ATTENTION.
=The Narrowness of Consciousness.=--One of the most extraordinary facts of
our life is that, although we are besieged at every moment by
impressions from our whole sensory surface, we notice so very small a
part of them. The sum total of our impressions never enters into our
_experience_, consciously so called, which runs through this sum total
like a tiny rill through a broad flowery mead. Yet the physical
impressions which do not count are _there_ as much as those which do,
and affect our sense-organs just as energetically. Why they fail to
pierce the mind is a mystery, which is only named and not explained when
we invoke _die Enge des Bewusstseins_, 'the narrowness of
consciousness,' as its ground.
=Its Physiological Ground.=--Our consciousness certainly is narrow, when
contrasted with the breadth of our sensory surface and the mass of
incoming currents which are at all times pouring in. Evidently no
current can be recorded in conscious experience unless it succeed in
penetrating to the hemispheres and filling their pathways by the
processes get up. When an incoming current thus occupies the hemispheres
with its consequences, other currents are for the time kept out. They
may show their faces at the door, but are turned back until the actual
possessors of the place are tired. Physiologically, then, the narrowness
of consciousness seems to depend on the fact that the activity of the
hemispheres tends at all times to be a consolidated and unified affair,
determinable now by this current and now by that, but determinable only
as a whole. The ideas correlative to the reigning system of processes
are those which are said to 'interest' us at the time; and thus that
selective character of our attention on which so much stress was laid on
pp. 173 ff. appears to find a physiological ground. At all times,
however, there is a liability to disintegration of the reigning system.
The consolidation is seldom quite complete, the excluded currents are
not wholly abortive, their presence affects the 'fringe' and margin of
our thought.
=Dispersed Attention.=--Sometimes, indeed, the normal consolidation seems
hardly to exist. At such moments it is possible that cerebral activity
sinks to a minimum. Most of us probably fall several times a day into a
fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the
world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the
whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of
consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of
surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our
mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing
ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the
next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot _start_; the _pensée
de derrière la tête_ fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps
our state about. Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know
no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after
pulse, and we float with it, until--also without reason that we can
discover--an energy is given, something--we know not what--enables us to
gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the
background-ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round
again.
This is the extreme of what is called dispersed attention. Between this
extreme and the extreme of concentrated attention, in which absorption
in the interest of the moment is so complete that grave bodily injuries
may be unfelt, there are intermediate degrees, and these have been
studied experimentally. The problem is known as that of =The Span of
Consciousness.=--How many objects can we attend to at once when they are
not embraced in one conceptual system? Prof. Cattell experimented with
combinations of letters exposed to the eye for so short a fraction of a
second that attention to them in succession seemed to be ruled out. When
the letters formed familiar words, three times as many of them could be
named as when their combination was meaningless. If the words formed a
sentence, twice as many could be caught as when they had no connection.
"The sentence was then apprehended as a whole. If not apprehended thus,
almost nothing is apprehended of the several words; but if the sentence
as a whole is apprehended, then the words appear very distinct."
A word is a conceptual system in which the letters do not enter
consciousness separately, as they do when apprehended alone. A sentence
flashed at once upon the eye is such a system relatively to its words. A
conceptual system may _mean_ many sensible objects, may be translated
later into them, but as an actual existent mental state, it does not
_consist of_ the consciousnesses of these objects. When I think of the
word _man_ as a whole, for instance, what is in my mind is something
different from what is there when I think of the letters _m_, _a_, and
_n_, as so many disconnected data.
When data are so disconnected that we have no conception which embraces
them together it is much harder to apprehend several of them at once,
and the mind tends to let go of one whilst it attends to another. Still,
within limits this can be avoided. M. Paulhan has experimented on the
matter by declaiming one poem aloud whilst he repeated a different one
mentally, or by writing one sentence whilst speaking another, or by
performing calculations on paper whilst reciting poetry. He found that
"the most favorable condition for the doubling of the mind was its
simultaneous application to two heterogeneous operations. Two operations
of the same sort, two multiplications, two recitations, or the reciting
of one poem and writing of another, render the process more uncertain
and difficult."
