I have directed your attention up to this point to the conservation of
experiences which at the time of their occurrence, although lost beyond
voluntary recall, for the most part occupied the focus of attention of
the individual—were within the full light of consciousness. If these
experiences were the only ones which were subject to conservation—and I
would have you still bear in mind that I am using the term only in the
limited sense of the ability to recover an experience in some favorable
condition, or moment of consciousness, or through some fortunate or
technical mode of reproduction—if, I say, these were the only ones to be
conserved, then the conservation of the experiences which make up our
mental lives would be considerably curtailed. It so happens, however,
that a large part of our mental activity is occupied with acts of which
at the moment we are only dimly aware—or half aware—in that they do not
occupy the focus of attention. Some of these are what we call
absent-minded acts. Again, many sensations and perceptions do not enter
the focus of attention, so that we are either not aware of them, or, if
we are, there is so little vividness attached to them that they are
almost immediately lost to voluntary memory. The same is true of certain
trains of thoughts which course through the mind while one’s attention
is concentrated on some other line of thought. They are sometimes
described as being in the background of the mind. Then, again, we have
our dream life, and that of reverie, and the important artificial state
of hypnosis; also certain pathological states to which some individuals
are subject, such as intoxication, hysterical crises, deliria, and
multiple personality. Accordingly it is important in any investigation
into the extent of the field of conservation to inquire whether all this
mental life is only fleeting, evanescent, psychological experience, or
whether it is subject to the same principle of conservation. If the
latter be the case it presages consequences which are portentous in the
possible multiplicity and manifoldness of the elements which may enter
into and may govern the mechanism of mental processes. But let me not
get ahead of my exposition.
=Absent-minded acts.=—In a study made some time ago I recorded the
reproduction, as a crystal vision, of an absent-minded act, i.e., one
which had not fully entered the focus of consciousness during deep
concentration of the attention. It is a type of numerous experiments of
this kind that I have made. Miss B. is directed to look into a crystal.
She sees therein a vision of herself walking along a particular street
in Boston in a brown study. She sees herself take out of her pocket some
bank notes, tear them up, and throw them into the street. Now this
artificial hallucination, or vision, was a picture of an actual
occurrence; in an absent-minded reverie the subject had actually
performed this very act under the circumstances portrayed in the vision
and had retained no memory of it.[27]
Similarly I have frequently recovered knowledge of the whereabouts of
articles mislaid absent-mindedly. Sometimes the method used has been, as
in the above examples, that of crystal gazing or artificial
hallucinations; sometimes hypnotism, sometimes automatic writing, etc.
By the last two methods not only the forgotten acts but the ideas and
feelings which were outside the focus of attention, but in the fringe of
consciousness, and prompted the acts are described. It is needless to
give the details of the observations; it suffices to say that each
minute detail of the absent-minded act and the thoughts and feelings
that determined it are described or mirrored, as the case may be. The
point of importance is that concentration of attention is not essential
for conservation, and, therefore, among the vast mass of the conserved
experiences of life may be found many which, though once conscious, only
entered the margin of awareness (not the focus of attention) and never
were subject to voluntary recollection. In the absence of attentive
awareness at the time for such an experience (and therefore of
recollection), we often can only be assured that it ever occurred by
circumstantial evidence. When this assurance is wanting we are tempted
to deny its occurrence and our responsibility, but experiment shows that
the process of conservation, like the dictagraph, is a more faithful
custodian of our experiences than are our voluntary memories.
=Subconscious perceptions=.—It is not difficult to show that perceptions
of the environment which _never even entered the fringe of the personal
consciousness, i.e., of which the individual was never even dimly
aware_, may be conserved. Indeed, the demonstration of their
conservation is one of the important pieces of evidence for the
occurrence of coconscious perception and, therefore, of the splitting of
consciousness. Mrs. Holland, both by automatic writing and in hypnosis,
describes perceptions of the environment (objects seen, etc.) of which
she was not aware at the time. Miss B. and B. C. A. recall, in hypnosis
and by automatic writing, paragraphs in the newspapers read through
casual glances without awareness thereof. The same is true of
perceptions of the environment experienced under experimental conditions
as well as fortuitously. I have made a large number of experiments and
other observations of this kind, and have been in the habit of
demonstrating before the students at my lectures this evidence of
coconscious perception. A simple method is to ask a suitable subject to
describe the dress of some person in the audience, or of objects in the
environment; if he is unable to do this, then to attempt to obtain as
minute a description as possible by automatic writing or verbally after
he has been hypnotized. It is often quite surprising to note with what
detail the objects which almost entirely escaped conscious observation
are subconsciously perceived and remembered. Sometimes the descriptions
of my students have been quite embarrassing from their naïve
truthfulness to nature.
The following is an example of such an observation: I asked B. C. A.
