Discovering Your Success Mechanism

When "YOU" select the goal and trigger it into action, an automatic mechanism takes over. First of all, you have picked up cigarettes, or performed similar movements before. Your automatic mechanism has "learned" something of the correct response needed. Next, your automatic mechanism uses feedback data furnished to the brain by your eyes, which tells it "the degree to which the cigarettes are not picked up." This feedback data enables the automatic mechanism to continually correct the motion of your hand, until it is steered to the cigarettes.

In a baby, just learning to use its muscles, the correction of the hand in reaching for a rattle is very obvious. The baby has little "stored information" to draw upon. Its hand zigzags back and forth and gropes obviously as it reaches. It is characteristic of all learning that as learning takes place, correction becomes more and more refined. We see this in a person just learning to drive a car, who "over-corrects" and zigzags back and forth across the street. Once, however, a correct or "successful response" has been accomplished it is "remembered" for future use. The automatic mechanism then duplicates this successful response on future trials. It has "learned" how to respond successfully. It "remembers" its successes, forgets its failures, and repeats the successful action without any further conscious "thought" or as a habit.

Now let us suppose that the room is dark so that you cannot see the cigarettes. You know, or hope, here is a package of cigarettes on the table, along with a variety of other objects. Instinctively, your hand will begin to "grope" back and forth, performing zigzag motions (or "scanning") rejecting one object after another, until the cigarettes are found and "recognized." This is an example of the second type of servo-mechanism. Recalling a name temporarily forgotten is another example. A "Scanner" in your brain scans back through your stored memories until the correct name is "recognized." An electronic brain solves problems in much the same way. First of all, a great deal of data must be fed into the machine.

This stored, or recorded information is the machine's "memory." A problem is posed to the machine. It scans back through its memory until it locates the only "answer" which is consistent with and meets all the conditions of the problem. Problem and answer together constitute a "whole" situation or structure. When part of the situation or structure (the problem) is given to the machine, it locates the only "missing parts," or the right size brick, so to speak, to complete the structure.