One might, perhaps add, as 4: that the memory-image is most conformable
to the actual one. This is not identical with the fact that we recollect
at all. It is to be assumed that the forms of memory-images vary very
much with different persons, because each individual verifies his images
of various objects variously. I know two men equally well for an equal
time, and yet have two memory-images of them. When I recall one, a
life-sized, moving, and moved figure appears before me, even the very
man himself; when I think of the other, I see only a small, bare
silhouette, foggy and colorless, and the difference does not require
that the first shall be an interesting and the second a boresome
individual. This is still clearer in memory of travels. One city appears
in recollection with size, color and movement, real; the other, in which
I sojourned for the same length of time and only a few days later, under
similar conditions of weather, etc., appears like a small, flat
photograph. Inquiry reveals that this is as true of other people as of
me, and that the problem of memory is much differentiated by the method
of recollection. In fact, this is so little in doubt that at some
periods of time there are more images of one sort than of another and
what is a rule for one kind of individual is an exception for another.
Now there is a series of phenomena for which we possess particular types
of images which often have little to do with the things themselves. So
Exner says: “We might know the physiognomy of an individual very
accurately, be able to pick him out among a thousand, without being
clear about the differences between him and another; indeed, we often do
not know the color of his eyes and hair, yet marvel when it suddenly
becomes different.”
Kries[220] calls attention to another fact: “When we try to mark in
memory the contour of a very well-known coin, we deceive ourselves,
unbelievably--when we see the coin the size we imagine it to be, we
wonder still more.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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