The animal mind is like a telephone exchange, it receives stimuli from outside through the sense organs and sends out appropriate responses through the nerves that govern muscles, glands and other parts of the body. The organism is constantly interacting with its surroundings receiving messages and acting on the new state of affairs that the messages signify.
But the human mind is not a simple transmitter like a telephone exchange. It is more like a great projector; for instead of merely mediating between an event in the outer world and a creature’s responsive action, it transforms or, if you will, distorts the event into an image to be looked at, retained an contemplated. For the images of things we remember are not exact and faithful transcriptions even of our actual sense impressions. The are made as much by what we think as by what we see. It is a well-known fact that if you ask several people the size of moon’s disk as they look at it, their estimates will very from the area of dime to that of a barrel top. Like a magic lantern, the mind projects its ideas of things on the screen of what we call ‘memory’ : but like all projections, these ideas are transformations of actual things. They are in fact, symbols of reality, not pieces of it.