the first place.

2. Go home and read up the subject in your textbooks, again
making notes. Thus is added the visual associations.

3. Write out in brief form the substance of the lecture, deriving
your knowledge from both the lecture and the book. You thus add
another set of associations to your memories of the subject.

4. Teach the subject to or discuss it with a fellow student. By
this you vitalize the memories you have, you link them firmly
together, you lend to them the ardor of usefulness and of
victory. You are forced to realize where the gaps, the lacunae of
your knowledge come, and are made to fill them in.

Thus the best way to remember a fact is to find a use for it and
to link it to your interests and your purposes. Unrelated it has
no value; related it becomes in fact a part of you. After that
the mechanics of memory necessitate the making of as many
pathways to that fact as possible, and this means deliberately to
associate the fact by sound, by speech and by action. The
advertised schemes of memory training are simply association
schemes, old as the hills, and having value indeed, but too much
is claimed for them. A splendid memory is born, not made; but any
memory, except where disease has entered, can be improved by
training.

It is because lectures on the whole do not supply enough
associations or arouse enough interest that the lecture is the
poorest method of teaching or learning. Man's mind sticks easily