Note 565 — Chapter XV · [512]

"The patient cannot retain the image of an object more than a moment. His memory is as short for sounds, letters, figures, and printed words. If we cover a written or printed word with a sheet of paper in which a little window has been cut, so that only the first letter is visible through the window, he pronounces this letter. If, then, the sheet is moved so as to cover the first letter and make the second one visible, he pronounces the second, but forgets the first, and cannot pronounce the first and second together." And so forth to the end. "If he closes his eyes and draws his finger exploringly over a well-known object like a knife or key, he cannot combine the separate impressions and recognize the object. But if it is put into his hand so that he can simultaneously touch it with several fingers, he names it without difficulty. This patient has thus lost the capacity for grouping successive ... impressions ... into a whole and perceiving them as a whole." (Grashey, in Archiv für Psychiatrie, Bd. xvi, pp. 672-673.) It is hard to believe that in such a patient the time intuited was not clipped off like the impressions it held, though perhaps not so much of it.

I have myself often noted a curious exaggeration of time-perspective at the moment of a falling asleep. A person will be moving or doing something in the room, and a certain stage of his act (whatever it may be) will be my last waking perception. Then a subsequent stage will wake me to a new perception. The two stages of the act will not be more than a few seconds apart; and yet it always seems to me as if, between the earlier and the later one, a long interval has passed away. I conjecturally account for the phenomenon thus, calling the two stages of the act a and b respectively: Were I awake, a would leave a fading process in my sensorium which would overlap the process of b when the latter came, and both would then appear in the same specious present, a belonging to its earlier end. But the sudden advent of the brain-change called sleep extinguishes a's fading process abruptly. When b then comes and wakes me, a comes back, it is true, but not as belonging to the specious present. It has to be specially revoked in memory. This mode of revocation usually characterizes long-past things—whence the illusion.