The Improvement of Memory

Chapter 4

“The average man,” said the noted psychologist, Professor Carl Seashore, “does not use above ten percent of his actual inherited capacity for memory. He wastes the ninety percent by violating the natural laws of remembering.”
Are you one of these average persons? If so, you are struggling under a handicap both socially and commercially; consequently, you will be interested in, and profit by, reading and rereading this chapter. It describes and explains these natural laws of remembering and shows how to use them in business and social conversation as well as in public speaking.
These “natural laws of remembering” are very simple. There are only three. Every so-called “memory system” has been founded upon them. Briefly, they are impression, repetition, and association.
The first mandate of memory is this: get a deep, vivid and lasting impression of the thing you wish to retain. And to do that, you must concentrate. Theodore Roosevelt’s remarkable memory impressed everyone he met. And no little amount of his extraordinary facility was due to this: his impressions were scratched on steel, not written in water. He had, by persistence and practice, trained himself to concentrate under the most adverse conditions. In 1912, during the Bull Moose Convention in Chicago, his head quarters were in the Congress Hotel. Crowds singed through the street below, crying, waving banners, shouting “We want Teddy! We want Teddy!” The roar of the throng, the music of bands, the coming and going of politicians, the hurried conferences, the consultations—would have driven the ordinary individual to distraction; but Roosevelt sat in a rocking chair in his room, oblivious to it all, read­ing Herodotus, the Greek historian. On his trip through the Brazilian wilderness, as soon as he reached the camping ground in the evening, he found a dry spot under some huge tree, got out a camp stool and his copy of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and, at once, he was so immersed in the book that he was oblivious to the rain, to the noise and activity of the camp, to the sounds of the tropical forest. Small wonder that the man remembered what he read.
Five minutes of vivid, energetic concentration will pro­duce greater results than days of mooning about in a mental haze. “One intense hour,” wrote Henry Ward Beecher, “will do more than dreamy years.” “If there is any one thing that. I have learned which is more important than any­ thing else,” said Eugene Grace, who made over a million a year as president of Bethlehem Steel Company, “and which practice every day under any and all circumstances, it is concentration in the particular job l have in hand.”
This is one of the secrets of power, especially memory power.

They Couldn’t See a Cherry Tree

Thomas Edison found that twenty-seven of his assistants had used, every day for six months, a certain path which led from his lamp factory to the main works at Menlo Park, New Jersey. A cherry tree grew along that path, and yet not one of these twenty-seven men had, when questioned, ever been conscious of that tree’s existence.
“The average person’s brain,” declared Mr. Edison with heat and energy, “does not observe a thousandth part of what the eye observes. It is almost incredible how poor our powers of observation—genuine observation—are.”
Introduce the average person to two or three of your friends and, the chances are that two minutes afterward he cannot recall the name of a single one of them. And why? Because he never paid sufficient attention to them in the first place, he never accurately observed them. He will likely tell you he has a poor memory. No, he has a poor observation. He would not condemn a camera because it failed to take pictures in a fog, but he expects his mind to retain impressions that are hazy and foggy to a degree. Of course, it can’t be done.
Joseph Pulitzer, who made the New York World, had three words placed over the desk of every man in his editorial offices:

Accuracy
Accuracy
ACCURACY

That is what we want. Hear the man’s name precisely. Insist on it. Ask him to repeat it. Inquire how it is spelled. He will be flattered by your interest and you will be able to remember his name because you have concentrated on it. You have got a clear, accurate impression.

