plateau with no progress beyond a certain point. If forced by stress of work,
danger of being dropped, or by will power to make a prolonged and intense
effort, he breaks through his hidebound rate and permanently attains a faster
pace. This is true at each step, and every advance seems to cost even more
intensive effort than the former one. At length, for those who go on, the rate of
receiving, which is a more complex process, exceeds that of sending; and the
curves of the above figure would cross if prolonged. The expert receives so
much faster than he sends that abbreviated codes are used, and he may take
eighty to eighty-five words a minute on a typewriter in correct form.
[Illustration: Letters per Minute x Weeks of Practice.]
The motor curve seems to asymptotically approach a perhaps physiological
limit, which the receiving curve does not suggest. This seems a special case of a
general though not yet explained law. In learning a foreign language, speaking is
first and easiest, and hearing takes a late but often sudden start to independence.
Perhaps this holds of every ability. To Bryan this suggests as a hierarchy of
habits, the plateau of little or no improvement, meaning that lower order habits
are approaching their maximum but are not yet automatic enough to leave the
attention free to attack higher order habits. The second ascent from drudgery to
freedom, which comes through automatism, is often as sudden as the first ascent.
One stroke of attention comes to do what once took many. To attain such
effective speed is not dependent on reaction time. This shooting together of units
distinguishes the master from the man, the genius from the hack. In many, if not
all, skills where expertness is sought, there is a long discouraging level, and then
for the best a sudden ascent, as if here, too, as we have reason to think in the
growth of both the body as a whole and in that of its parts, nature does make
leaps and attains her ends by alternate rests and rushes. Youth lives along on a
low level of interest and accomplishment and then starts onward, is transformed,
converted; the hard becomes easy; the old life sinks to a lower stratum; and a
new and higher order, perhaps a higher brain level and functions, is evolved. The
practical implication here of the necessity of hard concentrative effort as a
condition of advancement is re-enforced by a quotation from Senator Stanford
on the effect of early and rather intensive work at not too long periods in training
colts for racing. Let-ups are especially dangerous. He says, "It is the supreme
effort that develops." This, I may add, suggests what is developed elsewhere,
that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned by spontaneous muscle tension,
which is a function of growth, and that muscles are thus organs of the mind; and
also that even voluntary attention is motivated by the same nisus of development