Chapter 37 William James Reveals the Secrets of Good Memory

We have talked about the first two laws of memory here.And the third law, association, is an indispensable factor in memory.In fact, associations are interpretations of memory itself.As Professor James puts it: Our brain is essentially an associative machine—suppose you were silent for a moment, and then said in an imperative tone: "Remember! Recall!" Will your memory follow this instruction to recall a specific engram from the past?of course not.Because it makes you look into a vacuum, you can't help but ask yourself, "What am I going to recall?" In short, recall needs a cue.But if I say, recall your date of birth, or what you had for breakfast, or the arrangement of scales, then the desired result will immediately appear in your memory: the cue determines the probability of recalling a particular object.

Now, if you try to figure out how this happens, you might immediately imagine that the cue must be closely related to the recalled event.For example, "date of birth" has a deep-rooted relationship with numbers such as year and month. Breakfast will only make you imagine coffee, bacon, and eggs. , Duo.In fact, the law of association always plays a role in our thinking process, as long as this thinking is not interrupted because there is no object to think about.Whatever thoughts come to our minds, associations allow us to immediately capture them as if they were already in our minds.

Moreover, what you think about is exactly the same as what you recall—so trained memory relies on an organizational system of associations whose function depends on two properties.First, the persistence of associations; second, the orderliness of associations.The secret of a good memory, then, is to form diverse and rich associations with the facts to be memorized.And in this process, what else should we do besides thinking as much as possible about memorizing facts?Simply put, it is to bring the facts into order.For example, two people with the same experience, if one of them often thinks about the things he comes into contact with and forms them into an orderly system, then this person has relatively better memory ability.