M. Paulhan compared the time occupied by the same two operations done
simultaneously or in succession, and found that there was often a
considerable gain of time from doing them simultaneously. For instance:
"I multiply 421 312 212 by 2; the operation takes 6 seconds; the
recitation of four verses also takes 6 seconds. But the two operations
done at once only take 6 seconds, so that there is no loss of time from
combining them."
If, then, by the original question, how many objects can we attend to at
once, be meant how many entirely disconnected systems or processes can
go on simultaneously, the answer is, _not easily more than one, unless
the processes are very habitual; but then two, or even three_, without
very much oscillation of the attention. Where, however, the processes
are less automatic, as in the story of Julius Cæsar dictating four
letters whilst he writes a fifth, there must be a rapid oscillation of
the mind from one to the next, and no consequent gain of time.
* * * * *
When the things to be attended to are minute sensations, and when the
effort is to be exact in noting them, it is found that attention to one
interferes a good deal with the perception of the other. A good deal of
fine work has been done in this field by Professor Wundt. He tried to
note the exact position on a dial of a rapidly revolving hand, at the
moment when a bell struck. Here were two disparate sensations, one of
vision, the other of sound, to be noted together. But it was found that
in a long and patient research, the eye-impression could seldom or never
be noted at the exact moment when the bell actually struck. An earlier
or a later point were all that could be seen.
=The Varieties of Attention.=--Attention may be divided into kinds in
various ways. It is either to
_a_) Objects of sense (sensorial attention); or to
_b_) Ideal or represented objects (intellectual attention). It is either
_c_) Immediate; or
_d_) Derived: immediate, when the topic or stimulus is interesting in
itself, without relation to anything else; derived, when it owes its
interest to association with some other immediately interesting thing.
What I call derived attention has been named 'apperceptive' attention.
Furthermore, Attention may be either
_e_) Passive, reflex, involuntary, effortless; or
_f_) Active and voluntary.
_Voluntary attention is always derived_; we never make an _effort_ to
attend to an object except for the sake of some _remote_ interest which
the effort will serve. But both sensorial and intellectual attention may
be either passive or voluntary.
In _involuntary attention_ of the _immediate sensorial_ sort the
stimulus is either a sense-impression, very intense, voluminous, or
sudden; or it is an _instinctive_ stimulus, a perception which, by
reason of its nature rather than its mere force, appeals to some one of
our congenital impulses and has a directly exciting quality. In the
chapter on Instinct we shall see how these stimuli differ from one
animal to another, and what most of them are in man: strange things,
moving things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, metallic
things, words, blows, blood, etc., etc., etc.
Sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli characterizes
the attention of childhood and youth. In mature age we have generally
selected those stimuli which are connected with one or more so-called
permanent interests, and our attention has grown irresponsive to the
rest. But childhood is characterized by great active energy, and has few
organized interests by which to meet new impressions and decide whether
they are worthy of notice or not, and the consequence is that extreme
mobility of the attention with which we are all familiar in children,
and which makes of their first lessons such chaotic affairs. Any strong
sensation whatever produces accommodation of the organs which perceive
it, and absolute oblivion, for the time being, of the task in hand. This
reflex and passive character of the attention which, as a French writer
says, makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every
object which happens to catch his notice, is the first thing which the
teacher must overcome. It never is overcome in some people, whose work,
to the end of life, gets done in the interstices of their
mind-wandering.
The passive sensorial attention is _derived_ when the impression,
without being either strong or of an instinctively exciting nature, is
connected by previous experience and education with things that are so.
