The Act of Creation (76 page)

When a number of objects is projected by lantern slide on a screen
just long enough to be fully seen but not long enough to be counted,
few people can correctly tell how many objects they have seen if the
number exceeds seven; and many reach their limit of 'number perception'
at five. [41] Surprisingly enough, the remarkable experiments of Otto
Koehler revealed that pigeons, jackdaws, paroquets, and budgerigars can
do as well, and that specially gifted jackdaws have a 'number sense'
with the upper limit eight -- just as the most gifted humans.
The experimental procedure consists, briefly, in training birds to
open that box among several other boxes whose lid shows the same
number of spots as the number of objects shown to the bird on a cue
card. The sizes and spatial arrangements of the spots on the lid and of
the objects on the card are not related in any way; and the rigorous
experimental conditions and controls seem to have established beyond
doubt that birds have a 'prelinguistic number sense'; that they 'are able
to abstract the
concept
of numerical identity from groups of up
to seven objects of totally different and unfamiliar appearance'. [42]
Among mammals, squirrels have been shown to have the same ability. [43]
The evidence suggests 'that men and animals may have a prelinguistic
counting
ability of about the same degree, but that man's
superiority in dealing with numbers lies in his ability to use, as symbols
for numbers, words and figures which have not the same, or indeed any,
numerical attributes.' [44] The symbolic coding of 'number Gestalten'
seems indeed a decisive step towards the formation of cardinal numbers;
I shall return to the subject later (
Chapter XV
).

 

 

Sound-pictures, printed letters of the alphabet, number-configurations,
are all complex perceptual wholes, and at the same time elementary
parts of symbolic thought: one might call them (to change the metaphor)
'amphibian' entities. They signal the transition, in mental evolution,
from the 'aquatic' world of perception which keeps the organism
submerged in a fluid environment of sounds, shapes, and smells, to
the dry land of conceptualized thinking. The highest forms of purely
perceptual abstraction on the pre-verbal level are like bubbles of air
which aquatic creatures extract from the water; conceptualized thought
is dry and inexhaustible, like the atmosphere.

 

 

This is not meant of course to belittle the formidable powers of
perceptual abstraction found in some animals. The innate (or imprinted)
releasive mechanisms, for instance, may be regarded as phylogenetically
acquired skill, which enable the animal to combine the colour, shape,
and movement of the stimulus-pattern into a single 'constancy'. The rat
learns to make a 'mental map' of the maze in its head
(
Chapter XII
); and it has always been a mystery
to me how my dog recognizes another dog on the opposite sidewalk at sight
without using his sense of smell -- for the typical reactions of staring,
straining at the leash, whining, occurs at the very instant of catching
sight. The other dog may be a miniature Peke, a dolled-up Poodle, or
a Great Dane; how does my dog identify that apparition as a kinsman --
how did he abstract the universal 'Dog'? Perhaps at a distance he merely
reacts to four legs and one or two other Gestalt characteristics common
to all canines, which account for their 'dogginess' -- though we would
be at a loss to define them.

 

 

 

Generalization, Discrimination, and Association

 

 

We have discussed various forms of 'filtering' codes, both innate and
acquired, which de-particularize or strip the input for purposes of
recognition and storage according to the criteria of relevance in a given
hierarchy. The incoming pattern is thus subjected to 'generalization' and
discrimination at the same time; the two are compkmentary aspects of the
same process. (The word 'generalization' is often used in two different
senses: (a) extracting invariant features from a variety of experiences,
(b) the 'spreading' of responses. I am using it in the first sense.)

 

 

Native equipment and early learning provide the basic foundations on which
the different hierarchies are built, designed to filter out more and more
sharply defined features. The coarse-meshed 'perceptual sieves' of the
tyro acquire fine-meshed sub-analysers: perceptual learning progresses
'from the seeing of gross differences to the seeing of fine differences'
(
pp. 490
f.). All connoisseurship -- from the
chicken-sexer's to the handwriting expert's, from the wine-taster's to
the art historian's, depends on the hierarchic build-up of analysing,
matching, scanning codes which extract subtle similarities and make
precise discriminations.