Why Lincoln Read Aloud

Lincoln, in his youth, attended a country school where the floor was made out of split logs: greased pages, tom from the copybooks and pasted over the windows, served instead of glass to let in the light. Only one copy of the textbook existed, and the teacher read from it aloud. The pupils repeated the lesson after him, all of them talking at once. It made a constant uproar, and the neighbours called it the “blab school.”
At the “blab school,” Lincoln formed a habit that clung to him all his life: he forever read aloud everything he wished to remember. Each morning, as soon as he reached his law office in Springfield, he spread himself out on the couch, hooked one long, ungainly leg over a neighbouring chair, and read the newspaper audibly. “He annoyed me,” said his partner, ‘’almost beyond endurance. I once asked him why he read in this fashion. This was his explanation: ‘When I read aloud, two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore can remember it better.’
His memory was extraordinarily retentive. “My mind,” he said, “is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch any­ thing on it, but almost impossible, after you get it there, to rub it out.”
Appealing to two of the senses was the method he used to do the scratching. Go thou, and do likewise…
The ideal thing would be not only to see and hear the thing to be remembered, but to touch it, and smell it, and taste it.
But, above all else, see it. We are visual minded. Eye impressions stick. We can often remember a man’s face, even though we cannot recall his name. The nerves that lead from the eye to the brain are twenty-five times as large as those leading from the ear to the brain. The Chinese have a proverb that says “one time seeing is worth a thousand times hearing.”
Write down the name, the telephone number, the speech outline you want to remember. Look at it. Close your eyes. Visualize it in flaming letters of fire.

How Mark Twain Learned to Speak Without Notes

The discovery of how to use his visual memory enabled Mark Twain to discard the notes that had hampered his speeches for years. Here is his story as he told it in Harper’s Magazine:
Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures: figures are monotonously unshrinking in appearance, and they don’t take hold; they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to take hold. Pictures can make dates stick. They can make nearly anything stick—particularly if you make the picture yourself. Indeed, that is the great point—make the picture your­ self. I know about this from experience. Thirty years ago I was delivering a memorized lecture every night, and every night I had to help myself with a page of notes to keep from getting myself mixed. The notes consisted of beginnings of sentences, and were eleven in number, and they ran something like this:
In that region the weather­—
At that time it was a custom—
But in California one never heard—
Eleven of them. They initialled the brief of the lecture and protected me against skipping. But they all looked about alike on the page; they formed no picture; I had them by heart, but I could never with certainty remember the order of their succession; therefore, I always had to keep those notes by me and look at them every little while. Once I mislaid them; you will not be able to imagine the tenors of that evening. I now saw that I must invent some other protection. So I got ten of the initial letters by heart in their proper order—I, A, B, and so on—and I went on the platform the next night with these marked in ink on my ten finger nails. But it didn’t answer. I kept track of the fingers for awhile; then I lost it, and after that I was never quite sure which finger I had used last. I couldn’t lick off a letter after using it, for while that would have made success certain, it would also have provoked too much curiosity. There was curiosity enough without that. To the audience I seemed more interested in my finger nails than I was in my subject; one or two persons asked afterward what was the matter with my hands.
It was then that the idea of pictures occurred to me! Then my troubles passed away. In two minutes I made six pictures with my pen, and they did the work of the eleven catch-sentences and did it perfectly. I threw the pictures away as soon as they were made, for was sure I could shut my eyes and see them any time. That was a quarter of a century ago; the lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years ago, but I could re­ write it from the pictures—for they remain.
I had occasion to deliver a talk on memory. I wanted to use, very largely, the material in this chapter. I memorized the points by pictures. I visualized Roosevelt reading history while the crowds were yelling and bands playing outside his window. I saw Thomas Edison looking at a cherry tree. I pictured Lincoln reading a newspaper aloud. I imagined Mark Twain licking ink off his fingernails as he faced an audience.
How did I remember the order of the pictures? By one, two, three, and four? No, that would have been too difficult turned these numbers into pictures, and combined the pictures of the numbers with the pictures of the points illustrate. Number one sounds like run, so I made a race horse stand for one pictured Roosevelt in his room, reading astride a race horse. For two, I chose a word that sounds like two—zoo. I had the cherry tree that Thomas Edison was looking at standing in the bear cage at the zoo. For three, I pictured an object that sounds like three—tree. I had Lincoln sprawled out in the top of a tree, reading aloud to his partner. For four I imagined a picture that sounds like four—door. Mark Twain stood in an open door, lean­ing against the jamb, licking the ink off his fingers as he talked to the audience.
I realize full well that many men who read this will think that such a method verges on the ridiculous. It does. That is one reason why it works. It is comparatively easy to remember the bizarre and ridiculous. Had I tried to remember the order of my points by numbers only, I might easily have forgotten; but by the system I have just described, it was almost impossible to forget. When I wished to recall my third point, I had but to ask myself what was in the top of the tree. Instantly I saw Lincoln.
I have, very largely for my own convenience, turned the lumbers from one to twenty into pictures, choosing pictures that sound like the numbers. I have set them down here. If you will spend half an hour memorizing these Picture–numerals you will then be able, after having a list twenty objects called to you but once, to repeat them in their exact order and to skip about at random announcing which object was called to you eighth, which fourteenth, which third, and so on.
Here are the picture numbers. Try the test. You will find decidedly amusing.

