Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use ItAtkinson, William Walker
Science
Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use It
Atkinson, William Walker
Memory
Morell says: "We have every reason to believe that mental power when
once called forth follows the analogy of everything we see in the
material universe in the fact of its perpetuity. Every single effort of
mind is a creation which can never go back again into nonentity. It may
slumber in the depths of forgetfulness as light and heat slumber in the
coal seams, but there it is, ready at the bidding of some appropriate
stimulus to come again out of the darkness into the light of
consciousness." Beattie says: "That which has been long forgotten, nay,
that which we have often in vain endeavored to recollect, will sometimes
without an effort of ours occur to us on a sudden, and, if I may so
speak, of its own accord." Hamilton says: "The mind frequently contains
whole systems of knowledge which, though in our normal state they may
have faded into absolute oblivion, may in certain abnormal states, as
madness, delirium, somnambulism, catalepsy, etc., flash out into
luminous consciousness.... For example, there are cases in which the
extinct memory of whole languages were suddenly restored." Lecky says:
"It is now fully established that a multitude of events which are so
completely forgotten that no effort of the will can revive them, and
that the statement of them calls up no reminiscences, may nevertheless
be, so to speak, embedded in the memory, and may be reproduced with
intense vividness under certain physical conditions."
In proof of the above, the authorities give many instances recorded in
scientific annals. Coleridge relates the well-known case of the old
woman who could neither read nor write, who when in the delirium of
fever incessantly recited in very pompous tones long passages from the
Latin, Greek and Hebrew, with a distinct enunciation and precise
rendition. Notes of her ravings were taken down by shorthand, and caused
much wonderment, until it was afterwards found that in her youth she had
been employed as a servant in the house of a clergyman who was in the
habit of walking up and down in his study reading aloud from his
favorite classical and religious writers. In his books were found marked
passages corresponding to the notes taken from the girl's ravings. Her
subconscious memory had stored up the sounds of these passages heard in
her early youth, but of which she had no recollection in her normal
state. Beaufort, describing his sensations just before being rescued
from drowning says: "Every incident of my former life seemed to glance
across my recollection in a retrograde procession, not in mere outline,
but in a picture filled with every minute and collateral feature, thus
forming a panoramic view of my whole existence."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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