These things may be called the _motives_ of the attention. The
impression draws an interest from them, or perhaps it even fuses into a
single complex object with them; the result is that it is brought into
the focus of the mind. A faint tap _per se_ is not an interesting sound;
it may well escape being discriminated from the general rumor of the
world. But when it is a signal, as that of a lover on the window-pane,
hardly will it go unperceived. Herbart writes:
"How a bit of bad grammar wounds the ear of the purist! How a false note
hurts the musician! or an offence against good manners the man of the
world! How rapid is progress in a science when its first principles have
been so well impressed upon us that we reproduce them mentally with
perfect distinctness and ease! How slow and uncertain, on the other
hand, is our learning of the principles themselves, when familiarity
with the still more elementary percepts connected with the subject has
not given us an adequate predisposition!--Apperceptive attention may be
plainly observed in very small children when, hearing the speech of
their elders, as yet unintelligible to them, they suddenly catch a
single known word here and there, and repeat it to themselves; yes! even
in the dog who looks round at us when we speak of him and pronounce his
name. Not far removed is the talent which mind-wandering school-boys
display during the hours of instruction, of noticing every moment in
which the teacher tells a story. I remember classes in which,
instruction being uninteresting, and discipline relaxed, a buzzing
murmur was always to be heard, which invariably stopped for as long a
time as an anecdote lasted. How could the boys, since they seemed to
hear nothing, notice when the anecdote began? Doubtless most of them
always heard something of the teacher's talk; but most of it had no
connection with their previous knowledge and occupations, and therefore
the separate words no sooner entered their consciousness than they fell
out of it again; but, on the other hand, no sooner did the words awaken
old thoughts, forming strongly-connected series with which the new
impression easily combined, than out of new and old together a total
interest resulted which drove the vagrant ideas below the threshold of
consciousness, and brought for a while settled attention into their
place."
_Involuntary intellectual attention_ is immediate when we follow in
thought a train of images exciting or interesting _per se_; derived,
when the images are interesting only as means to a remote end, or merely
because they are associated with something which makes them dear. The
brain-currents may then form so solidly unified a system, and the
absorption in their object be so deep, as to banish not only ordinary
sensations, but even the severest pain. Pascal, Wesley, Robert Hall, are
said to have had this capacity. Dr. Carpenter says of himself that "he
has frequently begun a lecture whilst suffering neuralgic pain so severe
as to make him apprehend that he would find it impossible to proceed;
yet no sooner has he by a determined effort fairly launched himself into
the stream of thought, than he has found himself continuously borne
along without the least distraction, until the end has come, and the
attention has been released; when the pain has recurred with a force
that has overmastered all resistance, making him wonder how he could
have ever ceased to feel it."[34]
=Voluntary Attention.=--Dr. Carpenter speaks of launching himself by a
determined _effort_. This _effort_ characterizes what we called _active
or voluntary attention_. It is a feeling which everyone knows, but which
most people would call quite indescribable. We get it in the sensorial
sphere whenever we seek to catch an impression of extreme _faintness_,
be it of sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch; we get it whenever we
seek to _discriminate_ a sensation merged in a mass of others that are
similar; we get it whenever we _resist the attractions_ of more potent
stimuli and keep our mind occupied with some object that is naturally
unimpressive. We get it in the intellectual sphere under exactly similar
conditions: as when we strive to sharpen and make distinct an idea which
we but vaguely seem to have; or painfully discriminate a shade of
meaning from its similars; or resolutely hold fast to a thought so
discordant with our impulses that, if left unaided, it would quickly
yield place to images of an exciting and impassioned kind. All forms of
attentive effort would be exercised at once by one whom we might suppose
at a dinner-party resolutely to listen to a neighbor giving him insipid
and unwelcome advice in a low voice, whilst all around the guests were
loudly laughing and talking about exciting and interesting things.
_There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a
few seconds at a time._ What is called sustained voluntary attention is
a repetition of successive efforts which bring back the topic to the
mind. The topic once brought back, if a congenial one, _develops_; and
if its development is interesting it engages the attention passively for
a time. Dr. Carpenter, a moment back, described the stream of thought,
once entered, as 'bearing him along.' This passive interest may be
short or long. As soon as it flags, the attention is diverted by some
irrelevant thing, and then a voluntary effort may bring it back to the
topic again; and so on, under favorable conditions, for hours together.