• Run—visualize a race horse.
• Zoo—see the bear cage in the zoo.
• Tree-picture the third object called to you as lying in the top of a tree.
• Door—or wild boar. Take any object or animal that sounds like four.
• Bee hive.
• Sick—see a Red Cross nurse.
• Heaven-a street paved with gold, and angels playing on harps.
• Gate.
• Wine—the bottle has fallen over on the table, and the wine is streaming out and pouring down something below. Put action into the pictures. It helps to make them stick.
• Den of wild animals in a rocky cave in the deep woods.
• A football eleven, rushing madly across the fied. I picture them carrying aloft the object tow I wish to recall as number eleven.
• Shelve—see some one shoving something back a shelf.
• Hurting-see the blood spurting out of a wound and reddening the thirteenth object.
• Courting—a couple are sitting on something and making love.
• Lifting—a strong man, a regular John L. Sullivan is lifting something high above his head.
• Licking—a fist fight.
• Leavening—a housewife is kneading dough, and into the dough she kneads the seventeen object.
• Waiting—a woman is standing at a forked pat in the deep woods waiting for some one.
• Pining—a woman is weeping. See her tears falling on the nineteenth thing you wish to recall.
• Horn of Plenty—a goat’s horn overflowing with flowers and fruit and corn.

If you wish to try the test, spend a few minutes memorizing these picture-numbers. If you prefer, make pictures of your own. For ten, think of wren or fountain pen or hen or sen-sen- anything that sounds like ten. Suppose that the tenth object recalled to you a windmill. See the hen sitting on the windmill, or see it pumping ink to till the fountain pen. Then, when you are asked what was the tenth object called, do not think of ten at all; but merely ask yourself where was the hen sitting. You may not think it will work, but try it. You can soon astound people with what they will consider to be an extraordinary capacity for remembering. You will find it entertaining if nothing else.

Memorizing a Book as Long as the New Testament

One of the largest universities in the world is the Al-Azhar at Cairo. It is a Mohammedan institution with twenty-one thousand students. The entrance examination requires every applicant to repeat the Koran from memory. The Koran is about as long as the New Testament, and three days are required to recite it!
The Chinese students, or “study boys” as they are called, have to memorize some of the religious and classi­cal books of China.
How are these Arab and Chinese students able to perform these apparently prodigious feats of memory?
By repetition, the second “natural law of remembering.”
You can memorize an almost endless amount of material if you will repeat it often enough. Go over the knowledge you want to remember. Use it. Apply it. Employ the new word in your conversation. Call the stranger by his name if you want to remember it. Talk over in conversation the points you want to make in your public address. The knowledge that is used tends to stick.

