ts as can the human
being is that they cannot keep their attention fixed on
successive repetitions, and that in learning they literally do
not know what they are doing. They cannot, as can humans,
break up the activity which they are in process of learning
into its significant factors, and attend to these in successive
repetitions. The superiority of deliberate learning over the
brute method of trial and error consists precisely in that the
deliberate and attentive learner can pick out the important
steps of any process, and learn rapidly to eliminate random
and useless features of his early performances without waiting
to have the right way "knocked into him" by experience.
He will short-circuit the process of learning by choosing
appropriate responses in advance, noting how they may be
made more effective and discovering methods for making
them so, and for eliminating useless, random, and ineffective
acts. What we call the "capacity to learn" is evident in
marked degree where there is alert attention to the steps of
the process in successive repetitions. The truth in the assertion
that an intelligent man will shortly outclass the merely
automatically skillful in any occupation or profession requiring
training, lies not in any mysterious faculty, but in the
peculiarly valuable habit of attending with discriminating
interest to any process, and learning it thereby with vastly more
economical rapidity. Genius may be more than what one
writer described it, "a painstaking attention to detail"; but a
painstaking attention to the meaning and bearing of details it
most decidedly is.

LEARNING AFFECTED BY AGE, FATIGUE, AND HEALTH. There are
certain conditions not altogether within the control of the
individual which affect the rapidity with which habits are
acquired. One of the most important of these is fatigue.
Connections among the fibers that go to make up the nervous
system cannot be made with ease and rapidity when the
organism is fatigued. At such times there seems to be an
unusually high resistance at the synapses or nerve junctions
(where there is a lowering of resistance to the passage of a
nerve current when habits are easily formed). After a certain
point of fatigue, whether in the acquisition of motor habits
or the memorizing of information, in which the process is
much the same, the rate of learning is much slower and the
degree of accuracy much less. The length of time through
which habits are retained whe