work, you find yourself becoming inaccurate and your ideas flowing less freely, take a brisk walk for five minutes, or, if you have no heart weakness, run up and down stairs once or twice. This will frequently effect a noticeable improvement in thought.
You must not expect to obtain the highest quality of mental efficiency or the perfection of memory if you persistently ignore your bodily health. When you feel that your health is not what it should be, consult a properly qualified and registered medical practitioner. Do not attempt to dose yourself with patent medicines or advertised nostrums, and avoid the “quack” as you would the plague. It may be that the regular taking of a tonic for a week or so will brighten your whole outlook and vastly improve your mental alertness, but the tonic which may suit your friend may be extremely injurious to yourself. Only your doctor can prescribe for your own constitution.
Sleeplessness.
27. The inability to sleep is a terrible enemy of the mind. On no account whatever should you even occasionally endeavour to obtain sleep by the use of drugs without advice from a physician. No solid food or stimulants (including coffee) should be consumed within two hours of retiring at night, but a glass of hot milk may be taken the last thing. Sometimes sleep may be obtained by subconscious self-suggestion, by trying persistently to keep the eyes almost but not quite closed; form a mental picture of the state of sleep; breathe regularly and somewhat deeply. Whenever possible sleep with your bedroom windows open.
“Overstrain.”
28. A good deal is heard now-a-days of “overstrain.” This condition is far more often the result of wrong methods than of excessive work. The normal brain has an extraordinary capacity for knowledge, and its most serious danger lies not in activity but in worry. With regard to the avoidance of worry, it is more easy to give advice than to follow it. Should you be faced with any cause for anxiety, try to bear continually in mind the fact that worry can never in the smallest degree help in any situation, but that it can, and usually does, render one less competent to meet a crisis or difficulty by lowering the vitality and confusing the brain. You have one trouble: why take on another—the burden of worry? If calamity does come, determine that you will learn from it some lesson, whether of courage, or of patience, or of resource. In this way you may possibly make your gain in character more than balance your loss in other directions. True happiness, after all, depends infinitely more upon ourselves than upon our surroundings. The temporal possessions you have striven for and won so hardly may be taken away, but the priceless treasures of imagination none can wrest from you. Your body may be imprisoned in a dungeon, while your mind still enjoys the freedom of the Universe. When misfortune overtakes you, never gaze back on the opportunities of the past, but concentrate your attention on the opportunities of the future. Although instances of genuine mental overstrain unconnected with worry are extraordinarily rare, a sense of weariness may accrue from prolonged mental application. This may be avoided to a great extent if five minutes’ rest can be taken in every hour. Merely to rise from your seat and stretch your limbs will afford marked relief.
Rest.
29. Idleness is not necessarily restful, and it has a tendency to promote mind-wandering and lack of concentration. The most satisfactory form of rest usually consists in a change of occupation, or even in a mere change of study from one subject to another. To do nothing and to think of nothing is to invite physical and mental degeneration. Bodily idleness may sometimes be necessary for physical recuperation, but the same plea cannot be urged in extenuation of mental idleness.
Concluding Remarks.
At the conclusion of Lesson 1, as a new student you will be inclined to say: “What do I think of it?” We agree the question is not only natural but proper—indeed we desire to cultivate the reader’s critical abilities—but gradually.
Book I is a map more or less of the whole Course—an introduction to the science and art of mental training as understood and practised by the Pelman Institute. Judge it from that point of view and you will see that a rational system must first begin with the simple and proceed to the complex; and that to form a final opinion as to the merits of a Course, after studying one book, is about as intelligent as to value the ability of a pianist after hearing him play a few scales. Depend upon it, the particular aims you have in view—memory, concentration, will-power—will be dealt with fully in due time; so do not expect complete training at once. This is a Course, i.e., it extends to twelve lessons and each lesson contributes its quota to your development.
1 Reference to English money in these pages may easily be understood by Canadian and American students if the sovereign (£1) is reckoned as 5 dollars.
“DON’TS”
1.Don’t regard your difficulties as insuperable. Be hopeful.
2.Don’t abuse your memory; that is the way to make it worse.
3.Don’t say to-day “I can’t concentrate.” If you do, you will be less able to concentrate to-morrow.
4.Don’t admit you are too old. Mental age is a matter of training.
5.Don’t expect to become mentally efficient by means of one lesson. There are 12 lessons and some work ahead of you.
6.Don’t skip. Master every sentence. We teach the science and art of mental efficiency in the least possible number of printed pages.
EXERCISES
Exercise I.
It will be remembered that on a previous page (see p. 19) we dealt with the need of vivid impressions as a source of sound knowledge and reliable memory. It follows from this that the first scientific step in mental training is to educate the powers through which most of our information comes, namely, sight and hearing. Take a sheet of paper and write down a list of the names of six of your friends—both sexes. Opposite each name write the (a) colour of the eyes, (b) the shape of the nose, (c) the manner of wearing the hair, and, in the case of men, the absence or presence of beard and moustache. (d) Add also a note as to any particular article of clothing worn on the last occasion you saw the person concerned.
Some people find an exercise of this kind very easy; they are naturally acute observers; other people find it rather difficult; their powers need training.
Exercise II.
Take a set of dominoes, shuffle them face down, and then pick up one of them. Turn it up and remember the total number of pips on it. Suppose this is the 5—4, equalling 9. Turn it face down and pick up another with it. Turn both face up, and see how quickly you can name the total of the two dominoes without actually counting them. Do not try this experiment more than once or twice the first day or two, but after a week’s practice with two, you may add a third and then a fourth, naming the total number of pips instantly, without counting them at all.
For variety, deal out four cards, face downwards, side by side. Turn up the first and note what it is, replacing it face downwards. Repeat the process with the other three cards, then after a few moments, try to recall the four in order. When you can do this correctly, experiment with five cards, gradually increasing the number. One student was able to remember the whole pack.
After a few weeks of this sight training you can amuse yourself and your friends by asking them to place about a dozen articles upon a table; matchboxes, spoons, paper-weights, penknives, eye-glasses, anything; each object being slightly separated