1. Carefully consider your own powers of memory and see whether you can decide which of the four types of brain you have. Apply similar tests to your classmates or a group of school children whom you have a chance to observe. Be sure to take into account the effects of past training or habits of memory.
2. Watch in your own memorizing and also that of school children for failures in recall caused by lack of proper associations. Why is it particularly hard to commit what one does not understand?
3. Observe a class in a recitation or an examination and seek to discover whether any defects of memory revealed are to be explained by lack of (1) repetition, (2) recency, (3) vividness in learning.
4. Make a study of your own class and also of a group of children in school to discover their methods of memorizing. Have in mind the rules for memorizing given in section 5 of this chapter.
5. Observe by introspection your method of recall of historical events you have studied, and note whether images form an important part of your memory material; or does your recall consist chiefly of bare facts? In how far does this depend on your method of learning the facts in the first place?
6. Carefully consider your experience from cramming your lessons. Does the material learned in this way stay with you? Do you understand it and find yourself able to use it as well as stuff learned during a longer interval and with more time for associations to form?
CHAPTER XII
THINKING
No word is more constantly on our lips than the word think. A hundred times a day we tell what we think about this thing or that. Any exceptional power of thought classes us among the efficient of our generation. It is in their ability to think that men stand preëminently above the animals.