Sixth Lecture

Memory is very often presented as if thoughts are linked to the external perceptions we make through our senses, and as if we had these thoughts about what we perceive during the perception, perhaps even a little afterwards, and then these thoughts somehow rolled down into a subconscious and, with the appropriate effort, came up again from this subconscious as remembered ideas. One school of philosophy has spoken of such thoughts or ideas descending, as it were, below the threshold of consciousness, only to rise again above this threshold at the appropriate moment. It is certainly a convenient way of thinking to imagine that the act that takes place there is that the ideas are first aroused by the perceptions and then, when we no longer have them, they wander around or float around somewhere in the subconscious — which we don't really think about — and then come back up again when we need them. Even a superficial examination of human experiences shows that this is certainly not the case.