Memorization

“ And investigation reveals, always, that there has been used the identical process of committing these sacred books to memory, and recalling them at will—the natural method, instead of an artificial one. And therefore we shall devote this chapter solely to this method whereby poems or prose may be committed to memory and recalled readily.
This natural method of memorizing words, sentences, or verses is no royal road. It is a system which must be mastered by steady work and faithful review. One must start at the beginning and work his way up. ”

“ IMPRESSION Of all the mental operations employed by the student, memory is probably the one in which the greatest inefficiency is manifested. Though we often fail to realize it, much of our life is taken up with memorizing. Every time we make use of past experience, we rely upon this function of the mind, but in no occupation is it quite so practically important as in study. We shall begin our investigation of memory by dividing it into four phases or stages—Impression, Retention, Recall and Recognition. ”

“ And that by memorising and repeating for a considerable period Analytic Series, and especially by making and memorising one’s own Correlations, it is an unequalled system of Memory-TRAINING. Let the ambitious Pupil learn as many examples as I give in the lessons in order to so strengthen his natural memory that he will no longer have to use the device for memorising, his natural memory permanently retaining all he desires to remember. This result comes only to those who carry out all the directions with genuine alacrity—not shirking one of them.
Do all persons find them easy? ”

“ In order to bring speech forward and carry it into the [p. 138] air, set before you an imaginary target and direct the voice toward it, raising and lowering the target as you desire to raise and lower the tone. Remember to think the voice out, as you can get it out no other way.
How to Strengthen the Memory
If any one ask me what is the only and great art of memory, I shall say it is exercise and labor. To learn much by heart, to meditate much, and, if possible, daily, are the most efficacious of all methods. Nothing is so much strengthened by practice or weakened by neglect as memory. ”

“ Peculiarities of Memory.—Memory is an illusive and elusive function at best. All of us have had the sensation of having a word, and particularly a name, on the tip of our tongues. We often know the first letter and sometimes the first syllable of it. What memory brings to us, however, may not always be the first syllable of a word or name, though we are prone to think it must be, and we may go looking for it in the dictionary of names only to discover after a time that we are many letters away from its beginning. ”

“ In real life, our memory is always used in the service of some interest: we remember things which we care for or which are associated with things we care for; and the child who stands at the bottom of the scale thus experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of his passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical association into which he weaves the actual materials of his experience, be a very effective memorizer indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much better than an immediate parrot who might stand at the top of the 'scientifically accurate' list. ”

“ It is a Device or Method of memorising or learning any facts whatever—prose, poetry, dates, data, formulæ and facts and principles of the sciences, &c., &c., &c., or anything whatsoever to be remembered. (2) There is another equally, if not more important aspect of it, namely, as a Trainer or Strengthener of the Natural Memory to any extent the pupil wishes to carry it. And the Natural Memory is so strengthened by the use of the System, that as a Device, the System is no longer required. ”

“ I have the memory that recalls everything in proportion and sequence. I have often written that art is memory, is in great part memory, though not necessarily a recalling of mere personal experience: and the more deeply I live the more I see that this is so....
When you write, I mean imaginatively, you must write more and more with concentrated vision. Some time ago I re-read your Four Winds of the World; much of it is finely done, and in some of it your self lives, your own accent speaks. But you have it in you to do work far more ambitious. ”

“ Committing poetry may have little or no effect in strengthening the memory for historical or scientific data. In general, the memory must be trained in the specific lines in which it is to excel. General training will not serve except as it may lead to better modes of learning what is to be memorized.
6. WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD MEMORY
Let us next inquire what are the qualities which enter into what we call a good memory. The merchant or politician will say, "Ability to remember well people's faces and names"; the teacher of history, "The ability to recall readily dates and events" ”

“ We approach a phase of impression the importance of which is often unsuspected; namely, the intention with which memorizing is done. The fidelity of memory is greatly affected by the intention. If, at the time of impression, you intend to retain only until the time of recall, the material tends to slip away after that time. If, however, you impress with the intention to retain permanently the material stays by you better. Students make a great mistake when they study for the purpose merely of retaining until after examination time. ”

“ To attempt to reduce the art of literature to its component sense-elements is therefore vain. Memory, “the warder of the brain,” is a fickle trustee, whimsically lavish to strangers, giving up to the appeal of a spoken word or unspoken p. 11symbol, an odour or a touch, all that has been garnered by the sensitive capacities of man. It is the part of the writer to play upon memory, confusing what belongs to one sense with what belongs to another, extorting images of colour at a word, raising ideas of harmony without breaking the stillness of the air. ”

“ Speaking from memory admits of the application of every possible element of effectiveness, rhetorical and elocutionary, and in the delivery of a few great actors the highest excellence in this art has been exemplified. But speaking from memory requires the most minute and careful study, as well as high elocutionary ability, to guard the speaker against a merely mechanical utterance. Read in the same manner you would speak, as if the matter were your own original sentiments uttered directly from the heart. Action should not be used in ordinary reading. ”

