Illusions: A Psychological Study

by James Sully

The most striking examples of the illusory effect of mere vividness, involving a complete detachment of the event from the prominent landmarks of the past, are afforded by public events which lie outside the narrower circle of our personal life, and which do not in the natural course of things become linked to any definitely localized points in the field of memory. These events may be very stirring and engrossing for the time, but in many cases they pass out of the mind just as suddenly as they entered it. We have no occasion to revert to them, and if by chance we are afterwards reminded of them, they are pretty certain to look too near, just because the fact of their having greatly interested us has served to render their images particularly vivid.

A curious instance of this illusory effect was supplied not long since by the case of the ex-detectives, the expiration of whose term of punishment (three years) served as an occasion for the newspapers to recall the event of their trial and conviction. The news that three years had elapsed since this well-remembered occurrence proved very startling to myself, and to a number of my friends, all of us agreeing that the event did not seem to be at more than a third of its real distance. More than one newspaper commented on the apparent rapidity of the time, and this shows pretty plainly that there was some cause at work, such as I have suggested, producing a common illusion.

I have treated of these illusions connected with the estimate of past time and the dating of past events as passive illusions, not involving any active predisposition on the part of the imagination. At the same time, it is possible that error in these matters may occasionally depend on a present condition of the feelings and the imagination. It seems plain that since the apparent degree of remoteness of an event not distinctly localized in the past varies inversely as the degree of vividness of the mnemonic image, any conscious concentration of mind on a recollection will tend to bring it too near. In this way, then, an illusory propinquity may be given to a recalled event through a mere desire to dwell on it, or even a capricious wish to deceive one's self.

When, for example, old friends come together and talk over the days of yore, there is a gradual reinstatement of seemingly lost experiences, which often partakes of the character of a semi-voluntary process of self-delusion. Through the cumulative effect of mutual reminder, incident after incident returns, adding something to the whole picture till it acquires a degree of completeness, coherence, and vividness that render it hardly distinguishable from a very recent experience. The process is like looking at a distant object through a field-glass. Mistiness disappears, fresh details come into view, till we seem to ourselves to be almost within reach of the object.

Where the mind habitually goes back to some painful circumstance under the impulse of a morbid disposition to nurse regret, this momentary illusion may become recurring, and amount to a partial confusion of the near and the remote in our experience. An injury long brooded on seems at length a thing that continually moves forward as we move; it always presents itself to our memories as a very recent event. In states of insanity brought on by some great shock, we see this morbid tendency to resuscitate the dead past fully developed, and remote events and circumstances becoming confused with present ones.

On the other hand, in more healthy states of mind there presents itself an exactly opposite tendency, namely, an impulse of the will to banish whatever when recalled gives pain to the furthest conceivable regions of the past. Thus, when we have lost something we cherished dearly, and the recollection of it brings fruitless longing, we instinctively seek to expel the recollection from our minds. The very feeling that what has been can never again be, seems to induce this idea of a vast remoteness of the vanished reality. When, moreover, the lost object was fitted to call forth the emotion of reverence, the impulse to magnify the remoteness of the loss may not improbably be reinforced by the circumstance that everything belonging to the distant past is fitted on that account to excite a feeling akin to reverence. So, again, any rupture in our mental development may lead us to exaggerate the distance of some past portion of our experience. When we have broken with our former selves, either in the way of worsening or bettering, we tend to project these further into the past.

It is only when the sting of the recollection is removed, when, for example, the calling up of the image of a lost friend is no longer accompanied with the bitterness of futile longing, that a healthy mind ventures to nourish recollections of such remote events and to view these as part of its recent experiences. In this case the mnemonic image becomes transformed into a kind of present emotional possession, an element of that idealized and sublimated portion of our experience with which all imaginative persons fill up the emptiness of their actual lives, and to which the poet is wont to give an objective embodiment in his verse.

Distortions of Memory.

It is now time to pass to the second group of illusions of memory, which, according to the analogy of visual errors, may be called atmospheric illusions. Here the degree of error is greater than in the case of illusions of time-perspective, since the very nature of the events or circumstances is misconceived. We do not recall the event as it happened, but see it in part only, and obscured, or bent and distorted as by a process of refraction. Indeed, this transformation of the past does closely correspond with the transformation of a visible object effected by intervening media. Our minds are such refracting media, and the past reappears to us not as it actually was when it was close to us, but in numerous ways altered and disguised by the intervening spaces of our conscious experience.

To begin with, what we call recollection is uniformly a process of softening the reality. When we appear to ourselves to realize events of the remote past, it is plain that our representation in a general way falls below the reality: the vividness, the intensity of our impressions disappears. More particularly, so far as our experiences are emotional, they tend thus to become toned down by the mere lapse of time and the imperfections of our reproductive power. That which we seem to see in the act of recollection is thus very different from the reality.