Page:Memory; how to develop, train, and use it - Atkinson - 1919.djvu/71

Rh ing details, the task will be much easier, and better work will be accomplished. Begin to take notice of things about you; the places you visit; the things in the rooms, etc. In this way you will start the habit of “noticing things,” which is the first requisite for memory development.

Halleck gives the following excellent advice on this subject: “To look at a thing intelligently is the most difficult of all arts. The first rule for the cultivation of accurate perception is: Do not try to perceive the whole of a complex object at once. Take the human face as an example. A man, holding an important position to which he had been elected, offended many people because he could not remember faces, and hence failed to recognize individuals the second time he met them. His trouble was in looking at the countenance as a whole. When he changed his method of observation, and noticed carefully the nose, mouth, eyes, chin, and color of hair, he at once began to find recognition easier. He was no longer in difficulty of mistaking A for B, since he remembered that the shape of B’s