Visual memory

“ The chief art of strengthening visual, as well as every other form of memory, lies in multiplying associations; the healthiest memory being that in which all the associations are logical, and toward which all the senses concur in their due proportions. It is wonderful how much the vividness of a recollection is increased when two or more lines of association are simultaneously excited. ”

“ It is a mistake to suppose that sharp sight is accompanied by clear visual memory. I have not a few instances in which the independence of the two faculties is emphatically commented on; and I have at least one clear case where great interest in outlines and accurate appreciation of straightness, squareness, and the like, is unaccompanied by the power of visualising. Neither does the faculty go with dreaming. I have cases where it is powerful, and at the same time where dreams are rare and faint or altogether absent. ”

“ There is no kind of mental activity in which memory does not intervene. We are most familiar with it in the case of images, those fugitive elusive copies of sensations with which psychology has been hitherto so much, perhaps too much, concerned. Visual images are the best known of them, but it is important to recognise that every kind of sensation may have its corresponding image. Visceral, kinæsthetic, thermal images can with a little practice be produced, even by people who have never noticed their occurrence. ”

“ This is due to the fact that they can not make and retain in memory clear pictures of the things they see. They remember words rather than things—in fact, the training in language, which is so large a part of an education, tends ever to diminish the element of visual memory. ”

“ It is upon forms and colors, therefore, that both perception and memory must first be exercised. The visual impression should be amplified up to the point at which it is able to fix itself on the mind by its own momentum; therefore, without conscious effort. When the mind has accumulated a stock of reminiscences which can not be forgotten, it will, by so much, have enriched its structure and enlarged its furniture. ”

“ This sense has been endowed by nature with special ability and capacity. The nerves connecting the eye with the brain are eighteen times larger than those of any other sense. Their capacity to impress the brain is therefore many times greater. At the same time nature has duplicated the sense of sight and we have the mind's eye, or the faculty of visualization, by which we can reproduce the visual impression, or picture, of the thing which we have seen. This faculty is one of the important foundations of memory development as you will see in future chapters. ”

“ The recollection of adults, as is known, proceeds through different psychic material. Some recall by means of visual pictures—their memories are of a visual character; other individuals can scarcely reproduce in memory the most paltry sketch of an experience ”

“ Other Memory Material.—But sensory images are not the only material with which memory has to deal. We may also recall the bare fact that it rained a week ago today without having images of the rain. We may recall that Columbus discovered America in 1492 without visual or other images of the event. As a matter of fact we do constantly recall many facts of abstract nature, such as mathematical or scientific formulæ with no168 imagery other than that of the words or symbols, if indeed these be present. ”

“ We have here a continuous movement, by which the nebulosity of the idea is condensed into distinct auditory images, which, still fluid, will be finally solidified as they coalesce with the sounds materially perceived At no moment is it possible to say with precision that the idea or the memory-image ends, that the memory-image or the sensation begins. ”

“ But I am forced by my own experience and that of others to believe that nature has a memory, and that it is accessible to us.
But this memory cannot be recorded as ours through bodily organs of sight or hearing, nor can imagination make clear to me how any medium could exist in nature which would reflect upon itself as a mirror reflects, or as human vision reflects, an impression intelligible to us of what is passing. ”

“ If we look into another person's eye we may see there a picture of the whole field of his vision reflected from his lens. It is true that what we see is not what he sees, for that is on his retina, but the analogy of this with a photographic camera, where we see the picture on the ground glass, seems obvious and natural; and so we think of knowledge, so far as it depends on the sense of vision, as consisting in more or less vivid, more or less faded, copies of real things stored up by the memory. ”

“ So we might say that every man carries about with him on the physical plane two memories of anything which he has seen — his brain-memory, which is often imperfect or inaccurate, and the memory enshrined in any unchanged particles of his body or of the clothes that he wears, which is always perfect and accurate, but is available only for those who have learnt how to read it. ”

“ The single glance of an eye has been found sufficient to catch the passing expression of character, and fix it on the memory, when that memory has been strengthened and matured by repeated efforts: so evanescent are the features of things and forms that pass us by, that observation—discriminative observation—assisted by habits of memory, alone can fix them in our ideas: no single expression of the human countenance remains long enough to paint it by any other means. ”

“ The physical side of memory is most interesting. On the covering of the brain, each in its own place, the images or impression brought in by the senses and the activity are registered. So sensitive and susceptible are the brain cells during childhood, that these impressions are received as clay receives the touch of the sculptor's finger, and under right conditions, they are ineffaceable. When the soul acts upon these images, they live again, and we say, "We remember." ”

“ If there were such a medium, acting as a mirror to nature or life, and retaining the impression, it must be universal as the supposed æther of the scientist; and how could impressions on this medium intelligible to us be focussed as the vibrations of light are through the needlepoint of the eye to record a single view-point?
In our visions of the memory of nature we see undistorted figures.
If we could imagine the whole body to be sensitive to light, as is that single point in the brain on which the optic nerves converge, what kind of vision would we have? ”

“ The affairs of life could not go on if the memory introduced amongst them brilliant representations of the past in the midst of ordinary domestic scenes or the objects familiar to us. We may account for this by supposing that the set of nerves which carries the efforts of the memory to the brain cannot execute their functions at the same time as those which take cognizance of the images reflected on the retina. ”

