This spontaneous recollection, which is masked by the acquired recollection, may flash out at intervals; but it disappears at the least movement of the voluntary memory. If the subject sees the series of letters, of which he thought he retained the image, vanish from before his eyes, this happens mainly when he begins to repeat it: the effort seems to drive the rest of the image out of his consciousness.[1] Now, analyse many of the imaginative methods of mnenomics and you will find that the object of this science is to bring into the foreground the spontaneous memory which was hidden, and to place it, as an active memory, at our service; to this end every attempt at motor memory is, to begin with, suppressed. The faculty of mental photography, says one author,[2] belongs rather to subconsciousness than
- ↑ Something of this nature appears to take place in that affection which German authors call Dyslexie. The patient reads the first words of a sentence aright, and then stops abruptly, unable to go on, as though the movements of articulation had inhibited memory. See, on the subject of dyslexie: Berlin, Eine besondere Art der Wortblindheit (Dyslexie), Wiesbaden, 1887, and Sommer, Die Dyslexie als functionelle Störung (Arch. f. Psychiatrie, 1893). We may also compare with these phenomena the remarkable cases of word deafness in which the patient understands the speech of others, but no longer understands his own. (See examples cited by Bateman, On Aphasia, p. 200; by Bernard, De l'aphasie, Paris 1889, pp. 143 and 144; and by Broadbent, Case of Peculiar Affection of Speech, Brain, 1878–9, p. 484 et seq.).
- ↑ Mortimer Granville, Ways of remembering. (Lancet, Sept. 27, 1899, p. 458.)