“ Now this task cannot be accomplished by means of intensive and laborious repetition work; it cannot be accomplished by the traditional methods of memorizing; book-work and perseverance will never lead us to the goal of our memorizing ambitions. As we shall see later, in the early stages a certain amount of deliberate and conscious memorizing must be done; we shall insist on the daily repetition of a certain number of useful compounds, but sooner or later we shall come to a stage in which memory-work must be carried out on a far larger scale and in a far more spontaneous manner. ”

“ The verbal memory is that which retains in the mind, and reproduces at will what has been said in our hearing by others, or what we have read which has made a marked impression upon us. Thus, some persons can repeat with almost exact accuracy, every word of a long conversation held with another. Others can repeat whole poems, or long passages in prose from favorite authors, after reading them over two or three times, and can retain them perfectly in memory for half a century or more. ”

“ Why, sir, I mean that a memory may be inherited just like a mole, a birthmark, a physical or a moral characteristic. Our brains, as a clever writer has expressed it, are like the rocks of the Sinaitic valley, all covered over with inscriptions written there by the long caravans of Thought. ”

“ In cultivating the memory, the training should be first for the attention, then for the imagination and the power of suggestive thought; and from the opening of these faculties a true memory will grow. The mechanical power of repeating after once hearing so many words is a thing in itself to be dreaded. ”

“ The faculty, by which we repeat our impressions in the first manner, is called the MEMORY, and the other the IMAGINATION. It is evident at first sight, that the ideas of the memory are much more lively and strong than those of the imagination, and that the former faculty paints its objects in more distinct colours, than any which are employed by the latter. When we remember any past event, the idea of it flows in upon the mind in a forcible manner ”

“ Stokes, the great memory teacher of the Royal Polytechnic Institution of London, formulated his golden rule of memory as follows: “Observe, reflect, link thought with thought, and think of the impressions.”
Strengthening the Observation
Careful observation is the basis of memory. To observe is to regard with attention, to note with interest, in other words to see well. How many people are there who see well? All persons who are not blind can see, but do they see well? It must be confessed that good observers are rare, and that is one reason why good memories are rare. ”

“ So much did he inspire us with his own favorite tastes, that parsing the most difficult passages of the poets, remarkable either for elision or amplification, was coveted as a sport. The culture of memory was also a prominent object with him, for, being a natural metaphysician, he scanned the intellect as a map, and wrought in each department. ”

“ These words, uttered by the scholarly rhetorician of Rome during the first century of the Christian era, are as true today as when they were first spoken. Application, concentration, association, opposition, and use are the principal means for the effectual training and strengthening of the memory. Many systems have been devised for memory training, but none of them is of more than superficial use, the majority making it more difficult to remember the means whereby the thought is to be recalled than to remember the thought itself. They are cumbersome, burdensome, and unworkable. ”

“ The second general class of memory,—memory of ideas,—includes the memory of facts, events, thoughts, lines of reasoning, etc., and is regarded as higher in the scale than the memory of sense impressions, although not more necessary nor useful to the average person. This form of memory of course accompanies the higher lines of intellectual effort and activities, and constitutes a large part of what is known as true education, that is education which teaches one to think instead of to merely memorize certain things taught in books or lectures. ”

“ Practice in Memorizing Inadequate It is evident that if what we have been describing as the process of recall is true, then the commonly accepted idea that practice in memorizing makes memorizing easier is false, and that there is no truth in the popular figure of speech that likens the memory to a muscle that grows stronger with use. ”

“ Its great systems of filing, recording and indexing these records constitute that which we call memory. But before any of this work is possible, impressions must first have been received. And, as you may see from the quotations just given, these impressions depend upon the power of attention given to the things making the impressions. If there has been given great attention, there will be clear and deep impressions; if there has been given but average attention, there will be but average impressions; if there has been given but faint attention, there will be but faint impressions ”

“ Memoria.—Memory, of all the powers of the mind, is the most delicate and frail; ”

“ Torture of the Drill By practice we come to unconsciously discover and employ new associative methods in our recording of facts, making them easier to recall, but we can certainly add nothing to the actual scope and power of retention.
Yet many books on memory-training have wide circulation whose authors, showing no conception of the processes involved, seek to develop the general ability to remember by incessant practice in memorizing particular facts, just as one would develop a muscle by exercise. ”

“ In the mythological pedigree of learning, memory is made the mother of the muses, by which the masters of ancient wisdom, perhaps, meant to show the necessity of storing the mind copiously with true notions, before the imagination should be suffered to form fictions or collect embellishments; for the works of an ignorant poet can afford nothing higher than pleasing sound, and fiction is of no other use than to display the treasures of memory. ”

“ To every reader nothing can be more important than that faculty of the mind which we call memory. The retentive memory instinctively stores up the facts, ideas, imagery, and often the very language found in books, so clearly that they become available at any moment in after life. The tenacity of this hold upon the intellectual treasures which books contain depends largely upon the strength of the impression made upon the mind when reading. ”

“ The daily memorizing of a beautiful passage in literature will not only lend strength to the memory, but will store the mind with gems for quotation. But whether by little or much add daily to your memory power by practise. ”