“ The extraordinary memory of primitive people has been attributed to the fact that, owing to the absence of any convenient means of making written records, they had to depend upon their memories, which were strengthened accordingly; but in view of the known facts about the relation of memory to eyesight it is more reasonable to suppose that the retentive memory of primitive man was due to the same cause as his keen vision: namely, a mind at rest. ”

“ I can even see them more clearly than when the memory of them was fresh and green, for, as the eyes of one’s body become dim and blurred, the eyes of memory become ever sharper and keener, so that not even the smallest thing escapes their sight. ”

“ By cultivating the memory under these favorable conditions, it gradually becomes possible to retain it under unfavorable on that is, when the eyes are open and the mind conscious of the impressions of sight. ”

“ The waking vision is like what one sees in the open street in broad daylight, when every object is distinctly impressed on the memory. The two kinds of imagery differ also as regards voluntariness, the image being entirely subservient to the will, the visions entirely independent of it. They differ also in point of suddenness, the images being formed comparatively slowly as memory recalls each detail, and fading slowly as the mental effort to retain them is relaxed, the visions appearing and vanishing in an instant. ”

“ Vision is largely a matter of imagination and memory. And since both imagination and memory are impossible without prefect relaxation, the cultivation of these faculties not only improves the interpretation of the pictures on the retina, but improves the pictures themselves. When you imagine that you see a letter on the test card you actually do see it, because it is impossible to relax and imagine the letter perfectly, and, at the same time, strain and see it imperfectly. ”

“ The immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion.
And found it.
As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried motivations. ”

“ Our contention, on the contrary, is that no trace of an image can remain in the substance of the brain, and that no such centre of apperception can exist; but that there are merely, in that substance, organs of virtual perception, influenced by the intention of the memory, as there are at the periphery organs of real perception, influenced by the action of the object. ”

“ As there is an artificial memory relative to the eye, by which trains of visible ideas, laid up in the memory in a certain order, are made to suggest both things themselves, and the order in which we desire to remember them ”

“ Memory.—When the sight is normal the mind is always perfectly at rest, and when the memory is perfect the mind is also at rest. Therefore it is possible to improve the sight by the use of the memory. Anything the patient finds it agreeable to remember is a rest to the mind, but for purposes of practice a small black object, such as a period or a letter of diamond type, is usually most convenient. ”

“ How can a casual vision—say, of a lady sitting in her drawing-room,—of{194} a man returning home at six o'clock—be distinguished from memory-images on the one hand and from what I may term "expectation-images" on the other? The picture of the lady may be a slightly modified and externalised reminiscence; the picture of the man walking up to the door may be a mere projection of what the observer was hoping to see. ”

“ The difficulty of this question arises through the fact that the sensation which an image is supposed to copy is in the past when the image exists, and can therefore only be known by memory, while, on the other hand, memory of past sensations seems only possible by means of present images. How, then, are we to find any way of comparing the present image and the past sensation? The problem is just as acute if we say that images differ from their prototypes as if we say that they resemble them; it is the very possibility of comparison that is hard to understand. ”

“ Since this simple illustration may be made infinitely complex by means of the millions of fibers which connect every center in the cortex with every other center, and since, in passing from one experience to another in the round of our daily activities, these various areas are all involved in an endless chain of activities so intimately related that each one can finally lead to all the others, we have here the machinery both of retention and of recall—the mechanism by which our past may be made to serve the present through being reproduced in the form of memory images or ideas. ”

“ We can make such general speculations about all pictures moving before the inner eye, and it is always worth while investigating the anatomy of vision and to be intent on what appears to us, for if we have intentness we have memory. ”

“ The sense impressions of sight are by far the most numerous in our subconscious storehouse. We are constantly exercising our sense of sight, and receiving thousands of different sight impressions every hour. But the majority of these impressions are but faintly recorded upon the memory, because we give to them but little attention or interest. But it is astonishing, at times, when we find that when we recall some important event or incident we also recall many faint sight impressions of which we did not dream we had any record. ”

“ Always inhibited by the practical and useful consciousness of the present moment, that is to say, by the sensori-motor equilibrium of a nervous system connecting perception with action, this memory merely awaits the occurrence of a rift between the actual impression and its corresponding movement to slip in its images. ”

“ It is an act of vision.
A perception of images already existing breathed on some ethereal medium which in no way differs from the medium which holds for us our memories; and the reperception of an image in memory which is personal to us in no way differs as a psychical act from the perception of images in the memory of Earth. ”

“ An analogy will be pointed out between these and the blended portraits first described by myself a year ago under the name of "Composite Portraits," and specimens of the latter will be exhibited.
The physiological basis of memory is simple enough in its broad outlines. Whenever any group of brain elements has been excited by a sense impression, it becomes, so to speak, tender, and liable to be easily thrown again into a similar state of excitement. If the new cause of excitement differs from the original one, a memory is the result. ”

“ One patient, whose mental pictures were very poor, became able, when walking around the room and imagining things moving in the opposite direction, to imagine that a letter o was moving in the same direction as the furniture.
A mental picture need not be a complicated one. The perfect memory or imagination of even a small spot of color is sufficient to cure all errors of refraction—nearsight, far sight, and astigmatism—as well as many other abnormal conditions. But to form a perfect mental picture of a spot of color—say a black period—is not always easy. ”