(without warning and after having covered her eyes) to describe the
dress of a friend who was present and with whom she had been conversing
for perhaps some twenty minutes. She was unable to do so beyond saying
that he wore dark clothes. I then found that I myself was unable to give
a more detailed description of his dress, although we had lunched and
been together about two hours. B. C. A. was then asked to write a
description automatically. Her hand wrote as follows (she was unaware
that her hand was writing):
“He has on a dark greenish gray suit, a stripe in it—little rough
stripe; black bow-cravat; shirt with three little stripes in it; black
laced shoes; false teeth; one finger gone; three buttons on his coat.”
The written description was absolutely correct. The stripes in the coat
were almost invisible. I had not noticed his teeth or the loss of a
finger and we had to count the buttons to make sure of their number
owing to their partial concealment by the folds of the unbuttoned coat.
The shoe strings I am sure, under the conditions, would have escaped
nearly everyone’s observation.
Subconscious perceptions even more than absent-minded acts offer some of
the most interesting phenomena of conservation, for these phenomena give
evidence of the ability, under certain conditions, to reproduce, in one
mode or another, experiences which were never a phase of the personal
consciousness, never entered even the fringe of the content of this
consciousness and of which, therefore, we were never aware. For this
reason they are not, properly speaking, forgotten experiences. Their
reproduction sometimes produces dramatic effects. The following is an
instance: B. C. A., waking one night out of a sound sleep, saw a vision
of a young girl dressed in white, standing at the foot of her bed. The
vision was extraordinarily vivid, the face so distinct that she was able
to give a detailed description of it. She had no recollection of having
seen the face before, and it awakened no sense of familiarity.
Suspecting, for certain reasons, the figure to be that of a young girl
who had recently died and whom I knew that B. C. A. had never known and
was not aware that she had ever seen, I placed before her a collection
of a dozen or more photographs of different people among which was one
of this girl. This photograph she picked out as the one which most
resembled the vision (it was a poor likeness) and automatic writing
confirmed most positively the choice. Now it transpired that she had
passed by this girl on one occasion while the latter was talking to me
in the hall of my house, but she had purposely, for certain reasons, not
looked at her. Subconsciously, however, she had seen her since she could
give, both in hypnosis and by automatic writing, an accurate account of
the incident, which I also remembered. B. C. A., however, had no
recollection of it. The subconscious perception was later reproduced
(after having undergone secondary elaboration) as a vision.
Similarly I have known paragraphs read in the newspapers out of the
corner of her eye, so to speak, and probably by casual glances, not
only, as I have said, to be recalled in hypnosis and by automatic
writing, but to be reproduced with more or less elaboration in her
dreams. She had, as the evidence showed, no awareness at the time of
having read these paragraphs and no after recollection of the same.
Experimentally, as I have said, it is possible to demonstrate other
phenomena which are the same in principle. The experiment consists,
after surreptitiously placing objects under proper precautions in the
peripheral field of vision, in having the subject fix his eyes on
central vision and his attention distracted from the environment by
intense concentration or reading. Immediately after removing the objects
it is determined that the subject did not consciously perceive them. But
in hypnosis or by other methods it is found that memory for perceptions
of the peripheral objects returns, i.e., the perceptions are reproduced.
Auditory stimuli may be used as tests with similar results.
Likewise, with Miss B., I have frequently obtained reproductions of
perceptions of which at the time she was unaware. This has been either
under similar experimental conditions, or under accidental circumstances
when I could confirm the accuracy of the reproductions. For instance, to
cite one out of numerous examples, on one occasion I saw her pass by in
the street while I was standing on the door-step of a house some fifteen
or twenty feet away, well outside the line of her central vision. She
was in a brown study. I called to her three times saying, “Good morning,
Miss B.,” laying the accent each time on a different word. She did not
hear me and later had no recollection of the episode. In hypnosis she
recalled the circumstances accurately and reproduced my words with the
accents properly placed. Such observations and experiments I have
frequently made. They can be varied indefinitely in form and condition.
The phenomenon of subconscious perception of sensory _stimulations
applied to anesthetic areas_ (tactile, visual, etc.), in hysterics,
first demonstrated by Janet, is of the same order, but has been so often
described that only a reference to it is necessary. I mention examples
here merely that the different kinds of phenomena that may be brought
within the sphere of memory shall be mentioned. For instance, Mrs. E.
B.[28] has an hysterical loss of sensibility in the hand which, in
consequence, can be severely pinched or pricked, or an object placed in
it, etc., without her being aware of the fact. Notwithstanding this
absence of awareness these tactile experiences were conserved since an
accurate detailed memory of them is recovered in hypnosis, or manifested
through automatic writing. The same phenomenon can be demonstrated in
Mrs. R., whose right arm is anesthetic.[29] The same conservation of
subconscious perceptions can be experimentally demonstrated during
automatic writing. At such times the writing hand becomes anesthetic and
if a screen is interposed so that the subject cannot see the hand he is
not aware of any stimulations applied to it. Nevertheless such sensory
stimulations—a prick or a pinch or more complicated impressions—are
conserved, for the hand will accurately describe all that is done.
