DISCOVERY 



205 



of things seems to make him more susceptible to 

 influence by the ^\Titten (and especially the printed) 

 words of others than b\- their spoken words. He is 

 a bad listener, finding it difficult to comprehend a 

 scheme when it is orally explained, and easy to grasp 

 it from a printed explanation. He seldom remembers 

 the actual words used in his own conversation or in 

 that of other people, and wonders that others can do 

 so. He seldom talks to himself, either loudly or 

 quietly, and when things go wrong he probably gets 

 a subnormal amount of satisfaction from the use of 

 expletives, unless they be new and loaded with 

 picturesque imagery. 



Speech about any matter which requires directed 

 thought is, on the whole, slower and more unsatis- 

 factory for him than for the verbaliser. Writing 

 may be for him a pleasure or a pain. If pressed for 

 time, it is an uncongenial task to describe or to express 

 in writing something about which he really cares, for 

 he knows that the words will fall short of, or overlap, 

 his real meaning. With plenty of time before him, 

 it may be amusing and challenging to discover the 

 words which wUl most neatly fit what he wants to say. 

 To have to write in a hurry about a serious matter is 

 like opening a bud before its time, and he wiU usually 

 offer an inexhaustible series of perfectly cogent reasons 

 why such writing shall not be attempted. This does 

 not prevent him, of course, from using words or phrases 

 as gestures of politeness, as one may do at the end of 

 a letter. But I venture to suspect that the visualiser 

 may be less easy to hypnotise than the verbaliser by 

 the sonorous phrase in politics, or the ancient and 

 respectable in science. (It may be well to except 

 from this statement some verbalisers who have had a 

 philosophical training.) Perhaps for the verbaliser 

 the platitude is a little more impressive, a little less 

 likely to be seen through, just as the platitude's pic- 

 torial homologues ; impressive tailoring, or an actress's 

 pretty professional smile, may have similarly paralysing 

 effects upon the visualiser's thinking. 



To many an orator's rumbling stream of words, as 

 round and as alike as beads, connected by an almost 

 imperceptible but cheap string, he is speciaUv im- 

 pervious, unless they happen to evoke vivid pictures. 

 Even then he may not welcome them, preferring to 

 make his own, like many of his kind who object to 

 actual pictures which profess to illustrate a novel. 

 He often finds it difficult to keep pace with a speaker 

 who employs abstract and general terms. This is 

 sometimes because his simple arithmetical thinking 

 is easOy outstripped b\^ the speaker's comprehensive 

 algebraic processes. At other times, perhaps, he is 

 hindered b\- the results of applying this apparently 

 satisfactory algebra to concrete cases and finding that 

 it is true only of imaginary quantities. 



It may be, too, that a person of this type, when he 

 falls sick or is otherwise in trouble, is less easUy and 

 completely comforted by the spoken word, uttered 

 either by another or by himself, unless, for special 

 reasons, often connected with \asual factors, the word 

 is extraordinarily impressive. This might explain 

 some interesting observations. An intelligent patient, 

 during the course of a severe nervous trouble, was 

 greatly troubled by pseudo-hallucinations ^ of a dis- 

 tressing kind, which vanished after their sources had 

 been traced by anahsis. During an interview with 

 the doctor, the patient complained that, although on 

 lea\'ing the. consulting-room he rnvariabh- felt better 

 for an hour or so, after that time the meaning of the 

 conversation which had relieved him entirely vanished, 

 and the time seemed to have been wasted. One 

 day a colleague suggested that this might be coimected 

 with the patient's predominant visual imagery, and 

 that therefore it might be worth whUe to try the effect 

 of writing down for him the gist of the hour's conversa- 

 tion. This was done. The patient then reported that 

 whenever one of these specific worries arose he would 

 read the slip of paper which summarised the thera- 

 peutic conversation about it, and feel immensely 

 relieved. One night the doctor had attempted to 

 lessen one of the patient's serious anxieties by a simple 

 explanation of the brain's functions, illustrating his 

 remarks by a sketch of the cerebrum. \\'hen, that 

 night, the haOucination appeared in the darkness, 

 there spread over the centre of it an image of the brain- 

 diagram, which reassured him and brought him great 

 comfort. 



Though this is an extreme case, it Ulustrates the 

 way in which spoken words may fail to affect certain 

 individuals, not because the words are not understood, 

 but simply because their appeal is in a medium which 

 is vmder-developed in these particular persons. 



Auto-suggestion and the Verbaliser 



It might be profitable to discover how far auto- 

 suggestion, in that form at least which is recommended 

 by M. Coue, may owe its success to peculiarities in 

 the LndiNddual's imagery. Certainly one cannot de- 

 cide from theory whether a person who habitually 

 makes up his mind by means of words, using muttered 

 or sub-vocal phrases as slips from which to launch his 

 actions, is likely to find autc-suggestion more or less 

 effective than the man who seldom or never " pushes 

 off " from a word. For the latter, auto-suggestion 

 might conceivably be very effective if the doctor's 

 hetero-suggestion were so powerful as to make the 

 patient adopt this, for him, violently unusual behaviour. 



' Hallucinations the origin of which is attributed by the 

 patient to his own mental processes, no objective reality 

 being attached to them. 