 

 

This leads to the hoary problem of the nature of 'similarity'. The
simplest answer would be to eliminate it altogether from the vocabulary
of psychology and to substitute 'equipotentiality' for it. Two percepts
are equipotential if both can pass a given filter in a given hierarchy --
if they satisfy its criteria according to the rules of the game that is
played at the time; in other words, if 'for
one
intent and purpose'
(but not 'for all intents and purposes') they are the same thing. Sultan
discovered the 'similarity' between a branch on the castor-oil bush and
a stick because they were equipotential for his purpose. A paperclip is
'similar' to a hair-pin when I have to mend a blown fuse. The answer to
the old classroom question whether a red circle is more similar to a green
circle than to a red triangle, depends on whether I am teaching geometry
or colour-theory. In the first case, the two circles are for my purpose
'the same thing'; in the second, the two colours are 'the same thing.'*
The width of the span within which two stimuli are perceived as
'the same thing' depends on the precision of the analyser -- the
gauge of the sieve through which they must pass. To talk of the
'spreading' of response ('generalization' in sense (b)) is confusing;
the equipotentiality of circle and ellipse to the naïve Pavlov dog is
not due to any
spreading
of reactions from circle to ellipse,
but to the
absence of discrimination
between two figures which
for the 'intents and purposes' of the untrained animal are the same --
as for my intents and purposes one sheep is the same as another. Similar
considerations apply to 'transfer' (
Chapter XV
).

 

 

'Association by similarity' of perceptions would accordingly mean that
an input-pattern A at some stage of its ascent in the nervous system
initiates the recall of some past experience B which is equipotential
to A with respect to the scanning process at that particular stage,
but not in other respects. We might say that A and B have one 'partial'
in common which causes B to 'resonate'.

 

 

Association by sound and visual form plays, as we have seen, an
important part in the dream and in subconscious processes which enter
into creativity. But in the ordinary routines of life, association of
sensory percepts uncontaminated by conceptual thinking seems to he rare,
and whether it occurs at all is anybody's introspective guess. In the
Rohrschach test visual association depends on projective dynamics imbued
with meaning. Verbal suggestions influence the visual matrix and distort
even the eidetic image; the ambiguities of the sound-picture can only
be dispelled by reference to vocabulary; children and aphasic patients
often confuse p and q, or write s and e as mirror images, because the
cognitive glue which holds the true perceptual units together (verticals,
loops, etc.) has not yet hardened or has already decayed -- like the
aggregate of visual and cognitive elements which constitutes the image
of the elephant. Thus hearing is inextricably bound up with interpreting,
seeing with knowing, perceiving with naming. By these methods the organism
is enabled to build a model of the external world into its own nervous
system, without having to store lantern-slides and gramophone records
of complex perceptual forms -- animal, vegetable and mineral -- which
would not work anyway. All that the model needs in the way of perceptual
'traces' is a modest inventory of elementary root-forms -- much like the
cubist painter's austere repertory which Cézanne recommended:
'Everything in nature is modelled on the sphere, the cone and the
cylinder. One must teach oneself to base one's painting on these simple
figures -- then one can accomplish anything one likes.' [45]

 

 

What we call our visual or auditory memory probably consists of a
limited number of such 'root traces' or 'perceptual elements' (in Hebb's
sense). These alone may have 'real form' as perceptual wholes, and at the
same time enter as parts into the complex, aggregate 'pseudo-images',
held together by meaningful association. If it seems to us that such
complex aggregates can be 'taken in' and 'recognized at a glance'
without scanning and exploration, this is perhaps because we commonly
underestimate the span of the psychological present. In his review of the
literature on the psychological present, Woodrow found that its maximum
span is estimated to lie between 2.3 and 12 seconds. [46] No wonder there
is considerable disagreement about the size of the 'discrete units of
speech' in perception -- whether the unit is the phoneme, syllable,
word, or a whole sentence! A few seconds are ample time for those
partly or wholly unconscious operations which make our perceptions into
inferential constructions. If the psychological present /P/ be regarded as
an elementary quantum of conscious experience, then the processes which
go on
within
/P/ can
ex hypothesi
not
be on a conscious
level; they must remain an unanalysable and uncompressible blur.

 

 

 

Recognition and Recall

 

 

While new matrices are formed by learning, others may decay through
disuse like old waterways overgrown by weeds. Apart from generation
and decay, the traces left by past events in the nervous system also
undergo dynamic changes -- simplification, condensation, distortion on the
one hand; elaboration and enrichment through the addition of extraneous
material on the other. The 'schemata' of memory, as Bartlett called them,
are 'living, constantly developing, affected by every bit of incoming
sensational experience of a given kind'. [47] In other words, the past
is constantly being re-made by the present.* To quote Bartlett again:

Remembering is not re-excitation of innumerable, fixed, lifeless
and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or
construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a
whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and
to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or
in language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the
most rudimentary cases of rote-recapitulation, and it is not at all
important that it should be so. [48]

