The Art of Memory (Part I)

Four Things to Improve Your Memory:

1. First, You should associate the Thing to be remembered with some fitting but unusual image, and keep that image in mind.
This is because you remember sensory things much better than you do abstract things, since the memory is in the same part of your mind and brain as the senses and emotions. The image should be unusual or grotesque that which is unusual is more easily remembered than what is normal.

2. Second, you should carefully think about the thing you want to remember and put its corresponding image or sign in your mind in some sort of visual/spatial order, and do so in relation to other things you want to remember. This is so that you can pass easily from one memory to another and more easily from the image in your mind to the thing you want to remember.

3. Third, you should attach strong emotion and vivid sensory experience to the image of the thing to be remembered, because you’re much more likely to remember something the more deeply it is impressed in your emotional memory.

4. Fourth, you should reflect frequently on the thing it is you want to remember. This is done by re-visualizing and looking over and exploring the space, as it were, where you have these images in your mind, since such reflection more deeply impresses the images of these things and preserves them in your memory.

These are the basic elements of what is sometimes called the “Memory Palace” technique.

A Liberal Education

“With a liberal education a man is a power in whatever work he may employ his energies. A liberal education must not propose the useful as its sole and immediate aim. And yet the useful is attained, and even in a far larger measure than if it had been sought directly for its own sake. For the mind has grown in strength and versatility […]  However it may be employed, an educated mind will never be limited in its vision or its grasp to the specific work of a trade or a profession […]  It is the educated mind that in all ages has advanced mankind, lifting it above sordid aims, bringing to it pure and ennobling enjoyment, prompting its highest ambitions by holding before it exalted ideals.“

— Archbishop John Ireland, Church and Modern Society, vol I.