PUBLIC SPEAKING= DALE DOROTHY CHAP 4

CHAPTER FOUR 

The Improvement of Memory “The average man,” said the noted psychologist,Professor Carl Seashore, “does not use above ten percent of his actual inherited capacity for memory. Hewastes the ninety per cent by violating the natural lawsofremembering.” Are you one of these average persons? If so, youarestruggling under a handicap both socially and commercially;consequently, you will be interested in, and profit by,reading and rereading this chapter. It describes and explainsthese natural laws of remembering and shows how to   in business  and social conversation as well as in public speaking. These “natural laws of remembering” are very simple.

There are only three. 

Every so-called “memory system”has been founded upon them. Briefly, they are impression, repetition, and association. The first mandate of memory is this: get a deep, vivid and lasting impression of the thing you wish to retain. And to do that, you must concentrate. Theodore Roosevelt’s remarkable memory impressed everyone he met. little amount of his extraordinary facility was due to this:his impressions were scratched on steel, not written in water. He had, by persistence and practice, trained himself to concentrate under the most adverse conditions. In 1912, during the Bull Moose Convention in Chicago, his headquarters were in the Congress Hotel. Crowds surged through the street below, crying, waving banners, shouting “We want Teddy! We want Teddy!” The roar of the throng,the music of bands, the coming and going of politicians,the hurried conferences, the consultations—would have driven the ordinary individual to distraction; but Rooseveltsat in a rocking chair in bis room, oblivious to it all, reading Herodotus, the Greek historian. On his trip throughthe Brazilian wilderness, as soon as he reached the campingground in the evening, he found a dry spot under somehuge tree, got out a camp stool and his copy of Gibbon’s“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and, at once,“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and, at once,he was so immersed in the book that he was oblivioustothe rain, to the noise and activity of the camp, to thesounds of the tropical forest Small wonder that the manremembered what he read. Five minutes of vivid, energetic concentration will produce greater results than days of mooning about in a mentalhaze. “One intense hour,” wrote Henry Ward Beecher,“will do more than dreamy years.” “If there is anyonething that I have learned which is more important than anything else,” said Eugene Grace, who made over a milliona year as president of Bethlehem Steel Company, “andwhich I practice every day under any and all circumstances,it is concentration in the particular job / have in hand.”This is one of the secrets of power, especially memorypowerThey Coudn't See a Cherry Tree Thomas Edison found that twenty-seven of hisassistants had used, every day for six months, a certain pathwhich led from his lamp factory to the main worksatMenlo Park, New Jersey. A cherry tree grew along that The Improvement of Memory 59path, and yet not one of these twenty-seven men had, whenquestioned, ever been conscious of that tree’s existence. “The average person’s brain,” declared Mr. Edison withheat and energy, “does not observe a thousandth partofwhat the eye observes. It is almost incredible how poor ourpowers of observation—genuine observation—are.” Introduce the average person to two or three of yourfriends and, the chances are that Introduce the average person to two or three of yourfriends and, the chances are that two minutes afterwardhecannot recall the name of a single one of them. Andwhy?Because he never paid sufficient attention to them in thefirst place, he never accurately observed them. He will likelytell you he has a poor memory. No, he has a poor observation. He would not condemn a camera because it failedto take pictures in a fog, but he expects his mind to retainimpressions that are hazy and foggy to a degree. Of Joseph Pulitzer, who made the New York World , hadthree words placed over the desk of every man in liiseditorial offices: Accuracy Accuracy ACCURACY That is what we want. Hear the man’s name precisely.Insist on it. Ask him to repeat it. Inquire how it is spelled.He will be flattered by your interest and you will be able toremember his name because you have concentrated onit.You have got a clear, accurate impressionWhy Lincoln Read Aloud Lincoln, in his youth, attended a country schoolwhere the floor was made out of split logs: greased pages,tom from the copybooks and pasted over the windows,served instead of glass to let in the light. Only one copyof the textbook existed, and the teacher read from it aloud.The pupils repeated the lesson after him, all of them talking 6o HOW TO DEVELOP SELF-CONFIDENCEat once. It made a constant uproar, and the neighborscalled it the “blab school.” At the “blab school,” Lincoln formed