True recall by imagery would be possible only if the de-particularized
memory could be re-particularized, the irreversible process reversed. One
may be able to 'hear' -- while shaving, for instance -- the faint,
pale ghost of a voice from the past singing a simple song. To make
this possible, at least three different systems of 'coloured filters',
concerned with melody, timbre, and wording, must each have preserved
one aspect of the original experience. One may also recall, more or
less distinctly, characteristic combinations of form and motion: the
stride of a person, the roll of a boat, the waddle of a tortoise. But
the average person's abilities of perceptual imaging are limited to this
kind of production. Hence the paradox of what one might call 'negative
recognition': I visit a friend whom I have not seen for some time, look
round and say: 'Something is changed in this room' -- without being
able to say
what
has been changed. I can only assume that my
memory of the room was determined by several complementary matrices --
sketchy, part verbal, part visual schemata, such as 'Regency furniture',
'L-shaped plan', 'subdued colour scheme', etc. -- plus one or two 'vivid
details': a picture, a flower-vase. A good many changes could be made in
the room which I would not notice so long as they satisfy these criteria
as 'equipotential variations'; only changes which offend against one of
the codes will make me register that 'something is wrong'. My inability
to name that 'something' indicates that the code was functioning below
the level of conscious awareness (Cf. Book One,
XIX
).*

 

 

The adjectives used to describe a face -- 'soft', 'bony', 'pinched',
'humorous', etc. -- refer to part visual, part verbal schemata, some of
which may be as simplified as the surprisingly few linear elements which
suffice to indicate emotional expression by the posture and slant of
mouth and eyes. The caricaturist can evoke a face by a few strokes which
schematize a total impression (Hitler's moustache and lock), or he can
pick out a detail which acts as a 'sign-releaser' (Churchill's cigar). It
is often easier to remember a face known only from illustrations --
Napoleon or Mona Lisa -- than faces of living persons; perhaps because
half of the compressing and coding of the visual information has already
been done by the artist. Equally revealing is the police method of
reconstructing the likeness of a criminal by the Identi-Kit method. This
is based on 'a slide-file of five hundred and fifty facial characteristics
containing, among other things, a hundred and two sets of eyes ranging
from pop to squinting, thirty-three sets of lips from thin to sensuous,
fifty-two chins, from weak to jutting, and even twenty-five sets of
wrinkles. Witnesses pick the individual features that most closely
resemble their idea of the criminal's look. From their selections a
composite picture of all the features is then assembled.' [49]
If in the process of memory-formation the input is stripped down to
bare essentials, recall requires dressing it up again. This seems to
be done by some summary drapings, patched out with surviving fragments
of picture-strip, plus some fitting garments borrowed from elsewhere --
we all know how often 'vivid details' are incorporated into the recall
of experiences to which they do not belong. Imaging involves imagining,
which is a flexible skill. It is triggered-off by an impulse of central
origin -- a kind of 'excitation-clang' which unlocks 'memory releasers'
and sets off the feedback-circuits of 'inferential reconstruction';
as with other plastic skills, two performances are never quite the same.
Summary
I have treated perception, recognition, and memory-formation as a
continuous series. The sensory input is screened, dismantled, reassembled,
analysed, interpreted, and stored along a variety of channels belonging
to different hierarchies with different criteria of relevance. A tune can
be stored stripped of timbre, and vice versa. The de-particularization
of experience in the process of memory-formation is compensated to some
extent by the multiplicity of abstractive hierarchies which participate in
the process, and by the retention of 'picture-strips' -- vivid fragments
of emotive or symbolic significance.
Central controls and motor activities participate at various stages in
the processing of the input; from stimulus-selection in the end-organ
and visual scanning, through resonances from the vocal tract, to the
interpretation of Klangbild by Wortschatz, and of the seen by the
known. Nowhere are 'stimuli' and 'responses' neatly separable; they
form hierarchies of loops within loops. The mechanisms responsible for
the processing are partly inborn, mostly acquired; their codes have a
high degree of autonomy and show their 'self-asserting' tendencies in
the tenacity of optical illusions and of 'seeing in terms of'.
The generalization and retention of perceptual forms has an upper
limit where symbolic coding must take over to make further progress in
learning possible. The ability of man to form 'number percepts' is not
significantly superior to that of some birds; memory images are aggregates
of relatively simple schematized forms, i.e. of true perceptual elements,
held together by cognitive linkages, as the 'sound-pictures' of speech
are given coherence by their meaning. They are double-faced entities:
complex perceptual Gestalt-wholes which enter as units into the symbolic
hierarchy. We must assume that there are analysing devices of this
kind active in the nervous system, 'resonators' which are 'attuned'
to a certain configuration in the perceptual input, and respond to it
by signals in symbolic coding addressed to the higher echelons. All
inputs which are equipotential with respect to that configuration --
e.g. 'triangularity' -- are regarded by the analyser as 'the same thing',
and reported by the same signal. The process is thus the reverse of the
'spelling out' activites of the motor hierarchy -- which is in some
respects comparable to the unlocking of memory-releasers in recall.
'Generalization' and 'discrimination' are complementary aspects of the
same process, and will be discussed, together with the ambiguities of
'spreading' and 'transfer', in later chapters.
NOTES
To