The Science of Human Nature: A Psychology for BeginnersPyle, William Henry
Science
The Science of Human Nature: A Psychology for Beginners
Pyle, William Henry
Educational psychology; Psychology
Let us now ask the question, why can one remember better words that are
connected by logical relations than words that have no such connection?
If we read to a person a list of twenty nonsense words, the person can
remember only two or three; but if a list of twenty words connected in a
sentence were read to a person, in most cases, all of them would be
reproduced. The reason is that the words in the latter case are not new.
We already know the words. They are already a part of our experience. We
have had days, perhaps years, of experience with them. All that is now
new about them is perhaps a slightly new relation.
Moreover, the twenty words may contain but one, or at most only a few,
ideas, and in this case it is the ideas that we remember. The ideas hold
the words together. If the twenty words contain a great number of ideas,
then we cannot remember all of them from one reading. If I say, "I have
a little boy who loves his father and mother very much, and this boy
wishes to go to the river to catch some fish," one can easily remember
all these words after one reading. But if I say, "The stomach in all the
Salmonidæ is syphonal and at the pylorus are fifteen to two hundred
comparatively large pyloric coeca"; although this sentence is shorter,
one finds it more difficult to remember, and the main reason is that the
words are not so familiar.
=Memory and Thinking.= What is the relation of memory to thinking and the
other mental functions? One often hears a teacher say that she does not
wish her pupils to depend on memory, but wishes them to reason things
out. Such a statement shows a misunderstanding of the facts; for
reasoning itself is only the recall of ideas in accordance with the laws
of association. Without memory, there would be no reasoning, for the
very material of thought is found to be the revived experiences which we
call ideas, memories.
One of the first requisites of good thinking is a reliable memory. One
must have facts to reason, and these facts must come to one in memory to
be available for thought. If one wishes to become a great thinker in a
certain field, he must gain experience in that field and organize that
experience in such a way as to remember it and to recall it when it is
wanted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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