Improve Your Memory

Improve Your Memory

  

A full and accurate memory is a hallmark of intelligent and effective personality. Following are the three essentials in the cultivation of the memory:

(1) Use and Exercise; Review and Practice;

(2) Attention and Interest; and

(3) Intelligent Association.

Use and Exercise; Review and Practice 

Like any other mental faculty, or physical function, the memory will tend to atrophy by disuse, and increase, strengthen and develop by rational exercise and use within the limits of moderation. As you develop a muscle by exercise, you can train any special faculty of the mind like memory in the same way.

Attention and Interest

By attention you acquire the impressions that you file away in your mental record-file of memory. And the degree of attention regulates the depth, clearness and strength of the impression. Without a good record, you cannot expect to obtain a good reproduction of it.

The cultivation of the attention is a prerequisite for good memory, and deficiency in this respect means deficiency not only in the field of memory but also in the general field of mental work.

Intelligent Association

Every association that you weld to an idea or an impression, serves as a cross-reference in the index, whereby the thing is found by remembrance or recollection when it is needed.

It is by means of association that the stored away records of the memory may be recovered or re-collected. Nothing helps the mind so much as order and classification.

Endeavor to link by some thought relation each new mental acquisition to an old one. Bind new facts to other facts by relations of similarity, cause and effect, whole and part, or by any logical relation, and we shall find that when an idea occurs to us, a host of related ideas will flow into the mind.