a habit At the “blab school,” Lincoln formed a habit that clungto him all his life: he forever read aloud everythinghewished to remember. Each morning, as soon as he reachedhis law office in Springfield, he spread himself out onthecouch, hooked one long, ungainly leg over a neighboringchair, and read the newspaper audibly. “He annoyed me,”said his partner, “almost beyond endurance. I once askedhim why he read in this fashion. This was his explanation:‘When I read aloud, two senses catch the idea: first, I seewhat I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I can rememberit better.His memory was extraordinarily retentive. “My mind,”he said, “is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch anything on it, but almost impossible, after you get it there, torub it out.” Appealing to two of the senses was the method he usedto do the scratching. Go thou, and do likewise. . . . The ideal thing would be not only to see and hear thething to be remembered, but to touch it, and smell it, andtaste it But, above all else, see it. We are visual minded. Eyeimpressions stick. We can often remember a man’s face,even though we cannot recall his name. The nerves thatlead from the eye to the brain are twenty-five times as largeas those leading from the ear to the brain. The Chinesehave a proverb that says “one time seeing is worthathousand times hearing.” Write down the name, the telephone number, the Write down the name, the telephone number, the speechoutline you want to remember. Look at it. Close your eyes.Visualize it in flaming letters of fire. How Mark Twain Learned to Speak Without Notes The discovery of how to use his visual memoryenabled Mark Twain to discard the notes that had ham- The Improvement of Memory 61 pered his speeches for years. Here is his story as he toldit in Harper's MagazineDates are hard to remember because they consist offigures: figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don’t take hold; they form no pictures,and so they give the eye no chance to take hold. Picturescan make dates stick. They can make nearly anythingstick—particularly if you make the picture yourself.Indeed, that is the great point—make the picture yourself. I know about this from experience. Thirty years agoI was delivering a memorized lecture every night, andevery night I had to help myself with a page of notes tokeep from getting myself mixed. The notes consisted ofbeginnings of sentences, and were eleven in number,and they ran something like this: In that region the weather At that time it was a custom But in California one never heard Eleven of them. They initialed th

Eleven of them. They initialed the brief of the lectureand protected me against skipping. But they all lookedabout alike on the page; they formed no picture; I hadthem by heart, but I could never with certainty rememberthe order of their succession; therefore, I always hadtokeep those notes by me and look at them every littlewhile. Once I mislaid them; you will not be able toimagine the terrors of that evening. I now saw that Imust invent some other protection. So I got ten of theinitial letters by heart in their proper order—I, A, B,and so on—and I went on the platform the next nightwith these marked in ink on my ten finger nails. Butit didn’t answer. I kept track of the fingers for awhile;then I lost it, and after that I was never quite sure whichfinger I had used last. I couldn’t lick off a letter afterusing it, for while that would have made success certain,it would also have provoked too much curiosity. Therewas curiosity enough without that. To the seemed more interested in my finger nails than I wasinmy subject; one or two persons asked afterward whatwas the matter with my hands. It was then that the idea of pictures occurred to me! 62 HOW TO DEVELOP SELF-CONFIDENCEThen my troubles passed away. In two minutes I madesix pictures with my pen, and they did the work of theeleven catch-sentences and did it perfectly. 1 threwthepictures away as soon as they were made, for i wassure1 could shut my eyes and see them any time. Thatwasa quarter of a century ago; the lecture vanished outofmy head more than twenty years ago, but 1 couldre-write it from the pictures—for they remain1 had occasion to deliver a talk on memory. I wantedtouse, very largely, the material in this chapter. I memorizedthe points by pictures. I visualized Roosevelt reading historywhile the crowds were yelling and bands playing outsidehis window. 