MEMORY TRAINING

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXI, Issue 214, 24 August 1931, Page 5

MEMORY TRAINING

MIND ONLY CAN BE IMPROVED. LESSON IN PSYCHOLOGY. "You cannot train your memory; you can only improve your method of learning.” This was the answer of Dr. C. E. Beeby, I'h.D., lecturer in psychology at Canterbury College, to the question asked in the title of his lecture, "Can the Memory be Trained?” given in the Public Library, says the ‘ ‘ Christchurch Times. ’ ’ “This business memory training is one about which more nonsense has been talked than any other, and that is saying something,” said Dr. Beeby. Yet it was a most improtant thing to every person. Memory was the recall of past experience. To rido a bicycle was a memory of the muscles. There was, too, memory by visualisation and by connection of ideas. The remembering of the words of a song was a muscular memory, as was also writing. They were all different processes. To train one might not be to train another.

THREE PROCESSES. There were three processes in memorising anything. First there was impression, secondly, retention, and lastly, recall. In this particular memorising was like the making of a gramophone record. There was the impression of the needle on the soft wax, the transference to the harder surface, and finally the playing of the record. Retention depended on the make-up of the mind. ’Some people's minds took impressions easily and lost them easily; others took longer to gain the impression, but retained it longer. No matter of training would alter these processes, though sometimes an injury of tho brain would cause a derangement of them. Some memory training courses advocated the noticing of unusual things. He did not wish to say anything against this, but he could not see what practical use it would be. It did not matter if one could not visualise things one was accustomed to so long as one remembered them when one saw them. The best types of minds remembered only the essential things. Retention, in the speaker’s opinion, could not bo trained. PARLOUR TRICKS.

To demonstrate that some apparently amazing feats of memory were merely parlour tricks, Dr. Beeby gave a demonstration by remembering twenty things in numerical order, and then explained how it was done. This, he said, was of no use as a memory trainer. There were some people who had absolutely no visual memory; they had to write a thing down before they remembered it. Dr. Beeby related a number of experiences he had had of children whose mental processes were unusual, to illustrate his meaning. All people were as unlike mentally as they were externally, he said, and no general rule or method could be laid down. One could not train one’s memory; one could only improve one’s method of learning, he said.