Yes! You Can Double Your Mental Powers

• Sharpen your positive senses.
• Keep your memory always at work.
• Learn to control the direction of your thinking.
• Nourish your thoughts with the opinions of others.
• Trust your subconscious mind and do not neglect its intimations.
• Set no limits to your thinking.

The writer said: "I know a garage owner who can recall, with perfect ease, all the license numbers of the cars — numbering in the hundreds — that are under his supervision." And in the United States he saw an interpreter speaking four different languages with four persons without stopping...

These dazzling feats appear miraculous to ordinary people, but the truth is that we are unable to grasp the extent of our mental powers. For psychologists have declared that man uses, throughout his life, only a part of his mental powers.

Here we ask: can we make our mental powers more effective than they are now? We can, without a doubt.

Here are some methods that will help each of us to supply his mental powers with renewal and vitality to the utmost of their capacity.

First: sharpen your positive senses. Do you remember how you felt as a child when you heard the rain falling at night on the roof above your head? And how the smell of the smoke of burning grasses affected you on certain autumn days? When the days carry us along on their wings and we move on in the procession of life, we come to believe that the world is striding backward, and that the marks of gladness and joy are vanishing from it. But the fact is that it is we who change; for we have come to walk along seeing and hearing nothing of the marvels of this vast universe, which never change at all.

To avoid this dangerous neglect, we must always look closely at the familiar things around us. Notice the reflection of sunlight on the wing of some insect you come across. Look closely at the little birds gathered on the branches and consider how they manage their affairs. Close your eyes and try to catch all the sounds around you, and try to classify them. Try to think of what happens to the blind man and the deaf man when their lost senses are suddenly restored to them.

Our senses are, for us, the bridge of knowledge and a spur to the imagination. If they are not always ready to serve us precisely, our mental powers are affected adversely and sluggishness overtakes them. And so we are forced, all our lives long, to be dependent on others, and we gradually lose our personality.

Second: keep your memory always at work. One psychologist has said: "It has been established in psychological research that memory grows stronger with the abundance of the tasks it bears, and becomes a center of trust if you trust it." Conversely, memory is paralyzed if it is neglected. Every time we use the telephone without going back to the directory we strengthen the powers of our memory; and every time we go to market without a shopping list we enable ourselves to persevere in this plan, and thereby to reach our goal. Here is a practical example of this plan: one of President Roosevelt's aides trained his memory so remarkably that he was able to memorize 20,000 names of American political men, because by virtue of his position he was obliged to be in touch with these persons and others. Then there was an official on one of the express trains in America who memorized the names of all the great personalities he accompanied on his journeys — indeed, he could remember the names of hundreds of persons at the mere sight of them. We may well wonder how they performed this astonishing feat: one of them, asked the secret of his memory's strength, answered that he used to ask each of the travelers what pleased him and look into his requests; in this way he sorted his guests into individuals, each with his own particular stamp, and thus enabled his memory to retain the names of all these persons without arduous effort.

Third: learn to control the direction of your thoughts. What is there to prevent us from using all our mental powers? By our nature we can remember with complete clarity the minute events that have passed us by. At times, too, we manage to concentrate our thoughts and fix them. And at certain moments useful, brilliant ideas occur to our minds. If it were possible to use these powers at the needed time for our own benefit, we would reach the summit.

Here are some experiments useful for gaining control over the direction of one's thoughts: Try to remember everything in a room you have visited and then left. If you do not succeed, go back to it and examine carefully the things you forgot; then repeat the experiment a second and a third time until you are entirely sure of your success. And if your aim is to absorb the matter of a book, or notes you wish to memorize, imagine that you are before an examining board that is putting many questions to you while you answer them.

And if certain problems confront you and you wish to solve them, imagine that this problem belongs to someone else, and that he has come to seek your advice. Try to solve it on this basis, and you will most likely succeed in solving it; for by our nature we are abler and stronger at solving the problems of others than at solving our own problems ourselves.

Fourth: nourish your thoughts with the opinions of others. Our mental powers depend a great deal on the influences of minds outside us; indeed, these influences are among the most important causes of their growth. Moreover, our mental powers are stronger than we suppose: such is their flexibility that they can hold far more than they need. Therefore make questioning your habit, and ask about everything you do not know. Ask about governments, and how they train the prominent politicians among their subjects; ask how the artist can paint the light of the sun on the face of the sea; ask about the origin of the strange word that has come your way, and about its history, and so on.

It is well known that many people, as they advance in age, gradually lose interest in what is around them and take to chewing over distant memories, contenting themselves with what they have and welcoming the same thoughts that take their turns in their imagination. This is the condition that every one of us must fight, for it is not inevitable: many older people have ripe ideas such as the young are incapable of producing; indeed, some of them possess mighty mental gifts that have never once flagged in supplying humanity with the best opinions and the newest inventions.

Therefore, if life itself has not equipped you with the motives or impulses of curiosity and inquiry, then make it your purpose to respond to all the opinions you encounter — those you favor and those that run counter to your view — for thereby you sharpen your mental powers and develop within yourself the powers of inquiry. Try, indeed, to debate with the man who opposes your opinion, however slight the subject. It is useful, too, for a person to make friends with those foreign to him in race and country, for his knowledge thereby gains in breadth and polish.

Fifth: trust your subconscious mind and do not neglect its intimations. Experiments have proved that the subconscious mind holds sway over the solving of our difficulties while we sleep. Many people try in vain to solve a difficulty that has confronted them in their daily lives, and are forced, against their will, to leave it because of their inability to reach the desired solution. But it is truly astonishing that they find the solution ready in their minds upon waking, as though a hidden hand had paved the way to it. From this it has come to be known that a part of man's mind — that is, the subconscious mind — is equipped with powers of which the conscious mind knows nothing. Yet psychology has shown that man does know one thing about the relation of the conscious mind to the subconscious: the more the conscious mind works, the more the subconscious mind is sharpened and refined. If a man has not strained his conscious mind over the solving of his difficulty, his subconscious mind will not be affected by that difficulty, nor help in solving it.

Sixth: set no limits to your thinking — leave it free. Beware of fleeing from the mental problems you find hard to solve. Always sharpen your wits to understand the things that ordinary people fail to understand; perhaps you possess a capacity you never discovered in yourself before, which will help you to understand what others have not grasped. For how many thousands of years was electric power among us while we did not use it? — and that was because we did not perceive its existence. Our mental powers are counted, to this day, among the secrets whose details have not yet been discovered; hence our understanding of even the simplest of them may bring us the amplest benefit.