1 saw Thomas Edison looking at a cherry tree.1 pictured Lincoln reading a newspaper aloud. I imaginedMark Twain licking ink off his fingernails as he facedanaudience. How did I remember the order of the pictures? Byone,two, three, and four? No, that would have been too difficult1 turned these numbers into pictures, and combined the pictures of the numbers with the pictures of the points. Toil-lustrate. Number one sounds like run, so 1 lustrate. Number one sounds like run, so 1 made a racehorse stand for one. 1 pictured Roosevelt in his room, reading astride a race horse. For two, 1 chose a word that soundslike two zoo. 1 had the cherry tree that Thomas Edisonwas looking at standing in the bear cage at the zoo. Forthree, 1 pictured an object that sounds like three tree. Ihad Lincoln sprawled out in the top of a tree, reading aloudto his partner. For four i imagined a picture that soundslike four door. Mark Twain stood in an open door, leaning against the jamb, licking the ink off his fingers ashetalked to the audience. 1 realize full well that many men who read this will thinkthat such a method verges on the ridiculous. It does. Thatis one reason why it works. It is comparatively easy to re-member the bizarre and ridiculous. Had 1 tried to the order of my points by numbers only, 1 might easily haveforgotten; but by the system i have just described, it wasalmost impossible to forget. When I wished to recall my The Improvement of Memory 63third point, I had but to ask myself what was in the topofthe tree, instantly I saw Lincoln. 1 have, very largely for my own convenience, turned the(lumbers from one to twenty into pictures, choosing pictures that sound like the numbers. I have set them downtiere. If you will spend half an hour memorizing thesepicture-numerals you will then be able, after having alistt)f twenty objects called to you but once, to repeat themn their exact order and to skip about at randomanlouncing which object was called to louncing which object was called to you eighth, whichfourteenth, which third, and so on. Here are the picture numbers. Try the test. You will findt decidedly amusing. 1. Run—visualize a race horse. 2. Zoo—see the bear cage in the zoo. 3. Tree-picture the third object called to youaslying in the top of a tree. 4. Door—or wild boar. Take any object or 4. Door—or wild boar. Take any object or animalthat sounds like four. 5. Bee hive. 6. Sick—see a Red Cross nurse. 7. Heaven—a street paved with gold, and angelsplaying on harps. 8. Gate. 9. Wine—the bottle has fallen over on the table, andthe wine is streaming out and pouring downsomething below. Put action into the pictures.It helps to make them stick. 10. Den of wild animals in a rocky cave in the 4. Door—or wild boar. Take any object or animalthat sounds like four. 5. Bee hive. 6. Sick—see a Red Cross nurse. 7. Heaven—a street paved with gold, and angelsplaying on harps. 8. Gate. 9. Wine—the bottle has fallen over on the table, andthe wine is streaming out and pouring downsomething below. Put action into the pictures.It helps to make them stick. 10. Den of wild animals in a rocky cave in the woods. ^4 HOW TO DEVELOP SELF-CON FID f\ X11. A football eleven, rushing madly across the fielc l picture them carrying aloft the object thuI wish to recall as number eleven. 12. Shelve—see some one shoving something backo: a shelf. 13. Hurting—see the blood spurting out of a woumand reddening the thirteenth object. 14. Courting—a couple are sitting on 14. Courting—a couple are sitting on something ancmaking love. 15. Lifting—a strong man, a regular John L. Sullivanis lifting something high above Ms head. 16. Licking—a fist fight. 17. Leavening—a housewife is kneading dough, ancinto the dough she kneads the seventeen!!object. 18. Waiting—a woman is standing at a forked patlin the deep woods waiting for some one19. Pining—a woman is weeping. See her tears fallingon the nineteenth thing you wish to recall. 20. Horn of Plenty—a goat’s horn overflowing witlflowers and fruit and corn. If you wish to try the test, spend a few minutes memorizing these picture-numbers. If you prefer, make pictures of your own. For ten, think of wren or fountain petor hen or sen-sen—anything that sounds like ten. Suppos*that the tenth object recalled to you a windmill. See th(hen sitting on the windmill, or see it pumping ink to the fountain pen. Then, when you are asked what wasthttenth object called, do not think of ten at all; but merel] The Improvement of Memory 65ask yourself where was the hen sitting. You may not thinkit will work, but try it. You can soon astound people withwhat they will consider to be an extraordinary capacity forremembering. You will find it entertaining if nothing else.Memorizing a Book as Long as the New Testament One of the largest unive The Improvement of Memory “The average man,” said the noted psychologist,Professor Carl Seashore, “does not use above ten percent of his actual inherited capacity for memory. Hewastes the ninety per cent by violating the natural lawsofremembering.” Are you one of these average persons? If so, youarestruggling under a handicap both socially and commercially;consequently, you will be interested in, and profit by,reading and rereading this chapter. It describes and explainsthese natural laws of remembering and shows how to usethem in business

 and social conversation as well as in publicspeaking. These “natural laws of

 remembering” are very simple.

