Page "learned" Paragraph 917

The patient himself denied that he had any visual imagery at all ; ;

and there was ample evidence of the following sort to corroborate him.

After a conversation with another man, he was able to recount practically everything that had been said but could not describe at all what the other man looked like.

Nor could he call up memory-pictures of close friends or relatives.

In short, both his own declarations and his figural blindness, when he looked at objects, seem to present undeniable evidence that he had simply no visual memory at all.

He was oblivious of the form of the object actually being viewed, precisely because he could not assign it to a visual shape, already learned and held in visual memory, as persons of normal vision do.

He could not recognize it ; ;

he was absolutely unfamiliar with it because he had no visual memory at all.

Therefore, his only recourse was to learn the shape all over again for each new visual experience of the same individual object or type of object ; ;

and this he could do only by going over its mass with the tracing procedure.

Then he might finally recognize it, apparently by combining the visual blot, actually being seen, with tactual feelings in the head or body accompanying the tracing movements.

This would mean, it can readily be seen, that, again, for each new visual experience, the tracing motions would have to be repeated because of the absence of visual imagery.