During all this time, however, note that it is not an identical _object_
in the psychological sense, but a succession of mutually related objects
forming an identical _topic_ only, upon which the attention is fixed.
_No one can possibly attend continuously to an object that does not
change._
Now there are always some objects that for the time being _will not
develop_. They simply _go out_; and to keep the mind upon anything
related to them requires such incessently renewed effort that the most
resolute Will ere long gives out and lets its thoughts follow the more
stimulating solicitations after it has withstood them for what length of
time it can. There are topics known to every man from which he shies
like a frightened horse, and which to get a glimpse of is to shun. Such
are his ebbing assets to the spendthrift in full career. But why single
out the spendthrift, when to every man actuated by passion the thought
of interests which negate the passion can hardly for more than a
fleeting instant stay before the mind? It is like 'memento mori' in the
heydey of the pride of life. Nature rises at such suggestions, and
excludes them from the view:--How long, O healthy reader, can you now
continue thinking of your tomb?--In milder instances the difficulty is
as great, especially when the brain is fagged. One snatches at any and
every passing pretext, no matter how trivial or external, to escape from
the odiousness of the matter in hand. I know a person, for example, who
will poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust-specks from the
floor, arrange his table, snatch up the newspaper, take down any book
which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning _anyhow_, in
short, and all without premeditation,--simply because the only thing he
_ought_ to attend to is the preparation of a noonday lesson in formal
logic which he detests. Anything but _that_!
[Illustration: FIG. 54.]
Once more, the object must change. When it is one of sight, it will
actually become invisible; when of hearing, inaudible,--if we attend to
it too unmovingly. Helmholtz, who has put his sensorial attention to the
severest tests, by using his eyes on objects which in common life are
expressly overlooked, makes some interesting remarks on this point in
his section on retinal rivalry. The phenomenon called by that name is
this, that if we look with each eye upon a different picture (as in the
annexed stereoscopic slide), sometimes one picture, sometimes the other,
or parts of both, will come to consciousness, but hardly ever both
combined. Helmholtz now says:
"I find that I am able to attend voluntarily, now to one and now to the
other system of lines; and that then this system remains visible alone
for a certain time, whilst the other completely vanishes. This happens,
for example, whenever I try to count the lines first of one and then of
the other system.... But it is extremely hard to chain the attention
down to one of the systems for long, unless we associate with our
looking some distinct purpose which keeps the activity of the attention
perpetually renewed. Such a one is counting the lines, comparing their
intervals, or the like. An equilibrium of the attention, persistent for
any length of time, is under no circumstances attainable. The natural
tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new
things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as
nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to
something else. _If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we
must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter_,
especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away."
These words of Helmholtz are of fundamental importance. And if true of
sensorial attention, how much more true are they of the intellectual
variety! The _conditio sine quâ non_ of sustained attention to a given
topic of thought is that we should roll it over and over incessantly and
consider different aspects and relations of it in turn. Only in
pathological states will a fixed and ever monotonously recurring idea
possess the mind.
=Genius and Attention.=--And now we can see why it is that what is called
sustained attention is the easier, the richer in acquisitions and the
fresher and more original the mind. In such minds, subjects bud and
sprout and grow. At every moment, they please by a new consequence and
rivet the attention afresh. But an intellect unfurnished with materials,
stagnant, unoriginal, will hardly be likely to consider any subject
long. A glance exhausts its possibilities of interest. Geniuses are
commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained
attention. In most of them, it is to be feared, the so-called 'power' is
of the passive sort. Their ideas coruscate, every subject branches
infinitely before their fertile minds, and so for hours they may be
rapt. _But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention
making geniuses of them._ And, when we come down to the root of the
matter, we see that they differ from ordinary men less in the character
of their attention than in the nature of the objects upon which it is
successively bestowed. In the genius, these form a concatenated series,
suggesting each other mutually by some rational law. Therefore we call
the attention 'sustained' and the topic of meditation for hours 'the
same.' In the common man the series is for the most part incoherent, the
objects have no rational bond, and we call the attention wandering and
unfixed.