There are only three. Every so-called “memory system”has been founded upon them. Briefly, they are impression, repetition, and association. The first mandate of memory is this: get a deep, vividand lasting impression of the thing you wish to retain. Andto do that, you must concentrate. Theodore Roosevelt’sremarkable memory impressed everyone he met. little amount of his extraordinary facility was due to this:his impressions were scratched on steel, not written inwater. He had, by persistence and practice, trained himselfto concentrate under the most adverse conditions. In 1912, during the Bull Moose Convention in Chicago, his headquarters were in the Congress Hotel. Crowds surged throughthe street below, crying, waving banners, shouting “Wewant Teddy! We want Teddy!” The roar of the throng,the music of bands, the coming and going of politicians,the hurried conferences, the consultations—would havedriven the ordinary individual to distraction; but Rooseveltsat in a rocking chair in bis room, oblivious to it all, reading Herodotus, the Greek historian. On his trip throughthe Brazilian wilderness, as soon as he reached the campingground in the evening, he found a dry spot under somehuge tree, got out a camp stool and his copy of Gibbon’s“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and, at once,“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and, at once,he was so immersed in the book that he was oblivioustothe rain, to the noise and activity of the camp, to thesounds of the tropical forest Small wonder that the manremembered what he read. Five minutes of vivid, energetic concentration will produce greater results than days of mooning about in a mentalhaze. “One intense hour,” wrote Henry Ward Beecher,“will do more than dreamy years.” “If there is anyonething that I have learned which is more important than anything else,” said Eugene Grace, who made over a milliona year as president of Bethlehem Steel Company, “andwhich I practice every day under any and all circumstances,it is concentration in the particular job / have in hand.”This is one of the secrets of power, especially memorypowerThey Coudn't See a Cherry Tree Thomas Edison found that twenty-seven of hisassistants had used, every day for six months, a certain pathwhich led from his lamp factory to the main worksatMenlo Park, New Jersey. A cherry tree grew along that The Improvement of Memory 59path, and yet not one of these twenty-seven men had, whenquestioned, ever been conscious of that tree’s existence. “The average person’s brain,” declared Mr. Edison withheat and energy, “does not observe a thousandth partofwhat the eye observes. It is almost incredible how poor ourpowers of observation—genuine observation—are.” Introduce the average person to two or three of yourfriends and, the chances are that Introduce the average person to two or three of yourfriends and, the chances are that two minutes afterwardhecannot recall the name of a single one of them. Andwhy?Because he never paid sufficient attention to them in thefirst place, he never accurately observed them. He will likelytell you he has a poor memory. No, he has a poor observation. He would not condemn a camera because it failedto take pictures in a fog, but he expects his mind to retainimpressions that are hazy and foggy to a degree. Of Joseph Pulitzer, who made the New York World , hadthree words placed over the desk of every man in liiseditorial offices: Accuracy Accuracy ACCURACY That is what we want. Hear the man’s name precisely.Insist on it. Ask him to repeat it. Inquire how it is spelled.He will be flattered by your interest and you will be able toremember his name because you have concentrated onit.You have got a clear, accurate impressionWhy Lincoln Read Aloud Lincoln, in his youth, attended a country schoolwhere the floor was made out of split logs: greased pages,tom from the copybooks and pasted over the windows,served instead of glass to let in the light. Only one copyof the textbook existed, and the teacher read from it aloud.The pupils repeated the lesson after him, all of them talking 6o HOW TO DEVELOP SELF-CONFIDENCEat once. It made a constant uproar, and the neighborscalled it the “blab school.” At the “blab school,” Lincoln formed a habit At the “blab school,” Lincoln formed a habit that clungto him all his life: he forever read aloud everythinghewished to remember. Each morning, as soon as he reachedhis law office in Springfield, he spread himself out onthecouch, hooked one long, ungainly leg over a