AUTOMATISM IN PSYCIIO-INTELLECT UAL ACTIVITY..
IF, now, we enter upon the physiological study of cerebral activity proper, we shall see in what complex forms this curious property of the nerve-cell reveals itself, and in what an infinite number of combinations it is capable of taking part.
It is principally in the perceptive regions•of the sensorium, and those that are the seat of purely intellectual phenomena, that the manifestations of intense automatic life are most distinct.
In fact, what takes place within us when an external impression suddenly thrills us, when we find ourselves touched in the sensitive regions of our being, by the sight of an affecting scene, or a spectacle that charms us, or by the hearing of music which pleases our ears, is this : immediately, by reason of the elementary properties of the sensorium, which are at once called into play, sensibility is awakened, and develops itself into the sense of satisfaction, and this external impres sion, stored up in the vibratory condition, persists in us, and becomes a durable memory. But this is not all ; these persistent impressions, transformed into durable memories, do not remain there as mere barren stores ; the automatic activities of the nervous elements which have come into play are now evoked.
It is, in fact, as we have seen, sufficient that a certain series of cerebral cells shall have simultaneously under gone a series of sensorial impressions, in order that they shall form among themselves a species of mysterious association, united by the ties of contemporaneous im pression. If, then, we happen to experience any excita tion whatever, visual, auditory, or olfactory, the appeal of the first in the series, by virtue of these mysterious associations immediately causes the others to spring up ; former memories reappear, and so blind and inevitable is the communicated movement, that this is effected without any conscious participation of the will. It does not depend upon us to incite or direct it ; it follows its route by virtue of its peculiar affinities and regular anastomoses, as automatically as the sympathetic and excito-motor actions that are propagated through the plexuses of the spinal cord.
These phenomena, of the association of former memories following upon a recent impression, repeat themselves at every instant of cerebral activity. It is sufficient for us to come fortuitously upon one external object to think of another, which has either direct, or indirect and artificially maintained relations with the former.
Reading has no other rational basis. It is the memory of the thing signified, incessantly evoked by the graphic sign, that causes us to adopt automatically, with each graphic sign perceived by the understanding, ideas of which such signs are but the conventional expres sion.
In conversation ideas follow upon, and evoke one another in quite an automatic fashion. We think, without wishing it, of a thing outside of the subject in question, and, automatically, we are drawn away from the principal thought.
In assemblies we frequently see certain orators de viate by degrees from the subject under discussion, through the action of the automatic forces of their minds, which always lead them in the direction towards which they are biassed—that is to say, towards the regions of predilection, where their favourite thoughts have developed a species of persistent erethism. These automatic forces, which guide human thoughts in a certain direction, are so inevitable, and so apt to pass through a certain regular orbit, that, the character and oratorical habits of such and such a person being given, we may infer, a priori, that at a given moment he will express such and such a thought, or pronounce such and such a phrase.
In public lectures there are professors who, speaking volubly, repeat annually the same phrases, and the same words, at the same periods, and this without its being done voluntarily. More than this ; it is notorious that at certain examinations, the examiners in any given subject repeat again and again the same ques tions ; and this logic of the automatic cerebral activity is so real, that those interested have instituted a course of questions designed to calculate in advance the auto matic direction that the mind of their examiner will follow, and to anticipate the questions he will put to them.