An observation which I made on one of my subjects probably belongs here
rather than to the preceding types. Several different objects were
successively brought into the field of vision, but so far toward the
periphery that they could not be sufficiently clearly seen to be
identified. In hypnosis, however, they were accurately described,
showing the conservation of perceptions that did not enter the vivid
awareness or clear perception of the subject.
It is true, as a study of the coconscious would show, that such
phenomena of anesthesia and unrecognized perceptions are dependent upon
a dissociation of consciousness and upon coconscious perception. But
this is a matter of mechanism with which we are not now concerned. The
point simply is that subconscious perceptions which never entered the
awareness of the personal consciousness may be conserved.
I will cite one more observation, one in which the reproduction was
through secondary translation, as we shall see later that it belongs to
a class which enables us to determine the nature of conservation.
B. C. A., actuated by curiosity, looked into a crystal and saw there
some printed words which had no meaning for her whatever and awakened no
memory of any previous experience. It was afterward found that these
words represented a cablegram message which she unconsciously overheard
while it was being transmitted over the telephone to the telegraph
office by my secretary in the next room. She had no recollection of
having heard the words, as she was absorbed in reading a book at the
time. The correctness of the visual reproduction is shown, not only by
automatic writing which remembered and recorded the whole experience,
but also by comparison with the original cablegram.
Again, in other experiments there appear, in the crystal, visions rich
in detail of persons whom she does not remember having seen, although it
can be proved that she actually has seen them.
The reproduction of subconscious perceptions and forgotten knowledge in
dreams, visions, hypnosis, trance states, by automatic writing, etc., is
interesting apart from the theory of memory. Facts of this kind offer a
rational interpretation of many well-authenticated phenomena exploited
in spiritistic literature. Much of the surprising information given by
planchette, table rapping, and similar devices commonly employed by
mediums, depends upon the translation of forgotten dormant experiences
into manifestations of this sort. In clinical medicine, too, we can
often learn, through reproductions obtained by special methods of
investigation, the origin of obsessions and other ideas which otherwise
are unintelligible.
=Dreams and somnambulisms=.—Many people remember their dreams poorly or
not at all, and, in the latter case, are under the belief that they do
not dream. But often circumstantial evidence, such as talking in their
sleep, shows that they do dream. Now, though ordinarily they cannot
remember the dreams, by changing the waking state to an hypnotic one, or
through the device of crystal visions or automatic writing, it is
possible in some people to reproduce the whole dream. Amnesia for
dreams, therefore, cannot be taken as evidence that they do not occur,
and forgotten dream consciousness is subject to the same principles of
conservation and reproduction as the experiences of waking life. Thus in
B. C. A. dreams totally forgotten on awakening are easily recovered in
hypnosis and in crystal visions.[30] In the case of M——l, which I cited
to you a little while ago, the forgotten dream in which he lived over
again the original episode which led to the development of his
hysterical condition and which when repeated in the dream induced each
successive attack, was easily recovered in hypnosis. The same was true
of the forgotten dreams of Mrs. H. and Miss B.
The reproduction of nocturnal somnambulistic acts and the ideas which
occupied the content of consciousness of the somnambulist can be
effected in the same manner. I have quite a collection of observation of
this kind. In the study of visions,[31] to which I have already
referred, may be found the observation where Miss B., looking into a
crystal, sees herself walking in her sleep and hiding some money under a
tablecloth and books lying on the table. The money (which was supposed
to have been lost) was found where it was seen in the vision.
In my notebook are the records of numerous artificial hallucinations of
this kind which reproduce sleep-walking acts of B. C. A. To cite one
instance: in the crystal she sees herself arise from her bed, turn on
the lights, descend the stairs, enter one of the lower rooms, sit by the
fire in deep, pensive reflection, then get up and dance merrily as her
somnambulistic mood changes. Presently, as the cinematograph-like
picture unfolds itself in the crystal, she sees herself go to the
writing table, write two letters, ascend the stairs, dropping one letter
on the way,[32] reënter her room, open a glove box, place the remaining
letter under the gloves, and finally put out the lights and get into bed
when, with the advent of sleep, the vision ends. In the vision the
changing expression of her face displays each successive mood. In
hypnosis also the scene is remembered and then even the thoughts which
accompanied each act of the somnambulist are described. Here again,
then, we have evidence that even forgotten dreams and somnambulistic
thoughts are not lost but under certain special conditions can be
revived in one mode or another.