neighboringchair, and read the newspaper audibly. “He annoyed me,”said his partner, “almost beyond endurance. I once askedhim why he read in this fashion. This was his explanation:‘When I read aloud, two senses catch the idea: first, I seewhat I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I can rememberit better.His memory was extraordinarily retentive. “My mind,”he said, “is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch anything on it, but almost impossible, after you get it there, torub it out.” Appealing to two of the senses was the method he usedto do the scratching. Go thou, and do likewise. . . . The ideal thing would be not only to see and hear thething to be remembered, but to touch it, and smell it, andtaste it But, above all else, see it. We are visual minded. Eyeimpressions stick. We can often remember a man’s face,even though we cannot recall his name. The nerves thatlead from the eye to the brain are twenty-five times as largeas those leading from the ear to the brain. The Chinesehave a proverb that says “one time seeing is worthathousand times hearing.” Write down the name, the telephone number, the Write down the name, the telephone number, the speechoutline you want to remember. Look at it. Close your eyes.Visualize it in flaming letters of fire. How Mark Twain Learned to Speak Without Notes The discovery of how to use his visual memoryenabled Mark Twain to discard the notes that had ham- The Improvement of Memory 61 pered his speeches for years. Here is his story as he toldit in Harper's MagazineDates are hard to remember because they consist offigures: figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don’t take hold; they form no pictures,and so they give the eye no chance to take hold. Picturescan make dates stick. They can make nearly anythingstick—particularly if you make the picture yourself.Indeed, that is the great point—make the picture yourself. I know about this from experience. Thirty years agoI was delivering a memorized lecture every night, andevery night I had to help myself with a page of notes tokeep from getting myself mixed. The notes consisted ofbeginnings of sentences, and were eleven in number,and they ran something like this: In that region the weather At that time it was a custom But in California one never heard Eleven of them. They initialed th

Eleven of them. They initialed the brief of the lectureand protected me against skipping. But they all lookedabout alike on the page; they formed no picture; I hadthem by heart, but I could never with certainty rememberthe order of their succession; therefore, I always hadtokeep those notes by me and look at them every littlewhile. Once I mislaid them; you will not be able toimagine the terrors of that evening. I now saw that Imust invent some other protection. So I got ten of theinitial letters by heart in their proper order—I, A, B,and so on—and I went on the platform the next nightwith these marked in ink on my ten finger nails. Butit didn’t answer. I kept track of the fingers for awhile;then I lost it, and after that I was never quite sure whichfinger I had used last. I couldn’t lick off a letter afterusing it, for while that would have made success certain,it would also have provoked too much curiosity. Therewas curiosity enough without that. To the seemed more interested in my finger nails than I wasinmy subject; one or two persons asked afterward whatwas the matter with my hands. It was then that the idea of pictures occurred to me! 62 HOW TO DEVELOP SELF-CONFIDENCEThen my troubles passed away. In two minutes I madesix pictures with my pen, and they did the work of theeleven catch-sentences and did it perfectly. 1 threwthepictures away as soon as they were made, for i wassure1 could shut my eyes and see them any time. Thatwasa quarter of a century ago; the lecture vanished outofmy head more than twenty years ago, but 1 couldre-write it from the pictures—for they remain1 had occasion to deliver a talk on memory. I wantedtouse, very largely, the material in this chapter. I memorizedthe points by pictures. I visualized Roosevelt reading historywhile the crowds were yelling and bands playing outsidehis window. 