Note † — Chapter XXII · The Availability of the Poet’s Experience

Contrast the behaviour of the sleepy and the fully awake, of the normal man with the lightly and the more deeply anæsthetised patient, of the starved or fevered with the healthy. To describe these differences in neural potency, and to mark the degree of physiological efficiency, Dr Head has recently† suggested the term vigilance, a useful addition to our symbolic machinery. In a high state of vigilance the nervous system reacts to stimuli with highly adapted, discriminating, and ordered responses; in a lowered state of vigilance the responses are less discriminating, less delicately adapted. Whether we are considering the decerebrate preparation or the intact poet, the simplest automatisms or the most highly conscious acts, what happens in a given stimulus situation varies with the vigilance of the appropriate portion of the nervous system. The point as regards revival can be put conveniently by saying that experiences of high vigilance are the most likely to be available. The degree of vigilance of the individual at the moment at which revival is attempted is, of course, equally but more evidently an important factor.