Note 360 — Chapter XI

I must say that I am wholly unconscious of the peculiar feelings in the scalp which Fechner goes on to describe. "The feeling of strained attention in the different sense-organs seems to be only a muscular one produced in using these various organs by setting in motion, by a sort of reflex action, the muscles which belong to them. One can ask, then, with what particular muscular contraction the sense of strained attention in the effort to recall something is associated? On this question my own feeling gives me a decided answer; it comes to me distinctly, not as a sensation of tension in the inside of the head, but as a feeling of strain and contraction in the scalp with a pressure from without inwards over the whole cranium, undoubtedly caused by a contraction of the muscles of the scalp. This harmonizes very well with the German popular expression den Kopf zusammennehmen, etc., etc. In a former illness, in which I could not endure the slightest effort of continuous thought, and had no theoretical bias on this question, the muscles of the scalp, especially those of the occiput, assumed a fairly morbid degree of sensibility whenever I tried to think." (Ibid. pp. 490-491.) In an early writing by Professor Mach, after speaking of the way in which by attention we decompose complex musical sounds into their elements, this investigator continues: "It is more than a figure of speech when one says that we 'search' among the sounds. This hearkening search is very observably a bodily activity, just like attentive looking in the case of the eye. If, obeying the drift of physiology, we understand by attention nothing mystical, but a bodily disposition, it is most natural to seek it in the variable tension of the muscles of the ear. Just so, what common men call attentive looking reduces itself mainly to accommodating and setting of the optic axes.... According to this, it seems to me a very plausible view that quite generally Attention has its seat in the mechanism of the body. If nervous work is being done through certain channels, that by itself is a mechanical ground for other channels being closed." (Wien. Sitzungsberichte, Math. Naturw., xlviii, 2, 297. 1863.)