How to Use Your Mind: A Psychology of Study: Being a Manual for the Use of Students and Teachers in the Administration of Supervised StudyKitson, Harry Dexter
Science
How to Use Your Mind: A Psychology of Study: Being a Manual for the Use of Students and Teachers in the Administration of Supervised Study
Kitson, Harry Dexter
Study skills
According to another classification, there are two ways of
memorizing--by rote and by logical associations. Rote memorizing
involves the repetition of material just as it stands, and usually
requires such long and laborious drill that it is seldom economical.
True, some matter must be memorized this way; such as the days of the
week and the names of the months; but there is another and gentler
method which is usually more effective and economical than that of
brutal repetition. That is the method of logical association, by which
one links up a new fact with something already in the mind. If, for
example, you wish to remember the date of the World's Fair in Chicago,
you might proceed as follows: Ask yourself, What did the Fair
commemorate? The discovery of America in 1492, the four hundredth
anniversary occurring in 1892. The Fair could not be made ready in that
year, however, so was postponed a year. Such a process of memorizing
the date is less laborious than the method of rote memory, and is
usually more likely to lead to ready recall. The old fact already in
mind acts as a magnet which at some later time may call up other facts
that had once been associated with it. You can easily see that this new
fact might have been associated with several old facts, thus securing
more chances of being called up. From this it may be inferred that the
more facts you have in your mind about a subject the more chances you
have of retaining new facts. It is sometimes thought that if a person
stores so much in his memory it will soon be so full that he cannot
memorize any more. This is a false notion, involving a conception of
the brain as a hopper into which impressions are poured until it runs
over. On the contrary, it should be regarded as an interlacing of
fibers with infinite possibilities of inter-connection, and no one ever
exhausts the number of associations that can be made.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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