It is probable that genius tends actually to prevent a man from
acquiring habits of voluntary attention, and that moderate intellectual
endowments are the soil in which we may best expect, here as elsewhere,
the virtues of the will, strictly so called, to thrive. But, whether the
attention come by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer one
does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And the faculty
of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again
is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is _compos
sui_ if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty
would be _the_ education _par excellence_. But it is easier to define
this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about. The
only general pedagogic maxim bearing on attention is that the more
interests the child has in advance in the subject, the better he will
attend. Induct him therefore in such a way as to knit each new thing on
to some acquisition already there; and if possible awaken curiosity, so
that the new thing shall seem to come as an answer, or part of an
answer, to a question preëxisting in his mind.
=The Physiological Conditions of Attention.=--These seem to be the
following:
1) _The appropriate cortical centre must be excited ideationally as well
as sensorially, before attention to an object can take place._
2) _The sense-organ must then adapt itself to clearest reception of the
object, by the adjustment of its muscular apparatus._
3) _In all probability a certain afflux of blood to the cortical centre
must ensue._
Of this third condition I will say no more, since we have no proof of it
in detail, and I state it on the faith of general analogies. Conditions
1) and 2), however, are verifiable; and the best order will be to take
the latter first.
=The Adaptation of the Sense-organ.=--This occurs not only in sensorial
but also in intellectual attention to an object.
That it is present when we attend to _sensible_ things is obvious. When
we look or listen we accommodate our eyes and ears involuntarily, and we
turn our head and body as well; when we taste or smell we adjust the
tongue, lips, and respiration to the object; in feeling a surface we
move the palpatory organ in a suitable way; in all these acts, besides
making involuntary muscular contractions of a positive sort, we inhibit
others which might interfere with the result--we close the eyes in
tasting, suspend the respiration in listening, etc. The result is a more
or less massive organic feeling that attention is going on. This organic
feeling we usually treat as part of the sense of our _own activity_,
although it comes in to us from our organs after they are accommodated.
Any object, then, if _immediately_ exciting, causes a reflex
accommodation of the sense-organ, which has two results--first, the
feeling of activity in question; and second, the object's increase in
clearness.
But in _intellectual_ attention similar feelings of activity occur.
Fechner was the first, I believe, to analyze these feelings, and
discriminate them from the stronger ones just named. He writes:
"When we transfer the attention from objects of one sense to those of
another, we have an indescribable feeling (though at the same time one
perfectly determinate, and reproducible at pleasure), of altered
_direction_ or differently localized tension (_Spannung_). We feel a
strain forward in the eyes, one directed sidewise in the ears,
increasing with the degree of our attention, and changing according as
we look at an object carefully, or listen to something attentively; and
we speak accordingly of _straining the attention_. The difference is
most plainly felt when the attention oscillates rapidly between eye and
ear; and the feeling localizes itself with most decided difference in
regard to the various sense-organs, according as we wish to discriminate
a thing delicately by touch, taste, or smell.
"But now I have, when I try to vividly recall a picture of memory or
fancy, a feeling perfectly analogous to that which I experience when I
seek to apprehend a thing keenly by eye or ear; and this analogous
feeling is very differently localized. While in sharpest possible
attention to real objects (as well as to after-images) the strain is
plainly forwards, and (when the attention changes from one sense to
another) only alters its direction between the several external
sense-organs, leaving the rest of the head free from strain, the case is
different in memory or fancy, for here the feeling withdraws entirely
from the external sense-organs, and seems rather to take refuge in that
part of the head which the brain fills. If I wish, for example, to
_recall_ a place or person, it will arise before me with vividness, not
according as I strain my attention forwards, but rather in proportion as
I, so to speak, retract it backwards."
