MEMORY TRAINING

Hokitika Guardian, 31 August 1931, Page 3

MEMORY TRAINING

's, i I /i; "•/ I 1 il MIND ONLY CAN BE IMPROVED. LESSON IN PSYCHOLOGY. !\ fr - ■ , ’“You cannot train your memory ; you can. only, finprove your method of learn-ing/--This was the answer of Dr G. B. Bee by, Ph.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 iv:. • Public Library, says the \" Times.” ' “This business of memory training is - ‘: one about . which more nonsense has ® talked rtbfct any other, and that is • saying" something,” said Dr Beeby. Yet It was a nlost important thing to ‘ - t’ ' every person.- _ Memory was the lecall ■ • ■ 'af-past'Experience. To ride a bicycle - ,/was : a-’ memory of the muscles. There memory of visualisation and -by connection of ideas. The remembering of the words of a song wa s a mus- / cular 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 s 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 tta make-up of 'the mind. / Some people’s minds took ; impressions‘‘easily and lost them easily; ' V./i Alt hers "took longer to gain the impres- ■■■■ it longer. No matter of training-wotild alter these processes, r thoughsom' e tim an injury of the brain wotild cause " a derangement of tb&pv ■ " •sjr training courses advothe • noticing of unusual things. Hedid /neff// wish .to say anything against 1 thfsiXbiit' he could not see what practical use it would, be. It did not matter if one could hot visualise things one was accustomed to so long as one rememberedl them-when one saw them. The best types, of minds remembered only the essential things. Retention in tlie ; speaker Vopinion, could not be trained •'•- v-. ' • v ! F PARLOUR TRICKS. To demonstrate, that some apparent y £ amazing 'feats of memory were merely vpaVliour fribks, 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 aokolutely no visual memory; they had "to write a thing down before they icinembered it Dr Beeby a number <-f e\...yperiences lie, had had of children whose Nr?i/- -mdntal processes were unusual, to illustrate his'meaning. All people were as /.unlike. mfen'tally as they were externally, he said, and no general rule or method could he laid down. One could -- net train one’s memory ; one could only f improve one’s method of learning life said,.-