1 saw Thomas Edison looking at a cherry tree.1 pictured Lincoln reading a newspaper aloud. I imaginedMark Twain licking ink off his fingernails as he facedanaudience. How did I remember the order of the pictures? Byone,two, three, and four? No, that would have been too difficult1 turned these numbers into pictures, and combined the pictures of the numbers with the pictures of the points. Toil-lustrate. Number one sounds like run, so 1 lustrate. Number one sounds like run, so 1 made a racehorse stand for one. 1 pictured Roosevelt in his room, reading astride a race horse. For two, 1 chose a word that soundslike two zoo. 1 had the cherry tree that Thomas Edisonwas looking at standing in the bear cage at the zoo. Forthree, 1 pictured an object that sounds like three tree. Ihad Lincoln sprawled out in the top of a tree, reading aloudto his partner. For four i imagined a picture that soundslike four door. Mark Twain stood in an open door, leaning against the jamb, licking the ink off his fingers ashetalked to the audience. 1 realize full well that many men who read this will thinkthat such a method verges on the ridiculous. It does. Thatis one reason why it works. It is comparatively easy to re-member the bizarre and ridiculous. Had 1 tried to the order of my points by numbers only, 1 might easily haveforgotten; but by the system i have just described, it wasalmost impossible to forget. When I wished to recall my The Improvement of Memory 63third point, I had but to ask myself what was in the topofthe tree, instantly I saw Lincoln. 1 have, very largely for my own convenience, turned the(lumbers from one to twenty into pictures, choosing pictures that sound like the numbers. I have set them downtiere. If you will spend half an hour memorizing thesepicture-numerals you will then be able, after having alistt)f twenty objects called to you but once, to repeat themn their exact order and to skip about at randomanlouncing which object was called to louncing which object was called to you eighth, whichfourteenth, which third, and so on. Here are the picture numbers. Try the test. You will findt decidedly amusing. 1. Run—visualize a race horse. 2. Zoo—see the bear cage in the zoo. 3. Tree-picture the third object called to youaslying in the top of a tree. 4. Door—or wild boar. Take any object or 4. Door—or wild boar. Take any object or animalthat sounds like four. 5. Bee hive. 6. Sick—see a Red Cross nurse. 7. Heaven—a street paved with gold, and angelsplaying on harps. 8. Gate. 9. Wine—the bottle has fallen over on the table, andthe wine is streaming out and pouring downsomething below. Put action into the pictures.It helps to make them stick. 10. Den of wild animals in a rocky cave in the 4. Door—or wild boar. Take any object or animalthat sounds like four. 5. Bee hive. 6. Sick—see a Red Cross nurse. 7. Heaven—a street paved with gold, and angelsplaying on harps. 8. Gate. 9. Wine—the bottle has fallen over on the table, andthe wine is streaming out and pouring downsomething below. Put action into the pictures.It helps to make them stick. 10. Den of wild animals in a rocky cave in the woods. ^4 HOW TO DEVELOP SELF-CON FID f\ X11. A football eleven, rushing madly across the fielc l picture them carrying aloft the object thuI wish to recall as number eleven. 12. Shelve—see some one shoving something backo: a shelf. 13. Hurting—see the blood spurting out of a woumand reddening the thirteenth object. 14. Courting—a couple are sitting on 14. Courting—a couple are sitting on something ancmaking love. 15. Lifting—a strong man, a regular John L. Sullivanis lifting something high above Ms head. 16. Licking—a fist fight. 17. Leavening—a housewife is kneading dough, ancinto the dough she kneads the seventeen!!object. 18. Waiting—a woman is standing at a forked patlin the deep woods waiting for some one19. Pining—a woman is weeping. See her tears fallingon the nineteenth thing you wish to recall. 20. Horn of Plenty—a goat’s horn overflowing witlflowers and fruit and corn. If you wish to try the test, spend a few minutes memorizing these picture-numbers. If you prefer, make pictures of your own. For ten, think of wren or fountain petor hen or sen-sen—anything that sounds like ten. Suppos*that the tenth object recalled to you a windmill. See th(hen sitting on the windmill, or see it pumping ink to the fountain pen. Then, when you are asked what wasthttenth object called, do not think of ten at all; but merel] The Improvement of Memory 65ask yourself where was the hen sitting. You may not thinkit will work, but try it. You can soon astound people withwhat they will consider to be an extraordinary capacity forremembering. You will find it entertaining if nothing else.Memorizing a Book as Long as the New Testament One of the lar rsities in the world is

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