In myself the 'backward retraction' which is felt during attention to
ideas of memory, etc., seems to be principally constituted by the
feeling of an actual rolling outwards and upwards of the eyeballs, such
as occurs in sleep, and is the exact opposite of their behavior when we
look at a physical thing.
This accommodation of the sense-organ is not, however, the _essential_
process, even in sensorial attention. It is a secondary result which may
be prevented from occurring, as certain observations show. Usually, it
is true that no object lying in the marginal portions of the field of
vision can catch our attention without at the same time 'catching our
eye'--that is, fatally provoking such movements of rotation and
accommodation as will focus its image on the fovea, or point of
greatest sensibility. Practice, however, enables us, _with effort_, to
attend to a marginal object whilst keeping the eyes immovable. The
object under these circumstances never becomes perfectly distinct--the
place of its image on the retina makes distinctness impossible--but (as
anyone can satisfy himself by trying) we become more vividly conscious
of it than we were before the effort was made. Teachers thus notice the
acts of children in the school-room at whom they appear not to be
looking. Women in general train their peripheral visual attention more
than men. Helmholtz states the fact so strikingly that I will quote his
observation in full. He was trying to combine in a single solid percept
pairs of stereoscopic pictures illuminated instantaneously by the
electric spark. The pictures were in a dark box which the spark from
time to time lighted up; and, to keep the eyes from wandering
betweenwhiles, a pin-hole was pricked through the middle of each
picture, through which the light of the room came, so that each eye had
presented to it during the dark intervals a single bright point. With
parallel optical axes these points combined into a single image; and the
slightest movement of the eyeballs was betrayed by this image at once
becoming double. Helmholtz now found that simple linear figures could,
when the eyes were thus kept immovable, be perceived as solids at a
single flash of the spark. But when the figures were complicated
photographs, many successive flashes were required to grasp their
totality.
"Now it is interesting," he says, "to find that, although we keep
steadily fixating the pin-holes and never allow their combined image to
break into two, we can nevertheless, before the spark comes, keep our
attention voluntarily turned to any particular portion we please of the
dark field, so as then, when the spark comes, to receive an impression
only from such parts of the picture as lie in this region. In this
respect, then, our attention is quite independent of the position and
accommodation of the eyes, and of any known alteration in these organs,
and free to direct itself by a conscious and voluntary effort upon any
selected portion of a dark and undifferenced field of view. This is one
of the most important observations for a future theory of
attention."[35]
=The Ideational Excitement of the Centre.=--But if the peripheral part of
the picture in this experiment be not physically accommodated for, what
is meant by its sharing our attention? What happens when we 'distribute'
or 'disperse' the latter upon a thing for which we remain unwilling to
'adjust'? This leads us to that second feature in the process, the
'_ideational excitement_' of which we spoke. _The effort to attend to
the marginal region of the picture consists in nothing more nor less
than the effort to form as clear an_ IDEA _as is possible of what is
there portrayed._ The idea is to come to the help of the sensation and
make it more distinct. It may come with effort, and such a mode of
coming is the remaining part of what we know as our attention's 'strain'
under the circumstances. Let us show how universally present in our acts
of attention is this anticipatory thinking of the thing to which we
attend. Mr. Lewes's name of _preperception_ seems the best possible
designation for this imagining of an experience before it occurs.
It must as a matter of course be present when the attention is of the
intellectual variety, for the thing attended to then _is_ nothing but an
idea, an inward reproduction or conception. If then we prove ideal
construction of the object to be present in _sensorial_ attention, it
will be present everywhere. When, however, sensorial attention is at its
height, it is impossible to tell how much of the percept comes from
without and how much from within; but if we find that the _preparation_
we make for it always partly consists of the creation of an imaginary
duplicate of the object in the mind, that will be enough to establish
the point in dispute.
In reaction-time experiments, keeping our mind intent upon the motion
about to be made shortens the time. This shortening we ascribed in Chap.
VIII to the fact that the signal when it comes finds the motor-centre
already charged almost to the explosion-point in advance. Expectant
attention to a reaction thus goes with sub-excitement of the centre
concerned.
