|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 31
We have, then, not so much a faculty of memory as many faculties of
memory. We have as many as we have systems of objects habitually thought
of in connection with each other. A given object is held in the memory
by the associates it has acquired within its own system exclusively.
Learning the facts of another system will in no wise help it to stay in
the mind, for the simple reason that it has no 'cues' within that other
system.
We see examples of this on every hand. Most men have a good memory for
facts connected with their own pursuits. A college athlete, who remains
a dunce at his books, may amaze you by his knowledge of the 'records' at
various feats and games, and prove himself a walking dictionary of
sporting statistics. The reason is that he is constantly going over
these things in his mind, and comparing and making series of them. They
form for him, not so many odd facts, but a concept-system, so they
stick. So the merchant remembers prices, the politician other
politicians' speeches and votes, with a copiousness which astonishes
outsiders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on these
subjects easily explains.
The great memory for facts which a Darwin or a Spencer reveal in their
books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a mind
with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness. Let a man
early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of
evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to
their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and, the
more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition
will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory
memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon
as heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may
coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices of
its web. Those of you who have had much to do with scholars and
_savants_ will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean.
The best possible sort of system into which to weave an object,
mentally, is a _rational_ system, or what is called a 'science.' Place
the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory series; explain it
logically by its causes, and deduce from it its necessary effects; find
out of what natural law it is an instance,--and you then know it in the
best of all possible ways. A 'science' is thus the greatest of
labor-saving contrivances. It relieves the memory of an immense number
of details, replacing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by the
logical ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. If you know a 'law,'
you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the
law will reproduce them for you whenever you require them. The law of
refraction, for example: If you know that, you can with a pencil and a
bit of paper immediately discern how a convex lens, a concave lens, or a
prism, must severally alter the appearance of an object. But, if you
don't know the general law, you must charge your memory separately with
each of the three kinds of effect.
A 'philosophic' system, in which all things found their rational
explanation and were connected together as causes and effects, would be
the perfect mnemonic system, in which the greatest economy of means
would bring about the greatest richness of results. So that, if we have
poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves by cultivating the
philosophic turn of mind.
There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, some public, some sold
as secrets. They are all so many devices for training us into certain
methodical and stereotyped _ways of thinking_ about the facts we seek to
retain. Even were I competent, I could not here go into these systems in
any detail. But a single example, from a popular system, will show what
I mean. I take the number-alphabet, the great mnemonic device for
recollecting numbers and dates. In this system each digit is
represented by a consonant, thus: 1 is _t_ or _d_; 2, _n_; 3, _m_; 4,
_r_; 5, _l_; 6, _sh, j, ch_, or _g_; 7, _c, k, g_, or _qu_; 8, _f_ or
_v_; 9, _b_ or _p_; 0, _s, c_, or _z_. Suppose, now, you wish to
remember the velocity of sound, 1,142 feet a second: _t, t, r, n_, are
the letters you must use. They make the consonants of _tight run_, and
it would be a 'tight run' for you to keep up such a speed. So 1649, the
date of the execution of Charles I., may be remembered by the word
_sharp_, which recalls the headsman's axe.
Apart from the extreme difficulty of finding words that are appropriate
in this exercise, it is clearly an excessively poor, trivial, and silly
way of 'thinking' about dates; and the way of the historian is much
better. He has a lot of landmark-dates already in his mind. He knows the
historic concatenation of events, and can usually place an event at its
right date in the chronology-table, by thinking of it in a rational way,
referring it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and
consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with
theirs. The artificial memory-systems, recommending, as they do, such
irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the first
landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as enjoy no
rational connection with the rest of our ideas. Thus the student of
physics may remember the order of the spectral colours by the word
_vibgyor_ which their initial letters make. The student of anatomy may
remember the position of the Mitral valve on the Left side of the heart
by thinking that L.M. stands also for 'long meter' in the hymn-books.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|