The Mind and Its Education Part 13

7. MEMORY DEVICES

Many devices have been invented for training or using the memory, and not a few worthless "systems" have been imposed by conscienceless fakers upon uninformed people. All memorizing finally must go back to the fundamental laws of brain activity and the rules growing out of these laws. There is no "royal road" to a good memory.

THE EFFECTS OF CRAMMING.--Not a few students depend on cramming for much of their learning. If this method of study would yield as valuable permanent results, it would be by far the most sensible and economical method to use; for under the stress of necessity we often are able to accomplish results much faster than when no pressure is resting upon us.

The difficulty is, however, that the results are not permanent; the facts learned do not have time to seek out and link themselves to well-established a.s.sociates; learned in an hour, their retention is as ephemeral as the application which gave them to us.

Facts which are needed but temporarily and which cannot become a part of our body of permanent knowledge may profitably be learned by cramming.

The lawyer needs many details for the case he is trying, which not only are valueless to him as soon as the case is decided, but would positively be in his way. He may profitably cram such facts. But those facts which are to become a permanent part of his mental equipment, such as the fundamental principles of law, he cannot cram. These he must have in a logical chain which will not leave their recall dependent upon a chance cue. Crammed facts may serve us during a recitation or an examination, but they never really become a part of us. Nothing can take the place of the logical placing of facts if they are to be remembered with facility, and be usable in thinking when recalled.

REMEMBERING ISOLATED FACTS.--But after all this is taken into consideration there still remain a large number of facts which refuse to fit into any connected or logical system. Or, if they do belong with some system, their connection is not very close, and we have more need for the few individual facts than for the system as a whole. Hence we must have some means of remembering such facts other than by connecting them with their logical a.s.sociations. Such facts as may be typified by the multiplication table, certain dates, events, names, numbers, errands, and engagements of various kinds--all these need to be remembered accurately and quickly when the occasion for them arises. We must be able to recall them with facility, so that the occasion will not have pa.s.sed by before we can secure them and we have failed to do our part because of the lapse.

With facts of this type the means of securing a good memory are the same as in the case of logical memory, except that we must of necessity forego the linking to naturally related a.s.sociates. We can, however, take advantage of the three laws which have been given. If these methods are used faithfully, then we have done what we can in the way of insuring the recall of facts of this type, unless we a.s.sociate them with some artificial cue, such as tying a thread around our finger to remember an errand, or learning the multiplication table by singing it.

We are not to be too ready to excuse ourselves, however, if we have forgotten to mail the letter or deliver the message; for our attention may have been very lax when we recorded the direction in the first place, and we may never have taken the trouble to think of the matter between the time it was given into our keeping and the time we were to perform the errand.

MNEMONIC DEVICES.--Many ingenious devices have been invented to a.s.sist the memory. No doubt each one of you has some way of your own of remembering certain things committed to you, or some much-needed fact which has a tendency to elude you. You may not tie the traditional string around your finger or place your watch in the wrong pocket; but if not, you have invented some method which suits your convenience better. While many books have been written, and many lectures given exploiting mnemonic systems, they are, however, all founded upon the same general principle: namely, that of _a.s.sociation of ideas_ in the mind. They all make use of the same basis for memory that any of us use every time we remember anything, from the commonest event which occurred last hour to the most abstruse bit of philosophy which we may have in our minds. They all tie the fact to be remembered to some other fact which is sure of recall, and then trust the old fact to bring the new along with it when it again comes into the mind.

Artificial devices may be permissible in remembering the cla.s.s of facts which have no logical a.s.sociates in which we can relate them; but even then I cannot help feeling that if we should use the same care and ingenuity in carefully recording the seemingly unrelated facts that we do in working out the device and making the a.s.sociation in it, we should discover hidden relations for most of the facts we wish to remember, and we should be able to insure their recall as certainly and in a better way than through the device. Then, also, we should not be in danger of handing over to the device various facts for which we should discover relations, thus placing them in the logical body of our usable knowledge where they belong.

8. PROBLEMS IN OBSERVATION AND INTROSPECTION

1. Carefully consider your own powers of memory and see whether you can decide which of the four types of brain you have. Apply similar tests to your cla.s.smates or a group of school children whom you have a chance to observe. Be sure to take into account the effects of past training or habits of memory.

2. Watch in your own memorizing and also that of school children for failures in recall caused by lack of proper a.s.sociations. Why is it particularly hard to commit what one does not understand?

3. Observe a cla.s.s in a recitation or an examination and seek to discover whether any defects of memory revealed are to be explained by lack of (1) repet.i.tion, (2) recency, (3) vividness in learning.

4. Make a study of your own cla.s.s and also of a group of children in school to discover their methods of memorizing. Have in mind the rules for memorizing given in section 5 of this chapter.

5. Observe by introspection your method of recall of historical events you have studied, and note whether _images_ form an important part of your memory material; or does your recall consist chiefly of bare _facts_? In how far does this depend on your method of _learning_ the facts in the first place?

6. Carefully consider your experience from cramming your lessons. Does the material learned in this way stay with you? Do you _understand_ it and find yourself able to _use_ it as well as stuff learned during a longer interval and with more time for a.s.sociations to form?

