Still, the special strength of extra-vivid images in influencing the mind can be

constructively used (1) in persuading someone else to reach a correct conclusion

or (2) as a device for improving one’s own memory by attaching vivid images, one

after the other, to many items one doesn’t want to forget. Indeed, such use of

vivid images as memory boosters is what enabled the great orators of classical

Greece and Rome to give such long, organized speeches without using notes.

 

The great algorithm to remember in dealing with this tendency is simple: An idea

or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you.

 

Nineteen: Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency

 

All skills attenuate with disuse. I was a whiz at calculus until age twenty,

after which the skill was soon obliterated by total nonuse. The right antidote

to such a loss is to make use of the functional equivalent of the aircraft

simulator employed in pilot training. This allows a pilot to continuously

practice all of the rarely used skills that he can’t afford to lose.

 

Throughout his life, a wise man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely

used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as a sort of duty to his

better self. If he reduces the number of skills he practices and, therefore, the

number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a

hammer tendency. His learning capacity will also shrink as he creates gaps in

the latticework of theory he needs as a framework for understanding new

experience. It is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into