The Mind and Its Education. George Herbert Betts

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СКАЧАТЬ A leads to a course of action difficult or unpleasant, but necessary to success or duty, and that B leads to a course of action easy or pleasant, but fatal to success or duty. Which course will you follow—the rugged path of duty or the easier one of pleasure? The answer depends almost wholly, if not entirely, on your power of attention. If your will is strong enough to pull your thoughts away from the fatal but attractive B and hold them resolutely on the less attractive A, then A will dictate your course of action, and you will respond to the call for endeavor, self-denial, and duty; but if your thoughts break away from the domination of your will and allow the beckoning of your interests alone, then B will dictate your course of action, and you will follow the leading of ease and pleasure. For our actions are finally and irrevocably dictated by the things we think about.

      Not Really Different Kinds of Attention.—It is not to be understood, however, from what has been said, that there are really different kinds of attention. All attention denotes an active or dynamic phase of consciousness. The difference is rather in the way we secure attention; whether it is demanded by sudden stimulus, coaxed from us by interesting objects of thought without effort on our part, or compelled by force of will to desert the more interesting and take the direction which we dictate.

      6. IMPROVING THE POWER OF ATTENTION

      While attention is no doubt partly a natural gift, yet there is probably no power of the mind more susceptible to training than is attention. And with attention, as with every other power of body and mind, the secret of its development lies in its use. Stated briefly, the only way to train attention is by attending. No amount of theorizing or resolving can take the place of practice in the actual process of attending.

       Making Different Kinds of Attention Reënforce Each Other.—A very close relationship and interdependence exists between nonvoluntary and voluntary attention. It would be impossible to hold our attention by sheer force of will on objects which were forever devoid of interest; likewise the blind following of our interests and desires would finally lead to shipwreck in all our lives. Each kind of attention must support and reënforce the other. The lessons, the sermons, the lectures, and the books in which we are most interested, and hence to which we attend nonvoluntarily and with the least effort and fatigue, are the ones out of which, other things being equal, we get the most and remember the best and longest. On the other hand, there are sometimes lessons and lectures and books, and many things besides, which are not intensely interesting, but which should be attended to nevertheless. It is at this point that the will must step in and take command. If it has not the strength to do this, it is in so far a weak will, and steps should be taken to develop it. We are to "keep the faculty of effort alive in us by a little gratuitous exercise every day." We are to be systematically heroic in the little points of everyday life and experience. We are not to shrink from tasks because they are difficult or unpleasant. Then, when the test comes, we shall not find ourselves unnerved and untrained, but shall be able to stand in the evil day.

      The Habit of Attention.—Finally, one of the chief things in training the attention is to form the habit of attending. This habit is to be formed only by attending whenever and wherever the proper thing to do is to attend, whether "in work, in play, in making fishing flies, in preparing for an examination, in courting a sweetheart, in reading a book." The lesson, or the sermon, or the lecture, may not be very interesting; but if they are to be attended to at all, our rule should be to attend to them completely and absolutely. Not by fits and starts, now drifting away and now jerking ourselves back, but all the time. And, furthermore, the one who will deliberately do this will often find the dull and uninteresting task become more interesting; but if it never becomes interesting, he is at least forming a habit which will be invaluable to him through life. On the other hand, the one who fails to attend except when his interest is captured, who never exerts effort to compel attention, is forming a habit which will be the bane of his thinking until his stream of thought shall end.

      7. PROBLEMS IN OBSERVATION AND INTROSPECTION

      1. Which fatigues you more, to give attention of the nonvoluntary type, or the voluntary? Which can you maintain longer? Which is the more pleasant and agreeable to give? Under which can you accomplish more? What bearing have these facts on teaching?

      2. Try to follow for one or two minutes the "wave" in your consciousness, and then describe the course taken by your attention.

      3. Have you observed one class alert in attention, and another lifeless and inattentive? Can you explain the causes lying back of this difference? Estimate the relative amount of work accomplished under the two conditions.

      4. What distractions have you observed in the schoolroom tending to break up attention?

      5. Have you seen pupils inattentive from lack of (1) change, (2) pure air, (3) enthusiasm on the part of the teacher, (4) fatigue, (5) ill health?

      6. Have you noticed a difference in the habit of attention in different pupils? Have you noticed the same thing for whole schools or rooms?

      7. Do you know of children too much given to daydreaming? Are you?

      8. Have you seen a teacher rap the desk for attention? What type of attention was secured? Does it pay?

      9. Have you observed any instance in which pupils' lack of attention should be blamed on the teacher? If so, what was the fault? The remedy?

      10. Visit a school room or a recitation, and then write an account of the types and degrees of attention you observed. Try to explain the factors responsible for any failures in attention, and also those responsible for the good attention shown.

      CHAPTER III

THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM

      A fine brain, or a good mind. These terms are often used interchangeably, as if they stood for the same thing. Yet the brain is material substance—so many cells and fibers, a pulpy protoplasmic mass weighing some three pounds and shut away from the outside world in a casket of bone. The mind is a spiritual thing—the sum of the processes by which we think and feel and will, mastering our world and accomplishing our destiny.

      1. THE RELATIONS OF MIND AND BRAIN

      Interaction of Mind and Brain.—How, then, come these two widely different facts, mind and brain, to be so related in our speech? Why are the terms so commonly interchanged?—It is because mind and brain are so vitally related in their processes and so inseparably connected in their work. No movement of our thought, no bit of sensation, no memory, no feeling, no act of decision but is accompanied by its own particular activity in the cells of the brain. It is this that the psychologist has in mind when he says, no psychosis without its corresponding neurosis.

      So far as our present existence is concerned, then, no mind ever works except through some brain, and a brain without a mind becomes but a mass of dead matter, so much clay. Mind and brain are perfectly adapted to each other. Nor is this mere accident. For through the ages of man's past history each has grown up and developed into its present state of efficiency by working in conjunction with the other. Each has helped form the other and determine its qualities. Not only is this true for the race in its evolution, but for every individual as he passes from infancy to maturity.

       The Brain as the Mind's Machine.—In the first chapter we saw that the brain does not create the mind, but that the mind works through the brain. No one can believe that the brain secretes mind as the liver secretes bile, or that it grinds it out as a mill does flour. Indeed, just what their exact relation is has not yet been settled. Yet it is easy to see that if the mind must use the brain as a machine and work through it, then the mind must be subject to the limitations of its machine, or, in other words, the mind cannot be better than the СКАЧАТЬ