Page:Memory; how to develop, train, and use it - Atkinson - 1919.djvu/180

174 records of your memory. The oftener you use a fact, the easier does it become to recall it when needed. The favorite pen of a man is always at his hand in a remembered position, while the less used eraser or similar thing has to be searched for, often without success. And the more associations that you bestow upon a fact, the oftener is it likely to be used.

Another point to be remembered is that the future association of a fact depends very much upon your system of filing away facts. If you will think of this when endeavoring to store away a fact for future reference, you will be very apt to find the best mental pigeon-hole for it. File it away with the thing it most resembles, or to which it has the most familiar relationship. The child does this, involuntarily—it is nature’s own way. For instance, the child sees a zebra, it files away that animal as “a donkey with stripes;” a giraffe as a “long-necked horse;” a camel as a “horse with long, crooked legs, long neck and humps on its back.” The child always attaches its new knowledge or fact on to some familiar fact or bit of knowledge—sometimes the re-