Let us next inquire what are the qualities which enter into what we call a good
memory. The merchant or politician will say, "Ability to remember well people's
faces and names"; the teacher of history, "The ability to recall readily dates and
events"; the teacher of mathematics, "The power to recall mathematical
formulæ"; the hotel waiter, "The ability to keep in mind half-a-dozen orders at a
time"; the manager of a corporation, "The ability to recall all the necessary
details connected with the running of the concern." While these answers are very
divergent, yet they may all be true for the particular person testifying; for out of
them all there emerges this common truth, that the best memory is the one which
best serves its possessor. That is, one's memory not only must be ready and
exact, but must produce the right kind of material; it must bring to us what we
need in our thinking. A very easy corollary at once grows out of this fact;
namely, that in order to have the memory return to us the right kind of matter,
we must store it with the right kind of images and ideas, for the memory cannot
give back to us anything which we have not first given into its keeping.
A Good Memory Selects Its Material.—The best memory is not necessarily
the one which impartially repeats the largest number of facts of past experience.
Everyone has many experiences which he never needs to have reproduced in
memory; useful enough they may have been at the time, but wholly useless and
irrelevant later. They have served their purpose, and should henceforth slumber
in oblivion. They would be but so much rubbish and lumber if they could be
recalled. Everyone has surely met that particular type of bore whose memory is
so faithful to details that no incident in the story he tells, no matter however
trivial, is ever omitted in the recounting. His associations work in such a tireless
round of minute succession, without ever being able to take a jump or a short
cut, that he is powerless to separate the wheat from the chaff; so he dumps the
whole indiscriminate mass into our long-suffering ears.
Dr. Carpenter tells of a member of Parliament who could repeat long legal
documents and acts of Parliament after one reading. When he was congratulated
on his remarkable gift, he replied that, instead of being an advantage to him, it
was often a source of great inconvenience, because when he wished to recollect
anything in a document he had read, he could do it only by repeating the whole
from the beginning up to the point which he wished to recall. Maudsley says that
the kind of memory which enables a person "to read a photographic copy of
former impressions with his mind's eye is not, indeed, commonly associated with
high intellectual power," and gives as a reason that such a mind is hindered by
the very wealth of material furnished by the memory from discerning the