4. Teach the subject to or discuss it with a fellow student. By this you vitalize the memories you have, you link them firmly together, you lend to them the ardor of usefulness and of victory. You are forced to realize where the gaps, the lacunae of your knowledge come, and are made to fill them in.
Thus the best way to remember a fact is to find a use for it and to link it to your interests and your purposes. Unrelated it has no value; related it becomes in fact a part of you. After that the mechanics of memory necessitate the making of as many pathways to that fact as possible, and this means deliberately to associate the fact by sound, by speech and by action. The advertised schemes of memory training are simply association schemes, old as the hills, and having value indeed, but too much is claimed for them. A splendid memory is born, not made; but any memory, except where disease has entered, can be improved by training.
It is because lectures on the whole do not supply enough associations or arouse enough interest that the lecture is the poorest method of teaching or learning. Man's mind sticks easily to things, but with difficulty to words about things. To maintain attention for an hour or so, while sitting, is a task, and there develops a tendency either to a hypnoidal state in which the mind follows uncritically, or to a restless uneasiness with wandering mind and fatigue of body. A demonstration, on the other hand, a laboratory experiment with short, personal instruction, a bodily contact with the problem calls into play interest, enthusiasm, curiosity, motor images, the use of the hands, and is THE method of teaching.
There are at present excellent psychological methods of testing out the memory capacity. Every one engaged in any responsible work, or troubled about his memory, should be so tested. While there are other qualities of mind of great importance, memory is basic, and no one can really understand himself who is in doubt about his memory. In such diseases as neurasthenia one of the commonest complaints is the "loss of memory," which greatly troubles the patient. As a matter of fact, what is impaired is interest and attention, and when the patient realizes this he is usually quite relieved. The man who has a poor memory may become very successful if he develops systems of recording, filing, indexing, but his possibilities of knowledge are greatly reduced by his defect.[1]
[1] It is the growth of the subject matter of knowledge that makes necessary the elaborate systems of indexing, etc., now so important. It is as much as man can do to follow the places where the men work, let alone what they are doing. This growth of knowledge is getting to be an extra-human phenomenon. Of this Graham Wallas has written entertainingly.
A second fundamental ability of living tissue, and of particular importance in character, is habit formation. Habit resides in the fact that once living tissue has been traversed by a stimulus and has responded by an act, three things result:
1. The pathway for that stimulus becomes more permeable; becomes, as it were, grooved or like a track laid across the living structure of the nervous system.
2. The responding element is more easily stirred into activity, responds with more vigor and with less effort.
3. Consciousness, at first invoked, recedes more and more, until the habit-action of whatever type tends to become automatic. There is in this last peculiarity a tendency for the habit to establish itself as independent of the personality, and if an injurious or undesired habit, to set up the worst of the conflicts of life,—a conflict between one's intention and an automaton in the shape of a powerfully entrenched habit.
Habits are economical of thought and energy, generally speaking; that is their main recommendation. A dozen examples present themselves at once as illustrative: piano playing, with its intense concentration on each note, with consciousness attending to the action of each muscle, and then practice, habit formation, and the ease and power of execution with the mind free to wander off in the moods suggested by the music, or to busy itself with improvisations, flourishes and the artistic touches. Before true artistry can come, technique must be relegated to habit. So with typewriting, driving an automobile, etc.