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.
