University of Virginia Library

HABIT RELIEVES THE ATTENTION FROM DETAILS

Attention cannot be directed to more than one thing at a time. It is doubtless true that the "one thing" may be very complex, e.g. four letters or even four words. So long as the performance of an act demands attention, this one act is practically all that can be done at that time. As soon as this thing is reduced to habit, it may go on automatically, and the attention may be turned to other things.

When I begin to learn to play the piano, the finger movements require all my attention so that I cannot read the notes on the scale and make the proper execution at the

same time. Gradually, the reading of notes and the execution are reduced to habit, and I can then turn my attention to the reading of the words of the air. As each essential detail is reduced to habit, I acquire the ability to read the score, to make the correct finger and foot movements, to read the words of the song, to sing it correctly, and at the same time to be thinking more or less of other things.

My use of the pen has become so reduced to habit that I need pay no attention to the writing, but am enabled to give my entire attention to the thought which I am attempting to formulate. So every useful habit becomes a power or a tool which may be used for multiplying the efficiency of the individual. Habit formation is the greatest labor saving device in the human economy. No one has expressed this truth so forcefully as the late Professor William James.

"The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize

our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right."