What we have been examining is intentional memorizing, with the "will to learn" strongly in the game. The assertion has sometimes been made that the will to learn is necessary if any learning is to be accomplished. We must look into this matter, for it has an important bearing on the whole question of the process of learning. There is a famous incident that occurred in a Swiss psychological laboratory, when a foreign student was supposed to be memorizing a list of nonsense syllables. After the list had been passed before him many times without his giving the expected signal that he was ready to recite, the experimenter remarked that he seemed to be having trouble in memorizing the syllables. "Oh! I didn't understand that I was to learn them", he said, and it was found that, in fact, he had made almost no progress towards learning the list. He had been observing the separate syllables, with no effort to connect them into a series. Another incident: subjects were put repeatedly through a "color naming test", which consisted of five colors repeated in irregular order, the object being to name the one hundred bits of color as rapidly as possible. After the subjects had been through this test over two hundred times, you would think they could recite it from memory; but not {347} at all! They had very little memory of the order of the bits of color. Their efforts had been wholly concentrated upon naming the bits as seen, and not in connecting them into a series that could be remembered. The experiment described a few pages back on "paired associates" is another case in point. The subjects memorized the pairs, but made no effort to connect the pairs in order, and consequently were not able later to remember the order of the pairs. Many somewhat similar experiments have been performed, with the object of measuring the reliability of the testimony of eye-witnesses; and it has been found that testimony is very unreliable except for facts that were specifically noted at the time. Enact a little scene before a class of students who do not suspect that their memory of the affair is later to be tested, and you will find that their memory for many facts that were before their eyes is hazy, absent, or positively false. These facts all emphasize the importance of the will to learn. But let us consider another line of facts. An event occurs before our eyes, and we do notice certain facts about it, not with any intention of remembering them later, but simply because they arouse our interest; later, we recall such facts with great clearness and certainty. Or, we hear a tune time after time, and gradually come to be able to sing it ourselves, without ever having attempted to memorize it. Practically all that the child learns in the first few years of his life, he learns without any "will to learn".