When you train the particular sense muscles that transmit external impressions to a particular brain-mind unit (the same muscles that reflexively express the ideas of that one part of your multiplex ego) you may be absolutely sure of developing a particular related characteristic. For example, if you want to sharpen your perceptive faculties so that you will see with the eyes of your mind much more than the ordinary man perceives, exercise your physical eyes in taking snap-shots that you can see clearly in detail with your imagination when you look away from an object after a glance at it. Try glancing at the furnishings of your room, then shut your eyes and construct a mental picture. When this is definitely clear to you, open your eyes. The reality will be very different from your imagined picture. But sharpen your perceptive faculties, develop a "camera eye;" then the reality will be exactly impressed on your mind. Witnesses in court often contradict one another, in all honesty, simply because their ability to perceive actualities is not highly developed. In consequence, they get false mental impressions of happenings or things they severally have seen.
Three Processes Of Mental Development
There are but three processes of mental development:
The first process comprises getting information from a sense to its associated brain center, which then makes the mind center conscious that particular information has been transmitted to it.
The second process is organizing the information in the mind center, with relation to other information previously brought to the mind.
In the third process the mind center directs its co-related brain center to send out certain impulses of action to the corresponding muscular structure.
Let us analyze an illustration of these three processes of mental development. Suppose first you hear something that concerns a particular prospect for your "goods of sale." Second, you comprehend the significance to you of what you have heard. Third, your mind directs your muscles to make a particular use of what you have comprehended. The original mental impression has been fully developed because you employed all three processes. If you had not completed the cycle of development, you would have given your mind only partial exercise with what you heard.
In order to become a master salesman, you must take in many impressions, perceive their significance to you and how you can make use of them, then act on your comprehension of what you have learned. There are countless failures in the world who might have been successes if they had not stopped their possible mental development at the first or second stages.
A man might know an encyclopedia of facts, but be a failure.
He might comprehend how to use his knowledge, and still be a failure.