CHAPTER XII

THINKING

No word is more constantly on our lips than the word _think_. A hundred times a day we tell what we think about this thing or that. Any exceptional power of thought cla.s.ses us among the efficient of our generation. It is in their ability to think that men stand preeminently above the animals.

1. DIFFERENT TYPES OF THINKING

The term _think_, or _thinking_, is employed in so many different senses that it will be well first of all to come to an understanding as to its various uses. Four different types of thinking which we shall note are:[5] (1) _chance_, or idle, thinking; (2) thinking in the form of _uncritical belief_; (3) _a.s.similative_ thinking; and (4) _deliberative_ thinking.

CHANCE OR IDLE THINKING.--Our thinking is of the chance or idle kind when we think to no conscious end. No particular problem is up for solution, and the stream of thought drifts along in idleness. In such thinking, immediate interest, some idle fancy, the impulse of the moment, or the suggestions from our environment determine the train of a.s.sociations and give direction to our thought. In a sense, we surrender our mental bark to the winds of circ.u.mstance to drive it whithersoever they will without let or hindrance from us. Since no results are sought from our thinking, none are obtained. The best of us spend more time in these idle trains of thought than we would like to admit, while inferior and untrained minds seldom rise above this barren thought level. Not infrequently even when we are studying a lesson which demands our best thought power we find that an idle chain of a.s.sociations has supplanted the more rigid type of thinking and appropriated the field.

UNCRITICAL BELIEF.--We often say that we think a certain thing is true or false when we have, as a matter of fact, done little or no thinking about it. We only _believe_, or uncritically accept, the common point of view as to the truth or untruth of the matter concerned. The ancients believed that the earth was flat, and the savages that eclipses were caused by animals eating up the moon. Not a few people today believe that potatoes and other vegetables should be planted at a certain phase of the moon, that sickness is a visitation of Providence, and that various "charms" are potent to bring good fortune or ward off disaster.

Probably not one in a thousand of those who accept such beliefs could give, or have ever tried to give, any rational reason for their point of view.

But we must not be too harsh toward such crude ill.u.s.trations of uncritical thinking. It is entirely possible that not all of us who pride ourselves on our trained powers of thought could give good reasons discovered by our own thinking why we think our political party, our church, or our social organization is better than some other one. How few of us, after all, really _discover_ our creed, _join_ a church, or _choose_ a political party! We adopt the points of view of our nation or our group much as we adopt their customs and dress--not because we are convinced by thinking that they are best, but because they are less trouble.

a.s.sIMILATIVE THINKING.--It is this type of thinking that occupies us when we seek to appropriate new facts or ideas and understand them; that is, relate them to knowledge already on hand. We think after this fashion in much of our study in schools and textbooks. The problem for our thought is not so much one of invention or discovery as of grasp and a.s.similation. Our thinking is to apprehend meanings and relations, and so unify and give coherence to our knowledge.

In the absence of this type of thinking one may commit to memory many facts that he does not understand, gather much information that contains little meaning to him, and even achieve very creditable scholastic grades that stand for a small amount of education or development. For all information, to become vital and usable, must be thought into relation to our present active, functioning body of knowledge; therefore a.s.similative thinking is fundamental to true mastery and learning.

DELIBERATIVE THINKING.--Deliberative thinking const.i.tutes the highest type of thought process. In order to do deliberative thinking there is necessary, first of all, what Dewey calls a "split-road" situation. A traveler going along a well-beaten highway, says Dr. Dewey, does not deliberate; he simply keeps on going. But let the highway split into two roads at a fork, only one of which leads to the desired destination, and now a problem confronts him; he must take one road or the other, but _which_? The intelligent traveler will at once go to _seeking for evidence_ as to which road he should choose. He will balance this fact against that fact, and this probability against that probability, in an effort to arrive at a solution of his problem.

Before we can engage in deliberative thinking we must be confronted by some problem, some such "_split-road_" situation in our mental stream--we must have something to think about. It is this fact that makes one writer say that the great purpose of one's education is not to solve all his problems for him. It is rather to help him (1) to _discover_ problems, or "_split-road_" situations, (2) to a.s.sist him in gathering the facts necessary for their solution, and (3) to train him in the weighing of his facts or evidence, that is, in deliberative thinking. Only as we learn to recognize the true problems that confront us in our own lives and in society about us can we become thinkers in the best sense. Our own plans and projects, the questions of right and wrong that are constantly arising, the social, political and religious problems awaiting solution, all afford the opportunity and the necessity for deliberative thinking. And unhappy is the pupil whose school work does not set the problems and employ the methods which will insure training in this as well as in the a.s.similative type of thinking. Every school subject, besides supplying certain information to be "learned,"

should present its problems requiring true deliberative thinking within the range of development and ability of the pupil, and no subject--literature, history, science, language--is without many such problems.

2. THE FUNCTION OF THINKING

All true thinking is for the purpose of discovering relations between the things we think about. Imagine a world in which nothing is related to anything else; in which every object perceived, remembered, or imagined, stands absolutely by itself, independent and self-sufficient!