The Kind of Repetition That Counts

But the mere blind, mechanical going over a thing by rote is not enough. Intelligent repetition, repetition done in accordance with certain well-established traits of the mind—that is what we must have. For example, Professor Ebbinghous gave his students a long list of nonsense syllables to memorize, such as “deyux,” “qoli,” and so on. He found that these students memorized as many of these syllables by thirty-eight repetitions, distributed over a period of three days, as they did by sixty-eight repetitions done at a single sitting… Other psychological tests have repeatedly shown similar results.
That is a very significant discovery about the working of our memories. It means that we know now that the man who sits down and repeats a thing over and over until he finally fastens it in his memory, is using twice as much time and energy as is necessary to achieve the same results when the repeating process is done at judicious intervals.
This peculiarity of the mind—if we can call it such—can be explained by two factors:
First, during the intervals between repetitions, our sub—conscious minds are busy making the associations more secure. As Professor James sagely remarks: “We learn to swim during the winter and to skate during the summer.”
Second, the mind, coming to the task at intervals, is not fatigued by the strain of an unbroken application. Sir Richard Burton, the translator of the “Arabian Nights,” spoke twenty-seven languages like a native: yet he confessed that he never studied or practiced any language for more than fifteen minutes at a time, “for, after that, the brain lost its freshness.”
Surely, now, in the face of these facts, no man who prides himself on his common sense will delay the preparation of a talk until the night before it is to be given. If he does, his memory will, of necessity, be working at only one-half its possible efficiency.
Here is a very helpful discovery about the way in which we forget. Psychological experiments have repeatedly shown that of the new material we have learned, we forget more during the first eight hours than during the next thirty days. An amazing ratio! So, immediately before you go into a business conference or a PTA meeting or a club group, immediately before you make a speech, look over your data, think over your facts, refresh your memory.
Lincoln knew the value of such a practice, and employed it. The scholarly Edward Everett preceded him on the program of speech making at Gettysburg. When he saw that Everett was approaching the close of his long, formal oration, Lincoln “grew visibly nervous, as he always did when another man was speaking and he was to follow.” Hastily adjusting his spectacles, he took his manuscript from his pocket and read it silently to himself to refresh his memory.

Professor William James Explains
the Secret of a Good Memory

So much for the–first two laws of remembering. The third one, association, however, is the indispensable element in recalling. In fact, it is the explanation of memory itself. ‘’Our mind is:’ as Professor James sagely observed, “essentially an associating machine… Suppose I am silent for a moment, and then say in commanding accents: ‘Remember! Recollect!’ Does your faculty of memory obey the order, and reproduce any definite image from your past? Certainly not. It stands staring into vacancy, and asking, ‘What kind of thing do you wish me to remember?’ It needs, in short, a cue. But, if I say, remember the date of your birth, or remember what you had for breakfast, or remember the succession of notes in the musical scale; then your faculty of memory immediately produces the required result: the cue determines its vast set of potentialities toward a particular point. And if you now look to see how this happens, you immediately perceive that the cue is something contiguously associated with the thing recalled. The words, ‘date of my birth,’ have an ingrained association with a particular number, month, and year; the words, ‘breakfast this morning,’ cut off all other lines of recall except those which lead to coffee and bacon and eggs; the words, ‘musical scale,’ are inveterate mental neighbours of do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do. The laws of association govern, in fact, all the trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sensations breaking on us from without. Whatever appears in the mind must be introduced; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of something already there. This is as true of what you are recollection & as it is of everything else you think of …. An educated memory depends upon an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistence of the associations; and, second, on their number…. The ‘secret of a good memory’ is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain. But this forming of associations with a fact—what is it but thinking about the fact as much as possible? Briefly, then, of two men with the same outward experiences, the one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into the most systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.”

