. Psychology in daily life. hbox once and immediately gave her judgment. Ob-serve, she was prepared to trust her first impression;she knew what to do; and she concentrated all herenergies upon that specific task at the right moment. This is typical of all sense observation. Twenty-nine out of thirty are wasteful and dull in theirsense-perceptions because they do not one who proceeds economically stands out asan object of remark. The question arises, Why 71 PSYCHOLOGY IN DAILY LIFE could not the ratio be reversed by right training,so that the twenty-nine would show the high eff
. Psychology in daily life. hbox once and immediately gave her judgment. Ob-serve, she was prepared to trust her first impression;she knew what to do; and she concentrated all herenergies upon that specific task at the right moment. This is typical of all sense observation. Twenty-nine out of thirty are wasteful and dull in theirsense-perceptions because they do not one who proceeds economically stands out asan object of remark. The question arises, Why 71 PSYCHOLOGY IN DAILY LIFE could not the ratio be reversed by right training,so that the twenty-nine would show the high effi-ciency, and but one remain deficient, possibly byreason of defective mentality? The illustration is still more striking when it isnoted that the twenty-nine were more or less flur-ried, dissatisfied, and wearied by their performance,while the one of marked achievement worked withapparent ease and comfort; indeed, she seemed torest except at the very moments of actual lifting. This difference in personal ability may be in-. FlG. I terpreted in terms of the attention-wave. Con-sciousness is never a placid stream; it moves moreor less boldly in waves like the breakers on theocean beach. There are large waves, and withinthese are wavelets and ripples of various degrees,as is represented schematically in Fig. i. This 72 MENTAL EFFICIENCY change in the form and degree of consciousness weordinarily speak of in terms of attention; hence theexpression, attention-waves. Figuratively, we may say that there is a givenquantity of the mental stream available for anygiven activity, e. g., for perception. This amountmay be made available in different forms. The ef-fectiveness of the stream depends upon the distribu-tion of the energy, i. e., upon the form of thestream. The contour of the stream of consciousness fora given time, say three seconds, may be representedby three typical attention-wave forms, as in Fig.
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