Making Experience Count All the wealth of your past experience is still yours—a concrete part of your personality. All that is required to make it available for your present use is a sufficient concentration of your attention, a concentration of attention that shall dwell persistently and exclusively upon those associations that bear upon the fact desired.
The tendency of the mind toward dissociation, a function limiting the indiscriminate recall of associated "groups," is also manifested in all of us in the transfer to unconsciousness of many muscular activities.
As infants we learn to walk only by giving to every movement of the limbs the most deliberate conscious attention. Yet, in time, the complicated co-operation How Habits Are Formed of muscular movements involved in walking becomes involuntary and unconscious, so that we are no longer even aware of them.
It is the same with reading, writing, playing upon musical instruments, the manipulation of all sorts of mechanical devices, the thousand and one other muscular activities that become what we call habitual.
The moment one tries to make these habitual activities again dependent on the conscious will he encounters difficulties.
"The centipede was happy quite,
Until the toad, for fun,
Said, 'Pray which leg goes after which?'
This stirred his mind to such a pitch,
He lay distracted in a ditch,
Considering how to run."
All these habitual activities are started as acts of painstaking care and conscious attention. All ultimately become unconscious. They may, however, be started or stopped at will. They are, therefore, still related to the conscious mind. They occupy a semi-automatic middle ground between conscious and subconscious activities.