition: a definite ‘feeling that all this has happened before,’ sometimes connected with a ‘feeling that we know exactly what is coming,’—a ‘feeling’ which persists for a few seconds and carries positive conviction, in spite of the fact and the knowledge that the experience is novel; Dickens gives an instance in David Copperfield. Various explanations have been offered of the phenomenon. It occurs most frequently after periods of emotional stress, or in the state of extreme mental fatigue; that is, at a time when the associative tendencies in the brain are abnormally weak; and it seems to depend, essentially, upon a disjunction of mental processes that are normally held together in a single state of attention. Suppose the following case: you are about to cross a crowded street, and you take a hasty glance in both directions to make sure of a safe passage. Now your eye is caught, for a moment, by the contents of a shop window; and you pause, though only for a moment, to survey the window before you actually cross the street. Paramnesia would then appear as the feeling that you had already crossed; the preliminary glance up and down, which ordinarily connects with the crossing in a single attentive experience, is disjoined from the crossing; the look at the window, casual as it was, has been able to disrupt the associative tendencies. As you cross, then, you think ‘Why, I crossed this street just now’; your nervous system has severed two phases of a single experience, both of which are familiar, and the latter of which appears accordingly as a repetition of the earlier. The illusion will evidently be strengthened if, as is only natural, the casual look at the window does not recur to you. This is an imaginary case, simplified for clearness of exposition; and we cannot be at all sure that the explanation which it suggests is correct; for cases of paramnesia cannot be realised at will, and the nervous condition that leads to them is not favourable to scientific observation; but something of the sort must take place.

Illusions of memory have been touched upon on p. 186. We may remember something that never happened; we may remember something that happened, but could not have happened to us; we make all kinds of mistakes in memory; we fail to remember a great deal that has happened. These chances of error are inherent in the laws of associative tendency, and in the character of the memory-image. There is one illusion, however, that requires a word of comment: the illusion of the ‘good old days,’ the tendency of every man past middle age to be laudator temporis acti se puero. This has often been referred to the principle that we remember pleasurable experiences better than unpleasurable; we are so constituted, it is said, that the disagreeable events of our past life are forgotten and the agreeable are conserved in memory. The principle, however, has never been established, and there is some experimental evidence against it. In all probability, the illusion is due to many contributing factors. First of all, our nervous system takes its general set in childhood; it is then that we acquire standards of right and wrong, of social position, of daily intercourse and occupation. In so far as later experiences interfere with this set, the old order will be preferred. Secondly, our self-centredness (p. 2) leads us to idealise our past self; we think of ourselves as more important, more heroic, more dominating, more regarded, not only than we were, but also than any youngster of our sort could possibly have been; autobiographies, however truthful in intention, bring out the point with sufficient clearness. So we contrast our present struggles with the triumphs of an unreal past. Thirdly, the old days were, in one sense, really happier for us than the new; happier because we had no responsibilities, because there was a generation of adults to whom we could appeal; and we are very prone to confuse our own greater comfort with a better status of society. These are obvious considerations, but they and things like them are enough to account for the illusion.

[§ 42]. The Pattern of Memory.—Psychology cannot yet offer any adequate description of the pattern that mental processes display, the arrangement that they fall into, when we are remembering. Memory, as we are all aware, may occur in the state of primary attention, when we call it remembrance, or in the state of secondary attention, when we call it recollection. Something may be said under both heads; but our account must be largely figurative and conventional.

Let us take remembrance first. There seems to be, as it were in the background, something that holds us down to a particular circle of ideas, or, in other words, that limits the play of ideas to some particular situation. This something may be a group of contextual mental processes, or may be merely a nervous disposition; we shall have more to say of it later (§ 48). Upon the background move mental processes of extraordinary instability, all of them tinged more or less strongly by the feeling of familiarity. Attention is labile and fluid; the focus is occupied now by visual or other imagery, now by scraps of kinæsthesis, and now by organic or verbal processes that carry a personal meaning and reference; and the whole mental stream contracts and expands, pauses and hurries, and shows the most abrupt changes of direction. All of which is sadly vague! but let the reader catch himself ‘reminiscing,’ and he will realise the general truth of the description, and also the extreme difficulty of making it more concrete.

In recollection, the background is filled by the intent to recall; and this intent may, again, be constituted by contextual mental processes or carried by a nervous set. The course of recollection may then be characterised as a reconstruction along the lines of least resistance. Some bit of imagery, some form of words comes up, and is at once met, so to say, by the feeling of familiarity. Further ideas present themselves, in more or less disorderly fashion, and the feeling plays upon them, accepting here and rejecting there, serving throughout the experience as a court of final appeal. Some of the ideas are directly recognised; some seem to force our acceptance by their vividness; some pass muster because familiar verbal ideas, names or phrases, are connected with them. Some, that leave us in doubt as they arise, are shelved for the time, to be judged later on, when the positive acceptances are done with; and they are likely to be judged in the light of these acceptances, and of our general knowledge of the situation which we are trying to recall; even a weak recognitive feeling is enough to give them status. In and out among these ideas run threads of kinæsthesis, which imitate or repeat fragments of the original experience. There is thus a veritable tangle of processes; the situation is not reproduced in image, and its items read off in logical order; it is rather reconstructed; and the reconstruction follows, as has been said, the lines of least resistance at the moment. Yet we are so accustomed to the logical order of speech that our narrative, as recollection proceeds, may give but little hint of the tangled interplay of ideas; at most we may correct ourselves at points, or remark that just now we left something out. Observe the flow of mind itself, and the disorder is apparent.

We may say, then, that the pattern of memory is a discursive movement within fixed boundaries; the boundaries are given by the set or background, as we have named it, by the fact (in other words) that we are recalling a particular situation or event; and the discursiveness reveals itself in roaming of attention and shift of ideas, which imply a variable activity of the associative tendencies. The characteristic processes are the feeling of familiarity and the imitative kinæsthesis.

[§ 43] Mnemonics.—Rules for remembering, tricks of memorising, were considered of great importance in the ancient world; oratory was highly esteemed; and no orator before the time of Augustus would have ventured to use notes. As the art declined, these rules were less and less regarded; we hear practically nothing of them between the first and the thirteenth centuries of the present era. From that date, however, interest in artificial memory-systems has never died out; they have been recommended for sermons, for lectures, for disputations, for public speeches, for the learning of foreign languages, for examinations, for practically every occasion in which memory is employed, as well as for the improvement of memory itself.