Where the impression to be caught is very weak, the way not to miss it
is to sharpen our attention for it by preliminary contact with it in a
stronger form. Helmholtz says: "If we wish to begin to observe
overtones, it is advisable, just before the sound which is to be
analyzed, to sound very softly the note of which we are in search.... If
you place the resonator which corresponds to a certain overtone, for
example _g´_ of the sound _c_, against your ear, and then make the note
_c_ sound, you will hear _g´_ much strengthened by the resonator....
This strengthening by the resonator can be used to make the naked ear
attentive to the sound which it is to catch. For when the resonator is
gradually removed, the _g´_ grows weaker; but the attention, once
directed to it, holds it now more easily fast, and the observer hears
the tone _g´_ now in the natural unaltered sound of the note with his
unaided ear."
Wundt, commenting on experiences of this sort, says that "The same thing
is to be noticed in weak or fugitive visual impressions. Illuminate a
drawing by electric sparks separated by considerable intervals, and
after the first, and often after the second and third spark, hardly
anything will be recognized. But the confused image is held fast in
memory; each successive illumination completes it; and so at last we
attain to a clearer perception. The primary motive to this inward
activity proceeds usually from the outer impression itself. We hear a
sound in which, from certain associations, we suspect a certain
overtone; the next thing is to recall the overtone in memory; and
finally we catch it in the sound we hear. Or perhaps we see some mineral
substance we have met before; the impression awakens the memory-image,
which again more or less completely melts with the impression itself....
Different qualities of impression require disparate adaptations. And we
remark that our feeling of the _strain_ of our inward attentiveness
increases with every increase in the strength of the impressions on
whose perception we are intent."
The natural way of conceiving all this is under the symbolic form of a
brain-cell played upon from two directions. Whilst the object excites it
from without, other brain-cells arouse it from within. _The plenary
energy of the brain-cell demands the co-operation of both factors_: not
when merely present, but when both present and inwardly imagined, is the
object fully attended to and perceived.
A few additional experiences will now be perfectly clear. Helmholtz, for
instance, adds this observation concerning the stereoscopic pictures lit
by the electric spark. "In pictures," he says, "so simple that it is
relatively difficult for me to see them double, I can succeed in seeing
them double, even when the illumination is only instantaneous, the
moment I strive to _imagine in a lively way how they ought then to
look_. The influence of attention is here pure; for all eye-movements
are shut out."
Again, writing of retinal rivalry, Helmholtz says:
"It is not a trial of strength between two sensations, but depends on
our fixing or failing to fix the attention. Indeed, there is scarcely
any phenomenon so well fitted for the study of the causes which are
capable of determining the attention. It is not enough to form the
conscious intention of seeing first with one eye and then with the
other; _we must form as clear a notion as possible of what we expect to
see. Then it will actually appear._"
In Figs. 55 and 56, where the result is ambiguous, we can make the
change from one apparent form to the other by imagining strongly in
advance the form we wish to see. Similarly in those puzzles where
certain lines in a picture form by their combination an object that has
no connection with what the picture obviously represents; or indeed in
every case where an object is inconspicuous and hard to discern from the
background; we may not be able to see it for a long time; but, having
once seen it, we can attend to it again whenever we like, on account of
the mental duplicate of it which our imagination now bears. In the
meaningless French words '_pas de lieu Rhône que nous_,' who can
recognize immediately the English 'paddle your own canoe'? But who that
has once noticed the identity can fail to have it arrest his attention
again? When watching for the distant clock to strike, our mind is so
filled with its image that at every moment we think we hear the
longed-for or dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep. Every stir in
the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers.
Every bonnet in the street is momentarily taken by the lover to enshroud
the head of his idol. The image in the mind _is_ the attention; the
preperception is half of the perception of the looked-for thing.
[Illustration: FIG. 55.]
[Illustration: FIG. 56.]
