Show J the reason we forget 1 I let me see what was that name haven t we often beard heard that phrase or one very like if our memory often play us tricks and cause us to forget things we know perfectly well as well as I 1 know my own name in fact there Is a reason tor for this tor for nearly every case of loss of memory we can find a cause this discovery has recently been made and is one of the most important advances which psychology has made in the understanding of our mental life forgetting of course in one r sense ense Is loss of mamorv how first of all do we remember things it has been assumed by physiologists that ev ery event we experience leaves its trace in the nervous substance of the brain in much the same way that a trace is left upon the phonographic record by the scratch of the recording needle it the impression Is vivid that is it if it leaves a deep impression upon the nervous system then we remember it if not we forget it As the brain disintegrates with age the memories be come weak this is the doctrine usually as fumed for the storage of our memories but psychologists have lately compla ned against this materialistic view of the facts of late years professor henri bergson in particular has protested that such an explanation does not explain ve believe that memory Is a mental thing not a material one to be sure there was always the difficulty in accounting for memory that the brain cells which are constantly being replaced would eliminate the contained memo ries just as new wax cylinders would efface the record but scientific men got round this by as suming that the new cell as it was deposited somehow f inherited the traces of the previous one and thus retained the memory there was no evidence that it actually did so but it was as fumed to the strong strona protest against this ma i ic ff ft f c W f li tena teriah listic view found support in the fact that practically none of 0 our memories Is ever lost but all can be removed under suitable conditions and by proper means our memory Is potentially almost perfect we should all strive to improve the memory as much as possible for upon it our very personality depends it if we had no memory we could have no feeling ot of self no feeling that we are the same self we were yesterday and if we did not have this feeling we should be lower than the ant an mals we may improve the memory by paying strict attention to what is being said or done and by trying to associate it with as many other things as possible which have interest for us for it has been said that association is nine tenths of memory the more we forget the more we tend tr to forget and the more we train the memory the better it becomes like all else it improves with practice and habit forgetting is at times very awkward it leads us into all sorts of social inconveniences we forget a name an address a word when we wish most to remember it these acts of forgetful ness seem at first perfectly erratic and spon tane ous they seem to follow no law and be subject to no fixed rule so then when we forget a name or thing or by some error of speech or writing give another word for the right one we can nearly always find out why this should be so and uncover the actual process involved by a careful analysis of the previous trains ot of thought and action we forget because we wish to forget it is a well known tact fact that we tend to forget unpleasant events more readily than we do pleasant ones that is because of this tact fact because in one case the memory is repressed and in the other it Is not |