Begin by turning your attention upon some uninteresting thing and studying its details until you are able to describe them. This will prove very tiresome at first but you must stick to it. Do not practice too long at a time at first; take a rest and try it again later. You will soon find that it comes easier, and that a new interest is beginning to manifest itself in the task. Examine this book, as practice, learn how many pages there are in it; how many chapters; how many pages in each chapter; the details of type, printing and binding—all the little things about it—so that you could give another person a full account of the minor details of the book. This may seem uninteresting—and so it will be at first—but a little practice will create a new interest in the petty details, and you will be surprised at the number of little things that you will notice. This plan, practiced on many things, in spare hours, will develop the power of voluntary attention and perception in anyone, no matter how deficient he may have been in these things. If you can get some one else to join in the game-task with you, and then each endeavor to excel the other in finding details, the task will be much easier, and better work will be accomplished. Begin to take notice of things about you; the places you visit; the things in the rooms, etc. In this way you will start the habit of "noticing things," which is the first requisite for memory development.

Halleck gives the following excellent advice on this subject: "To look at a thing intelligently is the most difficult of all arts. The first rule for the cultivation of accurate perception is: Do not try to perceive the whole of a complex object at once. Take the human face as an example. A man, holding an important position to which he had been elected, offended many people because he could not remember faces, and hence failed to recognize individuals the second time he met them. His trouble was in looking at the countenance as a whole. When he changed his method of observation, and noticed carefully the nose, mouth, eyes, chin, and color of hair, he at once began to find recognition easier. He was no longer in difficulty of mistaking A for B, since he remembered that the shape of B's nose was different, or the color of his hair at least three shades lighter. This example shows that another rule can be formulated: Pay careful attention to details. We are perhaps asked to give a minute description of the exterior of a somewhat noted suburban house that we have lately seen. We reply in general terms, giving the size and color of the house. Perhaps we also have an idea of part of the material used in the exterior construction. We are asked to be exact about the shape of the door, porch, roof, chimneys and windows; whether the windows are plain or circular, whether they have cornices, or whether the trimmings around them are of the same material as the rest of the house. A friend, who will be unable to see the house, wishes to know definitely about the angles of the roof, and the way the windows are arranged with reference to them. Unless we can answer these questions exactly, we merely tantalize our friends by telling them we have seen the house. To see an object merely as an undiscriminated mass of something in a certain place, is to do no more than a donkey accomplishes as he trots along."