Abstract
IN the interesting paper on “Reflex Action” by Dr. W. Benthall, published in your issue of September 5, he speaks of acquiring some feat of manual dexterity in which, with practice, the required muscular action becomes automatic. It seems to me that the same rule applies to many operations which are generally regarded as purely mental, such as in the use of the first four rules in arithmetic, in writing grammatically and spelling correctly, and in speaking any language. If you think, the action becomes laborious and in all cases the result is uncertain. In the case of spelling this seems to occur to every one, so that if you have to look up one word in a dictionary, which shows that you have begun to think about spelling, you have immediately to look up a number of others. Many people who are employed as clerks, &c., no doubt in adding a column of figures have their minds completely blank without their knowing it. In my own case, both at school and afterwards, I was very slow at this process and very uncertain of the results if the figures were numerous, as in a money column, but I found out, more than twenty years after I left school, that by thinking, not of the figures, but of nothing, the process was easy and rapid and the results correct. In speaking, say, French, if a person has to think of grammatical rules, the gender of nouns, &c, he can never speak fluently; to do so he must think of what he intends to convey and let the words take care of themselves.
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DIXON, W. Automatic Actions. Nature 65, 102 (1901). https://doi.org/10.1038/065102a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/065102a0
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