It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for those aspects of
things which they have already been taught to discern. Any one of us can
notice a phenomenon after it has once been pointed out, which not one in
ten thousand could ever have discovered for himself. Even in poetry and
the arts, some one has to come and tell us what aspects to single out,
and what effects to admire, before our æsthetic nature can 'dilate' to
its full extent and never 'with the wrong emotion.' In
kindergarten-instruction one of the exercises is to make the children
see how many features they can point out in such an object as a flower
or a stuffed bird. They readily name the features they know already,
such as leaves, tail, bill, feet. But they may look for hours without
distinguishing nostrils, claws, scales, etc., until their attention is
called to these details; thereafter, however, they see them every time.
In short, _the only things which we commonly see are those which we
preperceive_, and the only things which we preperceive are those which
have been labelled for us, and the labels stamped into our mind. If we
lost our stock of labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst
of the world.
=Educational Corollaries.=--First, to _strengthen attention in children_
who care nothing for the subject they are studying and let their wits go
wool-gathering. The interest here must be 'derived' from something that
the teacher associates with the task, a reward or a punishment if
nothing less internal comes to mind. If a topic awakens no spontaneous
attention it must borrow an interest from elsewhere. But the best
interest is internal, and we must always try, in teaching a class, to
knit our novelties by rational links on to things of which they already
have preperceptions. The old and familiar is readily attended to by the
mind and helps to hold in turn the new, forming, in Herbartian
phraseology, an '_Apperceptionsmasse_' for it. Of course the teacher's
talent is best shown by knowing what 'Apperceptionsmasse' to use.
Psychology can only lay down the general rule.
Second, take that mind-wandering which at a later age may trouble us
_whilst reading or listening to a discourse_. If attention be the
reproduction of the sensation from within, the habit of reading not
merely with the eye, and of listening not merely with the ear, but of
articulating to one's self the words seen or heard, ought to deepen
one's attention to the latter. Experience shows that this is the case.
I can keep my wandering mind a great deal more closely upon a
conversation or a lecture if I actively re-echo to myself the words than
if I simply hear them; and I find a number of my students who report
benefit from voluntarily adopting a similar course.
=Attention and Free Will.=--I have spoken as if our attention were wholly
determined by neural conditions. I believe that the array of _things_ we
can attend to is so determined. No object can _catch_ our attention
except by the neural machinery. But the _amount_ of the attention which
an object receives after it has caught our mental eye is another
question. It often takes effort to keep the mind upon it. We feel that
we can make more or less of the effort as we choose. If this feeling be
not deceptive, if our effort be a spiritual force, and an indeterminate
one, then of course it contributes coequally with the cerebral
conditions to the result. Though it _introduce_ no new idea, it will
deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which
else would fade more quickly away. The delay thus gained might not be
more than a second in duration--but that second may be _critical_; for
in the constant rising and falling of considerations in the mind, where
two associated systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is often a
matter of but a second more or less of attention at the outset, whether
one system shall gain force to occupy the field and develop itself, and
exclude the other, or be excluded itself by the other. When developed,
it may make us act; and that act may seal our doom. When we come to the
chapter on the Will, we shall see that the whole drama of the voluntary
life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less,
which rival motor ideas may receive. But the whole feeling of reality,
the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our
sense that in it things are _really being decided_ from one moment to
another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was
forged innumerable ages ago. This appearance, which makes life and
history tingle with such a tragic zest, _may_ not be an illusion. Effort
may be an original force and not a mere effect, and it may be
indeterminate in amount. The last word of sober insight here is
ignorance, for the forces engaged are too delicate ever to be measured
in detail. Psychology, however, as a would-be 'Science,' must, like
every other Science, _postulate_ complete determinism in its facts, and
abstract consequently from the effects of free will, even if such a
force exist. I shall do so in this book like other psychologists; well
knowing, however, that such a procedure, although a methodical device
justified by the subjective need of arranging the facts in a simple and
'scientific' form, does not settle the ultimate truth of the free-will
question one way or the other.