How to Link Your Facts Together

Very good, but how are we to set about weaving our facts into systematic relations with each other? The answer is this: by finding their meaning, by thinking them over. For example, if you will ask and answer these questions about any new fact, that process will help to weave it into a systematic relation with other facts:
a. Why is this so?
b. How is this so?
c. When is it so?
d. Where is it so?
e. Who said it is so?
If it is a stranger’s name, for example, and it is a common one, we can perhaps tie it to some friend who bears · the same name. On the other hand, if it is unusual, we can take occasion to say so. This often leads the stranger to talk about his name. For example: while writing this chapter, I was introduced to a Mrs. Soter. I requested her to spell the name and remarked upon its unusualness. “Yes,” she replied, “it is very uncommon. It is a Greek word meaning ‘the Saviour.’ Then she told me about her husband’s people who had come from Athens and of the high positions they had held in the government there. I have found it quite easy to get people to talk about their names, and it always helps me to remember them.
Observe the stranger’s looks sharply. Note the color of his eyes and his hair, and look closely at his features. Note how he is dressed. Listen to his manner of talking. Get a clear, keen, vivid impression of his looks and personality, and associate these with his name. The next time these sharp impressions return to your mind, they will help bring the name with them.
Haven’t you had the experience, when meeting a man for the second or third time, of discovering that although you could remember his business or profession, you could not recall his name? The reason is this: a man’s business is something definite and concrete. It has a meaning. It will adhere like a court plaster while his meaningless name will roll away like hail falling on a steep roof. Consequently, to make sure of your ability to recall a man’s name, fashion a phrase about it that will tie it up to his business. There can be no doubt whatever about the effi­cacy of this method. For example, twenty men, strangers to one another, recently met in the Penn Athletic Club of Philadelphia. Each man was asked to rise, announce his name and business. A phrase was then manufactured to connect the two; and, within a few minutes, each person present could repeat the name of every other individual in the room. Many meetings later, neither the names nor businesses were forgotten, for they were linked together. They adhered.
Here are the first few names, in alphabetical order, from that group; and here are the crude phrases that were used to tie the names to the businesses:
Mr. G. P. Albrecht (Sand business)—”Sand makes all bright.”
Mr. G. W. Bayless (Asphalt)—”Use asphalt and pay less.” Mr. H. M. Biddle (Woolen cloth)—” Mr. Biddle piddles about the wool business.”
Mr. Gideon Bocricke (Mining)—”Boericke bores quickly for mines.”
Mr. Thomas Dcvery (Printing)—”Every man needs De–very’s printing.”
Mr. O. W. Doolittle (Automobiles)—”Do little and you won’t succeed in selling cars.”
Mr. Thomas Fischer (Coal)—”He fishes for coal orders.”
Mr. Frank H. Goldey (Lumber)—”Thcrc is gold in the lumber business.”
Mr. J. H. Hancock (Saturday Evening Post)—”Sign your John Hancock to a subscription blank for the Saturday Evening Post.”

How to Remember Dates

Dates can best be retained by connecting them with important dates already firmly established in the mind. Isn’t it far more difficult, for example, for an American to remember that the Suez Canal was opened in 1869 than to remember that the first ship passed through it four years after the close of the Civil War? If an American tried to remember that the first settlement in Australia was made in 1788, the date is likely to drop out of his mind like a loose bolt out of a car; it is far more likely to stick if he thinks of it in connection with July 4, 1776, and re­members that it occurred twelve years after the Declaration of Independence. That is like screwing a nut on the loose bolt. It holds.
It is well to bear this principle in mind when you are selecting a telephone number. For example, the writer’s phone number, during the war, was 1776. No one had difficulty in remembering it. If you can secure from the phone company some such number as 1492, 1861, 1865, 1914, 1918, your friends will not have to consult the directory. They might forget that your phone number was 1492, if you gave them the information in a colorless fashion; but would it slip their minds if you said, “You can easily remember my phone number: 1492, the year Columbus discovered America”?
The Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians who are reading these lines would, of course, substitute for 1776, 1861, 1865 significant dates in their own history. What is the best way to memorize the following dates?
a. 1564—Birth of Shakespeare.
b. 1607—The first English settlement in America was made in Jamestown.
c. 1819—The birth of Queen Victoria.
d. 1807—The birth of Robert E. Lee.
e. 1789—The Bastille was destroyed.
You would doubtless find it tiresome to memorize, by sheer mechanical repetition, the names of the thirteen original states in the order in which they entered the Union. But tie them together with a story and the memorizing can be done with a fraction of the time and trying. Read the following paragraph just once. Concentrate. When you have finished, see if you cannot name the thirteen states in their correct order:
One Saturday afternoon a young lady from Delaware bought a ticket over the Pennsylvania railroad for a little outing. She packed a New Jersey sweater in her suitcase, and visited a friend, Georgia, in Connecticut. The next morning the hostess and her visitor attended Mass in a church on Mary’s land. Then they took the South car line home, and dined on a new ham, which had been roasted by Virginia, the colored cook, from New York. After dinner they took the North car line and rode to the island.

