An old saying has it that quick learning means quick forgetting, and that quick learners are quick forgetters. Experiment does not wholly bear this out. A lesson that is learned quickly because it is clearly understood is better retained than one which is imperfectly understood and therefore slowly learned; and a learner who learns quickly because he is on the alert for significant facts and connections retains better than a learner who is slow from lack of such alertness. The wider awake the learner, the quicker will be his learning and the slower his subsequent forgetting; so that one is often tempted to admonish a certain type of studious but easy-going person, "for goodness' sake not to dawdle over his lessons", with any idea that the more time he spends with them the longer he will remember them. More gas! High pressure gives the biggest results, provided only it is directed into high-level observation, and does not simply generate fear and worry and a rattle-brained frenzy of rote learning. {354} Recall Having committed something to memory, how do we get it back when we want it? To judge from such simple cases as the animal's performance of a previously learned reaction, all that is necessary is a _stimulus_ previously linked with the response. How, for example, shall we get the cat to turn the door-button, this being an act that the cat has previously learned? Why, we put the cat into the same cage, i.e., we supply the stimulus that has previously given the reaction, and trust to it to give the same reaction again. The learning process has attached this reaction to this stimulus. Now can we say the same regarding material committed to memory by the human subject? Is recall a species of learned reaction that needs only the linked stimulus to arouse it? If you have learned and still retain a list of numbers or syllables, you can recite it on thinking of it, on hearing words that identify it in your mind, or on being given the first few items in the list as a start. The act of reciting the list became linked, during the learning, with the thought of the list, with words signifying this particular list, and with the first items of the list; therefore, these stimuli can now arouse the reaction of reciting the list. As you advance into the list, reciting it, the parts already recited act as stimuli to keep you going forward. In the same way, if you have memorized Hamlet's soliloquy, this title serves as the stimulus to make you recall the beginning of the speech and that in turn calls up the next part and so on; or, if you have analyzed the speech into an outline, the title calls up the outline and the outline acts as the stimulus to call up the several parts that were attached to the outline in the process of memorization. When one idea calls up another, the first acts as a stimulus and the second is a {355} response previously attached to this stimulus. In general, then, recall is a learned response to a stimulus.