[43]. The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. I, No. 3.
[44]. American Journal of Insanity, July, 1910.
LECTURE IV
CONSERVATION A RESIDUUM OF EXPERIENCES
A consideration of all the facts of observation and experiment of the kind which I have recited in the last two lectures—and I might have multiplied them many times—forces us to the conclusion that whether or not we can recall any given experience it may be still conserved. Bear in mind that I have used conservation, thus far, only in the sense that under favoring changes in the moment’s consciousness, or by special methods of stimulation, a past experience may reproduce itself, or may be made to reproduce itself, in one form or another of memory.
It may be, for example, that you have to-day only a vague and general recollection of the last lecture and if you should endeavor to write an account of it from memory the result would be but a fragmentary report. And yet it is quite possible that, if one or another of the various technical methods I have described could be applied to some one of you, we should be able to recover quite exact memories, of certain portions at least, of the lecture—perhaps verbatim transcripts of certain portions, and large numbers of facts which are quite beyond your present recollection.
Our study of those phenomena of memory which I cited in the last lecture was carried only so far as to allow us to draw the conclusions as to conservation which I have just stated. And, in drawing these conclusions, let me repeat—we have provisionally limited the meaning of the term conservation simply to the potential ability to reproduce experiences, with or without recollection, either in their original form, or translated into a graphic, visual, or auditory expression of them. We have not attempted from these phenomena to draw conclusions as to the nature of conservation, or as to whether it is anything apart from reproduction under favorable conditions. If we do not look below the surface of the phenomena it might be held that memory is only a recurrent phase of consciousness, and that the term conservation is only a figure of speech to express the ability to determine that recurrence in our self-consciousness.
Let us examine now a little more closely some of the phenomena we have already examined but inadequately.
Residual processes underlying automatic motor phenomena: writing, speech, gestures, etc.—We will take writing as a type and the following as an example: In a state of hypnosis a subject learns a verse by heart. It is then suggested that this verse shall be written automatically after he has been awakened. (By arranging the conditions of the experiment in this way we make certain that the script afterwards written shall express a memory and not a fabrication.) After the subject returns to the normal waking state he has complete amnesia for the whole hypnotic state and therefore for the verse. Now, if the experiment is successful, his hand writes the given verse without the subject being aware of what his hand is writing, and it may be without being aware that his hand is writing anything at all. The whole thing has been done without participation of his consciousness and without his knowing that any such phenomenon was to occur. (Of course any of his conscious experiences while in the hypnotic state might have been used as a test, these being known to the experimenter as well.) Now the things to be noted are:
1, that the script expresses a memory; that is, reproduces previous conserved conscious ideas—the verse. It expresses memory just exactly as it would express it if it had been consciously and voluntarily written.
2, that these ideas while in a state of conservation and without entering consciousness—i.e., becoming conscious memory—express themselves in written language.