How to Remember the Points of Your Talk

There are only two ways by which we can possibly think of a thing: first, by means of an outside stimulus; second, by association with something already in the mind. Applied to speeches, that means just this: .first, you can recall your points by the aid of some outside stimulus such as notes—but who likes to see a speaker use notes? Second, you can remember your points by associating them with something already in the mind. They should be arranged in such a logical order that the first one leads inevitably to the second, and the second to the third as naturally as the door of one room leads into another.
That sounds simple, but it may not prove so for the beginner whose thinking powers are rendered hors de combat with fear. There is, however, a method of tying your points together that is easy, rapid, and all but foolproof. I refer to the use of a nonsense sentence. To illus­trate: suppose you wish to discuss a veritable jumble of ideas, unassociated and hence hard to remember, such as, for example, cow, cigar, Napoleon, house, religion. Let us see if we cannot weld those ideas like the links of a chain by means of this absurd sentence: “The cow smoked a cigar and hooked Napoleon, and the house burned down with religion.”
Now, will you please cover the sentence above with your hand while you answer these questions? What is the third point in that talk; the fifth; fourth; second; first?
Does the method work? It does! And you who are trying to improve your memory are urged to use it.
Any group of ideas can be linked together in some such fashion, and the more ridiculous the sentence used for the linking, the easier it will be to recall.

What to Do in Case of a Complete Breakdown

Let us suppose that, in spite of all her preparation and precaution, a speaker, in the middle of her talk before a church group, suddenly finds her mind a blank—suddenly finds herself staring at her hearers completely balked, unable to go on—a terrifying situation. Her pride rebels at sitting down in confusion and defeat. She feels that she might be able to think of her next point, of some point, if she had only ten, fifteen seconds of grace; but even fifteen seconds of frantic silence before an audience would be little less than disastrous. What is to be done? When a certain well-known U. S. Senator recently found himself in this situation he asked his audience if he were speaking loudly enough, if he could be heard distinctly in the back of the room. He knew that he was. He was not seeking information. He was seeking time. And in that momentary pause, he grasped his thought and proceeded.
But perhaps the best lifesaver in such a mental hurricane is this: use the last word, or phrase, or idea in your last sentence for the beginning of a new sentence. This will make an endless chain that, like Tennyson’s brook and, I regret to say, with as little purpose as Tennyson’s brook, will run on forever. Let us see how it works in practice. Let us imagine that a speaker talking on Business Success, finds himself in a blind mental alley after having said: “The average employee does not get ahead because he takes so little real interest in his work, displays so little initiative.”
“Initiative.” Start a sentence with “initiative.” You will probably have no idea of what you are going to say or how you are going to end the sentence, but, nevertheless, begin. Even a poor showing is more to be desired than utter defeat.
Initiative means originality, doing a thing on your own, without eternally waiting to be told.
That is not a scintillating observation. It won’t make speech history. But isn’t it better than an agonizing silence? Our last phrase was what?—” waiting to be told.” All right, let us start a new sentence with that idea.
The constant telling and guiding and driving of employees who refuse to do any original thinking is one of the most exasperating things imaginable.
Well, we got through that one. Let us plunge again. This time we must say something about imagination:
Imagination—that is what is needed. Vision. “Where there is no vision,” Solomon said, “the people perish.”
We did two that time without a hitch. Let us take heart and continue:
The number of employees who perish each year in the battle of business is really lamentable. I say la­ men table, because with just a little more loyalty, a little more ambition, a little more enthusiasm, these same men and women might have lifted themselves over the line of demarcation between success and failure. Yet the failure of business never admits that this is the case.
And so on… While the speaker is saying these platitudes off the top of his mind. he should, at the same time, be thinking hard of the next point in his planned speech, of the thing he had originally intended to say.
This endless chain method of thinking will, if continued very long, trap the speaker into discussing plum pudding or the price of canary birds. However, it is a splendid first aid to the injured mind broken down temporarily through forget fullness: and, as such, it has been the means of resuscitating many a gasping and dying speech.
We Cannot Improve Our Memories for
All Classes of Things
I have pointed out in this chapter how we may improve our methods of getting vivid impressions, of repeating and of tying our facts together. But memory is so essentially a matter of association that “there can be,” as Professor James points out, “no improvement of the general or elementary faculty of memory; there can only be improvement of our memory for special systems of associated things.”
By memorizing, for instance, a quotation a day from Shakespeare, we may in I prove our memory for literary quotations to a surprising degree. Each additional quota­tion will find many friends in the mind to tie to. But the memorizing of everything from Hamlet to Romeo will not necessarily aid one in retaining facts about the cotton market or the Bessemer process for desiliconizing pig iron.
Let us repeat: if we apply and use the principles discussed in this chapter, we will improve our manner and efficiency for memorizing anything; but, if we do not apply these principles, then the memorizing of ten million facts about baseball will not help us in the slightest in memo­rizing facts about the stock market. Such unrelated data cannot be tied together. “Our mind is essentially an associating machine.”

