Memory Tricks

 Your life is touched by a never-ending barrage of sensory impressions-a continuous attack by countless little "sense-arrows," which invade your body through eyes and ears, mouth, nose and fingertips...all over you! These impressions crash the gates and head straight for your brain, there to be sorted and filed for future reference.

As you read this page, vision sensarrows are carrying its message to your brain; and because your mind is aware of your overall general goal, everything is being filed under the heading of "memory" ... "making mine better." That, then, is your target: success at gathering information about the psychological aspects of memory, and utilizing it to strengthen your own ability to remember. Or, turning the minds own habits to your practical advantage, much like a matador studies the bull's style of charging and turning, and then uses this knowledge to help him turn in a better performance during the corrida.

Using this image as a starting-point, let's begin to analyze your mind's memory habits, and see if they don't afford a few suggestions for strengthening your ability to remember.

Before those sensarrows can get into your mental filing cabinet, you've got to open the drawer. Let your sesame be the words, "I want to remember, I can remember, I shall remember!" As important as knowing the best ways to go about strengthening your retentive ability is your attitude. If you're convinced before you start that nothing's going to help, then you're absolutely right, even though you're dead wrong. The doubts that you have will always be present in your conscious thoughts, leaving no room for practical memories.

But an optimistic outlook clears the rocks from the road at the outset! If you're confident that you can reach your goal, the route will be fun, and everyone knows that fun is more fun than work! When you come to a hill, a difficult part of making your memory better, just making believe that it's fun will make it a lot easier!

Experiments have demonstrated that people generally retain memory of pleasant things more accurately, and for a longer time, than memory of unhappiness. So it follows, doesn't it, that by being an optimist to begin with, your memory is automatically a great deal better?