Chapter 64 The Second Law of Memory: Repetition

You, too, can memorize untold amounts of material—as long as you repeat it often, review what you want to remember, and keep using it. The University of Al-Afa in Cairo is one of the largest universities in the world.It is an Islamic university with a total of 21,000 students.The university's entrance exam requires every student applying for admission to recite the Koran. The length of the "Koran" is about the same as that of the "Bible New Testament", and it takes three days to recite it. Chinese students, also known as "school children", must also recite some religious and classical Chinese books.

Why can these Arab and Chinese students show such genius memory? They use the method of "repetition", which is also the second "natural law of memory". You, too, can memorize untold amounts of material—as long as you repeat it often, review what you want to remember, and keep using it.Incorporate new words into your everyday conversations, call a stranger by name - if you want to remember his name.Talk about the main points in your speech.The knowledge and information you have used will impress you. But memorizing and reviewing blindly and mechanically is not enough.Repetition effectively, reviewing with certain fixed thinking characteristics-this is the method we should use.For example, Professor Ebbinghaus chose many meaningless syllables to recite to his students, like "deyux", "goli", etc.He found that these students recited these strange characters an average of 38 times in three days, and they could actually memorize them all. If they repeated them 68 times in one breath, they could also memorize them all. ... Various other psychological tests have shown the same result.

This is an important discovery about memory.This shows that if a person sits down and repeats a thing repeatedly until it is deeply imprinted in memory, he uses exactly twice as much time and energy as repeating it in intervals of time to obtain the same result. . This strange behavior of thought—if we may call it that—is explained by two factors: First, in the intervals between repetitions, our subconscious minds are busy making reliable connections."We can learn to swim in the winter and ski in the summer," Professor James said. Second, by repeating in intervals, our minds will not be fatigued by continuous work. Sir Richard Burton, the translator of The Arabian Nights, spoke twenty-seven languages ​​fluently.He said that he never practiced or studied a language for more than fifteen minutes at a time, "because, after fifteen minutes, the mind loses its freshness."

Knowing these facts, no one who prides himself on common sense will not wait until the day before a speech to start preparing.If he had really waited until the eve of the speech to do it, his memory would only be half as effective as it should be. Psychological research has repeatedly shown that we forget more of what we just learn in the first eight hours than we forget in the next 36 days.This wonderful ratio of "forgetting" is a very helpful discovery for us.So before you walk into a business meeting or a parent meeting or a club meeting, before you give a speech, take a look at your data, think over the facts you've gathered, and your memory will recover Freshness.

Lincoln knew the value of doing so.At Gettysburg, the learned Edward Everett was scheduled to deliver a speech ahead of him, and when Lincoln saw that Everett's lengthy formal dedication was drawing to a close, he "obviously expressed He's got that nervous look on his face. He always does that when people are speaking in front of him."He hastily adjusted his glasses, took out the lecture notes from his pocket, and read them silently to strengthen his memory.