Summary

• “The average man,” said the noted psychologist, Professor Carl Seashore, “does not use above ten per cent of his actual inherited capacity for memory. He wastes the ninety per cent by violating the natural laws of remembering.”
• These “natural laws of remembering” are three: impression, repetition, association.
• Get a deep, vivid impression of the thing you wish to remember. To do that you mu—

a. Concentrate. That was the secret of Theodore Roosevelt’s memory.
b. Observe closely. Get an accurate impression. A camera won’t take pictures in a fog; neither will your mind retain foggy impressions.
c. Get your impressions through as many of the senses as possible. Lincoln read aloud whatever he wished to remember so that he would get both a visual and an auditory impression.
d. Above all else, be sure to get eye impressions. They stick. The nerves leading from the eye to the brain are twenty-five times act; large as those leading from the ear to the brain. Mark Twain could not remember the outline of his speech when he used notes; but when he threw away his notes and used pictures to recall his various headings, all his troubles vanished.

• The second law of memory is repetition. Thousands of Mohammedan students memorize the Koran—a book about as long as the New Testament—and they do it very largely through the power of repetition. We can memorize anything within reason if we repeat it often enough. But bear these facts in mind as you repeat:

a. Do not sit down and repeat a thing over and over until you have it engraved on your memory. Go over it once or twice, then drop it; come back later and go over it again. Repeating at intervals, in that manner, will enable you to memorize a thing in about one-half the time required to do it at one sitting.
b. After we memorize a thing, we forget as much during the first eight hours as we do during the next thirty days; so go over your notes just a few minutes before you rise to make your talk.

• The third law of memory is association. The only way anything can possibly be remembered at all is by associating it with some other fact. “Whatever appears in the mind,” said Professor James, “must be introduced; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of something already there…. The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into the most synthetic relation with each other, will be the one with the best memory.”
• When you wish to associate one fact with others already in the mind, think over the new fact from all angles. Ask about it such questions as these: “Why is this so? How is this so? When is it so? Where is it so? Who said it is so?”
• To remember a stranger’s name, ask questions about it—how is it spelled, and so on? Observe his looks sharply. Try to connect the name with his face. Find out his business and try to invent some nonsense phrase that will connect his name with his business, such as was done in the Penn Athletic Club group.
• To remember dates, associate them with prominent dates already in the mind. For example, the three hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth occurred during the Civil War.
• To remember the points of your address, arrange them in such logical order that one leads naturally to the next. In addition, one can make a nonsense sentence out of the main points-for example, “The cow smoked a cigar and hooked Napoleon, and the house burned down with religion.”
• If, in spite of all precautions, you suddenly forget what you intended to say, you may be able to save yourself from complete defeat by using the last words of your last sentence as the first words in a new one. This can be continued until you are able to think of your next point.