Page:Memory; how to develop, train, and use it - Atkinson - 1919.djvu/154

148 remembering numbers, and consequently gives you the lines upon which you should proceed to develop this phase of memory.

The law of Association may be used advantageously in memorizing numbers; for instance we know of a person who remembered the number 186,000 (the number of miles per second traveled by light-waves in the ether) by associating it with the number of his father’s former place of business, “186.” Another remembered his telephone number “1876” by recalling the date of the Declaration of Independence. Another, the number of States in the Union, by associating it with the last two figures of the number of his place of business. But by far the better way to memorize dates, special numbers connected with events, etc., it to visualize the picture of the event with the picture of the date or number, thus combining the two things into a mental picture, the association of which will be preserved when the picture is recalled. Verse of doggerel, such as “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue;” or “In eighteen hundred and sixty-one, our country’s Civil war begun,”