What a chaos it would be! We might perceive, remember, and imagine all the various objects we please, but without the power to think them together, they would all be totally unrelated, and hence have no meaning.

MEANING DEPENDS ON RELATIONS.--To have a rational meaning for us, things must always be defined in terms of other things, or in terms of their uses. _Fuel_ is that which feeds _fire_. _Food_ is what is eaten for _nourishment_. A _locomotive_ is a machine for _drawing a train_.

_Books_ are to _read_, _pianos_ to _play_, _b.a.l.l.s_ to _throw_, _schools_ to _instruct_, _friends_ to _enjoy_, and so on through the whole list of objects which we know or can define. Everything depends for its meaning on its relation to other things; and the more of these relations we can discover, the more fully do we see the meaning. Thus b.a.l.l.s may have other uses than to throw, schools other functions than to instruct, and friends mean much more to us than mere enjoyment. And just in the degree in which we have realized these different relations, have we defined the object, or, in other words, have we seen its meaning.

THE FUNCTION OF THINKING IS TO DISCOVER RELATIONS.--Now it is by _thinking_ that these relations are discovered. This is the function of thinking. Thinking takes the various separate items of our experience and discovers to us the relations existing among them, and builds them together into a unified, related, and usable body of knowledge, threading each little bit on the string of relationship which runs through the whole. It was, no doubt, this thought which Tennyson had in mind when he wrote:

Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower--but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what G.o.d and man is.

Starting in with even so simple a thing as a little flower, if he could discover all the relations which every part bears to every other part and to all other things besides, he would finally reach the meaning of G.o.d and man. For each separate thing, be it large or small, forms a link in an unbroken chain of relationships which binds the universe into an ordered whole.

NEAR AND REMOTE RELATIONS.--The relations discovered through our thinking may be very close and simple ones, as when a child sees the relation between his bottle and his dinner; or they may be very remote ones, as when Newton saw the relation between the falling of an apple and the motion of the planets in their orbits. But whether simple or remote, the seeing of the relationships is in both cases alike thinking; for thinking is nothing, in its last a.n.a.lysis, but the discovering of the relationships which exist between the various objects in our mental stream.

Thinking pa.s.ses through all grades of complexity, from the first faint dawnings in the mind of the babe when it sees the relation between the mother and its feeding, on to the mighty grasp of the sage who is able to "think G.o.d's thoughts after Him." But it all comes to the same end finally--the bringing to light of new meanings through the discovery of new relations. And whatever does this is thinking.

CHILD AND ADULT THINKING.--What const.i.tutes the difference in the thinking of the child and that of the sage? Let us see whether we can discover this difference. In the first place the relations seen by the child are _immediate_ relations: they exist between simple percepts or images; the remote and the general are beyond his reach. He has not had sufficient experience to enable him to discover remote relations. He cannot think things which are absent from him, or which he has never known. The child could by no possibility have seen in the falling apple what Newton saw; for the child knew nothing of the planets in their orbits, and hence could not see relations in which these formed one of the terms. The sage, on the other hand, is not limited to his immediate percepts or their images. He can see remote relations. He can go beyond individuals, and think in cla.s.ses. The falling apple is not a mere falling apple to him, but one of a _cla.s.s of falling bodies_. Besides a rich experience full of valuable facts, the trained thinker has acquired also the habit of looking out for relations; he has learned that this is the method _par excellence_ of increasing his store of knowledge and of rendering effective the knowledge he has. He has learned how to think.

The chief business of the child is the collection of the materials of thought, seeing only the more necessary and obvious relations as he proceeds; his chief business when older grown is to seek out the network of relations which unites this ma.s.s of material, and through this process to systematize and give new meanings to the whole.

3. THE MECHANISM OF THINKING

It is evident from the foregoing discussion that we may include under the term thinking all sorts of mental processes by which relations are apprehended between different objects of thought. Thus young children think as soon as they begin to understand something of the meaning of the objects of their environment. Even animals think by means of simple and direct a.s.sociations. Thinking may therefore go on in terms of the simplest and most immediate, or the most complex and distant relationships.

SENSATIONS AND PERCEPTS AS ELEMENTS IN THINKING.--Relations seen between sensations would mean something, but not much; relations seen between _objects_ immediately present to the senses would mean much more; but our thinking must go far beyond the present, and likewise far beyond individual objects. It must be able to annihilate both time and s.p.a.ce, and to deal with millions of individuals together in one group or cla.s.s.

Only in this way can our thinking go beyond that of the lower animals; for a wise rat, even, may come to see the relation between a trap and danger, or a horse the relation between pulling with his teeth at the piece of string on the gate latch, and securing his liberty.

But it takes the farther-reaching mind of man to _invent_ the trap and the latch. Perception alone does not go far enough. It is limited to immediately present objects and their most obvious relations. The perceptual image is likewise subject to similar limitations. While it enables us to dispense with the immediate presence of the object, yet it deals with separate individuals; and the world is too full of individual objects for us to deal with them separately. It is in _conception_, _judgment_, and _reasoning_ that true thinking takes place. Our next purpose will therefore be to study these somewhat more closely, and see how they combine in our thinking.