The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-01-12
MEMORY AN ATTRIBUTE.
It Cannot be Changed Any More Than the Color of the Eyes.

It cannot be Changed Any More Than
 '-.. the Color of the Eyes.
 People with short memories found scant comfort in Professr Frank M. Mo
 Murry's lecture on the strengthening of the. memory at Brooklyn Institute. Those persons with serious deficiencies
 regarding the whereabouts of their um- brellas or painfully weak on the ad- dresses and telephone numbers of their friends found food for melancholy In his opening words.
 The power of retention in the memo
 ry, according to Professor McMurry
 and the psychologists, is a prysical at-
 tribute, like the color of the eyes, and
 no more to be changed than the blue or
 gray of the iris.
 'The ability to retain disconnected
 facts like names, dates, addresses and
 the like, is fixed in each, like eye-sight, '' said the speaker. "It can nomore be
 strengthened by practice than the eye
 sight can be strengthened by 'practicing
 the eye on gazing at distance. We
 know that the atmosphere at 8 certain
 temperature will hold just so much
 moisture and no more. So each rnemo-
 ry will retain just so much, excepting
 that when one is physically exhausted
 the memory is weaker than when he is bright and feeling well. Our methods
 of teaching have been habitually and
 additionally modified by the idea that
 the memory could be strengthened by
 practice. If there did not seem any other good in compelling children to To- cate long lists of places on a map, we comforted ourselves with the idea that it would at least develop the child's memory. Poetry, prose, lists of histor- ical dates, are given to children to learn, to develop their power of mem-
 ory. It never does it."
 All the short memoried persons in the audience sighed, and then the pro-
 lessor began to give them some en- couragement.
 We remember things only be reason Of their content" said he. 'If the con- 1 tent is interesting to us, we remember it. AS we learn how to concentrate our attention, we remember 8 thing ,ir proportion as our attention was con-
 centrated on it at the moment of ob- serving it, or studying it. But concen- tratien acted by will power does not last long and is not very effective. The concentration that rises from interest in the subject is the only kind that is effective. We tell children to pay at tention;' that is, to concentrate They don't even know what we mean. But interest them in that lesson and they concentrate their attention on it with , out being aware of what they are do- ing. But much can be done in methods of memorizfng lessons. For instance, a child is given ten pages of history as a lesson. He wants to memorize it. 1 both in order to recite it and for the 1 sake of learning it. Nine children out 1 of ten will simply begin at the first ] line, and try to memorize the thing par. ] agraph by paragraph, perhaps taking l the most unimportant paragraph first 1 If, on the contrary, he were taught tt read that lesson carefully through, as 6 l whole, first, and grasp the central fact 1 in it, then take that fact as a starting l point and group all the details under 1 it in the order of their importance, the l lesson would appear to his mind as q coherent, reasonable thing. He would