Another incident: subjects were put repeatedly through a "color naming test", which consisted of five colors repeated in irregular order, the object being to name the one hundred bits of color as rapidly as possible. After the subjects had been through this test over two hundred times, you would think they could recite it from memory; but not [{347}] at all! They had very little memory of the order of the bits of color. Their efforts had been wholly concentrated upon naming the bits as seen, and not in connecting them into a series that could be remembered.
The experiment described a few pages back on "paired associates" is another case in point. The subjects memorized the pairs, but made no effort to connect the pairs in order, and consequently were not able later to remember the order of the pairs.
Many somewhat similar experiments have been performed, with the object of measuring the reliability of the testimony of eye-witnesses; and it has been found that testimony is very unreliable except for facts that were specifically noted at the time. Enact a little scene before a class of students who do not suspect that their memory of the affair is later to be tested, and you will find that their memory for many facts that were before their eyes is hazy, absent, or positively false.
These facts all emphasize the importance of the will to learn. But let us consider another line of facts. An event occurs before our eyes, and we do notice certain facts about it, not with any intention of remembering them later, but simply because they arouse our interest; later, we recall such facts with great clearness and certainty. Or, we hear a tune time after time, and gradually come to be able to sing it ourselves, without ever having attempted to memorize it. Practically all that the child learns in the first few years of his life, he learns without any "will to learn".
What is the difference between the case where the will to learn is necessary, and the case where it is unnecessary? The difference is that in the one case we observe facts for the purpose of committing them to memory, and in the other case we observe the facts without any such intention. In both cases we remember what we have definitely observed, [{348}] and fail to remember what we have not observed. Sometimes, to be sure, it is not so much observation as doing that is operative. We may make a certain reaction with the object of learning it so as to make it later, or we may make the reaction for some other reason; but in either case we learn it.
What is essential, then, is not the will to learn, but the doing and observing. The will to learn is sometimes important, as a directive tendency, to steer doing and observing into channels relevant to the particular memory task that we need to perform. But committing to memory seems not to be any special form of activity; rather, it consists of reactions that also occur without any view to future remembering. Not only do we learn by doing and observing, but doing and observing are learning.
Retention
We come now to the second of our four main problems, and ask how we retain, or carry around inside of us, what we have learned. The answer is, not by any process or activity. Retention is a resting state, in which a learned reaction remains until the stimulus arrives that can arouse it again. We carry around with us, not the reaction, but the machinery for making the reaction.
Consider, for example, the retention of motor skill. A boy who has learned to turn a handspring does not have to keep doing it all the time in order to retain it. He may keep himself in better form by reviewing the performance occasionally, but he retains the skill even while eating and sleeping. The same can be said of the retention of the multiplication table, or of a poem, or of knowledge of any kind. The machinery that is retained consists very largely in brain connections. Connections formed in the process of [{349}] learning remain behind in a resting condition till again aroused to activity by some appropriate stimulus.
But the machinery developed in the process of learning is subject to the wasting effects of time. It is subject to the law of "atrophy through disuse". Just as a muscle, brought by exercise into the pink of condition, and then left long inactive, grows weak and small, so it is with the brain connections formed in learning. With prolongation of the condition of rest, the machinery is less and less able to function, till finally all retention of a once-learned reaction may be lost.