galton.org 67
Mental Imagery
67
and making lucrative exhibitions in this way. His abilities in this line
created a scare among other rivals who had not practised this test of
memory. Since his day many chess-players who are gifted with strong and
clear memory and power of picturing to the mind the ideal board and men,
have carried this branch of exhibition play far beyond Morphy’s pitch;
and, contemporaneously with this development, it has become
acknowledged that skill in blindfold play is not an absolute test of
similarly relative powers over the board: e.g. Blackburne and Zukertort
can play as many as sixteen, or even twenty, blindfold games at a time,
and win about 80 per cent of them at least. Steinitz, who beats them both
in match play, does not essay more than six blindfold at a time. Mason
does not, to our knowledge, make any spécialité at all of this sort.”
I have many cases of persons mentally reading off scores when playing
the pianoforte, or manuscript when they are making speeches. One
statesman has assured me that a certain hesitation in utterance which he
has at times, is due to his being plagued by the image of his manuscript
speech with its original erasures and corrections. He cannot lay the ghost,
and he puzzles in trying to decipher it.
Some few persons see mentally in print every word that is uttered; they
attend to the visual equivalent and not to the sound of the words, and they
read them off usually as from a long imaginary strip of paper, such as is
unwound from telegraphic instruments. The experiences differ in detail as
to size and kind of type, colour of paper, and so forth, but are always the
same in the same person.
A well-known frequenter of the Royal Institution tells me that he often
craves for an absence of visual perceptions, they are so brilliant and
persistent. The Rev. George Henslow speaks of their extreme restlessness;
they oscillate, rotate, and change.”
It is a mistake to suppose that sharp sight is accompanied by clear
visual memory. I have not a few instances in which the independence of
the two faculties is emphatically commented on; and I have at least one
clear case where great interest in outlines and accurate appreciation of
straightness, squareness, and the like, is unaccompanied by the power of
visualising. Neither does the faculty go with dreaming. I have cases where
it is powerful, and at the same time where dreams are rare and faint or
altogether
