Memory Versus Habit

All of the scientific data in memories, for instance, hold true of habits, and vice versa. In popular speech, the word “habit” is distinguished froe the word “memory,”  as if they did not refer to the same kind of human function. Usually, the word “memory” is applied to the acquiring and retaining of words, symbols, and of conscious experiences, while the word “habit” is used to refer to non-verbal acts. Actually, the distinction is more apparent than real. Many act of muscular skill has been learned with the aid of verbal cues and instructions- for instance, driving an automobile, type writing, playing golf – while almost all acts of remembering are based on muscular movements, if only of the vocal apparatus, as in taking an examination, calling to someone recognized in the street, or testifying in court.

In popular speech the word “habit” is usually applied only to overt learned responses, such as tying shoe laces, knotting a necktie, typewriting, handwriting, driving, manners of eating, and so forth. In technical psychological discussions, the word ” habit” is also applied to covert patterns of responses. Thus, for instance, the silent speech in reading to oneself and in doing mental arithmetic is habitual. There are also habitual emotional reactions, like the fear of insects, snakes and the dark. There are habitual ways of attending and perceiving; one bus rider will look at the advertisements, another will look at his fellow passengers.

Attitudes are habitual, too, as when a man consistently despises members of other races, religions, nations, or economic classes than his own. The phenomenon of learning pervades all the topic of psychology. One cannot understand personality, individual development, thinking, or remembering without studying the process of habit-formation.

Let us repeat that the idea of habit is not being arbitrarily extended from it’s everyday meaning of automatic, overt behavior when it is made to include covert, conscious, and voluntary experience. From the procedural point of view – that is , in terms of what happens- a memory is learned in exactly the same ways as muscular habits are learned. All are examples of the building of stimulus-response patterns or habits, the process known as learning. In order to give the sets of rules for studying and habit-forming, we must look into the principles of purely human learning.