3, that this occurs while the subject has complete amnesia for the conserved ideas and therefore he could not possibly reproduce them as conscious memory.
4, that that which effects the writing is not a recurring phase of the self-consciousness which is concerned at the moment with totally different ideas.
5, that the “state of conservation” is, at least during the writing, a specific state existing and functioning independently and outside of the personal self-consciousness.
6, that in functioning it induces specific processes which make use of the same organized physiological mechanisms which ordinarily are made use of by conscious memory to express itself in writing and that these processes are not in, but independent of, consciousness.
We are forced to conclude therefore that a conscious experience—in this case the ideas of the verse—is conserved through the medium of some kind of residuum of itself capable of specific functioning and inducing processes which reproduce in the form of written symbols the ideas of the original experience.
We need not consider for the present the nature of the residuum, and its process, whether it is the ideas themselves or something else.
Residual processes underlying hallucinations.—We will take the observation of B. C. A. looking into a crystal and reading some printed words—a cablegram—which she had previously unconsciously overheard.[[45]] The words were, let us say, “Best Wishes and a Happy New Year.” This visual picture was not a literal reproduction of the original experience, which was a subconscious auditory experience of the same words, of which she was not aware; but plainly, nevertheless, the visual picture must have been determined somehow by the auditory experience. Equally plainly the visual image was not a recurrent phase of the consciousness, for the words of the message had not been previously seen. What occurred was this: the antecedent auditory perception manifested itself in consciousness after an interval of time as a visual hallucination of the words. There was a reproduction of the original experience but not in its original form. It had undergone a secondary alteration by which the visual perception replaced the auditory perception. As a memory it was a conversion or translation of an auditory experience into terms of another sense. Now the conversion must have been effected by some mechanism outside of consciousness; that is to say, it was not an ordinary visualization, i.e., intensely vivid secondary images pertaining to a conscious memory, as when one thinks of the morning’s breakfast table and visualizes it; for there was no conscious memory of the words, or knowledge that there ever had been such an experience. The visualization therefore must have been induced by something not in the content of consciousness,—something we have called a secondary process, of which the individual is unaware.
We can conceive of the phenomenon originating in either one of two possible modes. Either the hallucination was a newly fabricated conscious experience; or it was a reproduction of secondary visual images originally belonging to the auditory perception at the time of its occurrence and now thrust into consciousness in an intensely vivid form. In either case, for this to have taken place something must have been left by the original experience and conserved apart from and independent of the content of the personal consciousness at any and all moments—something capable of functioning after an interval of time as a secondary process outside of the personal consciousness. The only intelligible explanation of the phenomenon is that the original auditory impression persisted, somehow and somewhere, in a form capable of conservation as a specific and independent residuum during all subsequent changes in the content of consciousness. This residuum either fabricated the hallucination or thrust its secondary images into consciousness to become the hallucination.
The phenomenon by itself does not permit a conclusion as to the nature of the residuum, whether it is psychological or neural; i.e., whether an auditory perception, as perception, still persists subconsciously outside the focus of awareness of consciousness, or whether it has left an alteration of some kind in the neurons. Whatever the inner nature of the conserved experience it obviously must have a very specific and independent existence, somehow and somewhere, outside of the awareness of consciousness, and one capable of secondary functioning in a way that can reproduce the original experience in terms of another sense. In other words, conservation must be in the form of some kind of residuum, psychological or neural. It must be, therefore, something very different from reproduction or a recurrent phase of consciousness. Further, it must form a stage in the process of memory of which reproduction is the final result.
This observation of course does not stand alone. I have cited a number of observations and might cite many more in which the same phenomenon of transformation or conversion of sensory images of one sense into images of another sense was prominent. Indeed a study of hallucinations, artificial or spontaneous, which are representations of former experiences and where the determining factors can be ascertained, will show that in most, if not all, of them this same mechanism of conversion is at work. Take, for instance, the experiment cited in our last lecture, the one in which Miss B. was directed to look into a crystal for the purpose of discovering the whereabouts of some money she had lost without being aware of the fact. In the crystal she sees a vision of herself walking along a particular street in Boston absorbed in thought. She sees herself in a moment of absent-mindedness take some banknotes out of her pocket, tear them up, and throw them into the street.