Besides being the strongest of all the senses, sight is the most accurate. Psychological tests have shown the eye to be mistaken only eighteen per cent of the time, and the ear, which is the second sense in strength, is mistaken thirty-four per cent. Note that your sense of sight is especially endowed with the power to make the strongest, and at the same time, the most accurate impression upon your brain. The first step in memory improvement is to learn the proper use of this sense in impressing upon the brain those things which you wish to recall.
For the purposes of memory, to see a thing once is equal to having repeated it eighteen or twenty times.
Nature's Special Memory Endowment
We have a secondary or additional faculty which we call the mind's eye. You can close your eyes and see many familiar scenes or you can combine parts of these into new pictures that have never existed in fact. This process of visualization produces the strongest impression upon the brain that you are able to make.
The greatest step in the improvement of the memory is reached when the child realizes the value of this visual impression and is conscious of just how to use it.
A Memory Picture
Become familiar with the mind's eye picture and realize its value in memory, then follow the exercises given here until you are able to use it correctly for memory purposes. For practice visualize a House, use one that is familiar to you, see it as clearly as possible. Build a clear, definite picture as an artist would, first the outline, then add the detail, see the slope of the roof, the chimney, the gables, then see the shingles and the cracks between them, the bricks in the chimney and the plaster veins between.
The more distinctly you can see this object, the stronger the impression upon the brain—the longer it will last and the easier it will be to recall it.
The use of the exercises on Visualization in Book One will make it possible for you to build at once a clear picture of the House. If you have any difficulty in doing this, follow the instructions for drawing the outline and other suggestions given for the development of the faculty of visualization as they are found in the first book.