Page 14 - How to Develop A SUPER-POWER MEMORY

18 How Keen Is Your Observation?
knew how to spell. None of the students that heard that
little sentence, ever again misspelled the word, "believe."
Do you have trouble spelling the word, "piece"? If you do,
just remember the phrase, "piece of pie." This phrase will
always tell you how to spell, "piece."
Can you draw anything that resembles the map of Eng-
land, from memory? How about China, Japan or Czecho-
slovakia? You probably can't draw any of these. If I had
mentioned Italy, ninety percent of you would have imme-
diately seen a picture of a boot in your mind's eye. Is that
right? If you did, and if you draw a boot, you will have the
approximate outline of the map of Italy.
Why did this picture appear in your mind's eye? Only
because, at one time or another, perhaps many years ago,
you either heard or noticed that the map of Italy resembled
a boot. The shape of Italy, of course, was the new thing to
remember; the boot was the something we already knew
and remembered.
You can see that simple conscious associations helped
you memorize abstract information like the above examples
very easily. The initial system that I mentioned earlier, can
be used to help you memorize many things. For example,
if you wanted to remember the names of the Dionne quin-
tuplets, you could try to remember the word, "macey." This
would help you to recall that the girls' names are, Marie,
Annette, Cecile, Emilie and Yvonne.
There's only one thing wrong with this idea in its present
stage. There is nothing to make you remember that the
word, "macey" is connected with the Dionne quintuplets,
or vice versa.
If you remembered the word; fine, then you would prob-
ably know the names of the quints; but, how do you re-
member the word? I'll show you how to do this in future
chapters.