Retention.—Retention, as we have already seen, resides primarily in the brain.
It is accomplished through the law of habit working in the neurones of the
cortex. Here, as elsewhere, habit makes an activity once performed more easy of
performance each succeeding time. Through this law a neural activity once
performed tends to be repeated; or, in other words, a fact once known in
consciousness tends to be remembered. That so large a part of our past is lost in
oblivion, and out of the reach of our memory, is probably much more largely due
to a failure to recall than to retain. We say that we have forgotten a fact or a
name which we cannot recall, try as hard as we may; yet surely all have had the
experience of a long-striven-for fact suddenly appearing in our memory when
we had given it up and no longer had use for it. It was retained all the time, else
it never could have come back at all.
An aged man of my acquaintance lay on his deathbed. In his childhood he had
first learned to speak German; but, moving with his family when he was eight or
nine years of age to an English-speaking community, he had lost his ability to
speak German, and had been unable for a third of a century to carry on a
conversation in his mother tongue. Yet during the last days of his sickness he
lost almost wholly the power to use the English language, and spoke fluently in
German. During all these years his brain paths had retained the power to
reproduce the forgotten words, even though for so long a time the words could
not be recalled. James quotes a still more striking case of an aged woman who
was seized with a fever and, during her delirious ravings, was heard talking in
Latin, Hebrew and Greek. She herself could neither read nor write, and the
priests said she was possessed of a devil. But a physician unraveled the mystery.
When the girl was nine years of age, a pastor, who was a noted scholar, had
taken her into his home as a servant, and she had remained there until his death.
During this time she had daily heard him read aloud from his books in these
languages. Her brain had indelibly retained the record made upon it, although for
years she could not have recalled a sentence, if, indeed, she had ever been able to
do so.
Recall.—Recall depends entirely on association. There is no way to arrive at a
certain fact or name that is eluding us except by means of some other facts,
names, or what-not so related to the missing term as to be able to bring it into the
fold. Memory arrives at any desired fact only over a bridge of associations. It
therefore follows that the more associations set up between the fact to be
remembered and related facts already in the mind, the more certain the recall.
Historical dates and events should when learned be associated with important