ry area in the brain
with another. For example, when you see, smell, taste and touch an
orange, the corresponding areas in the brain act in conjunction and are
associated by means of the association neurones connecting them. The
association neurones play a large part in the securing and organizing
of knowledge. They are very important in study, for all learning
consists in building up associations.

From the foregoing description we see that the nervous system consists
merely of a mechanism for the reception and transmission of incoming
messages and their transformation into outgoing messages which produce
movement. The brain is the center where such transformations are made,
being a sort of central switchboard which permits the sense-organs to
come into communication with muscles. It is also the instrument by
means of which the impressions from the various senses can be united
and experience can be unified. The brain serves further as the medium
whereby impressions once made can be retained. That is, it is the great
organ of memory. Hence we see that it is to this organ we must look for
the performance of the activities necessary to study. Everything that
enters it produces some modification within it. Education consists in a
process of undergoing a selected group of experiences of such a nature
as to leave beneficial results in the brain. By means of the changes
made there, the individual is able better to adjust himself to new
situations. For when the individual enters the world, he is not
prepared to meet many situations; only a few of the neural connections
are made and he is able to perform only a meagre number of simple acts,
such as breathing, crying, digestion. The pathways for complex acts,
such as speaking English or French, or writing, are not formed at birth
but must be built up within the life-time of the individual. It is the
process of building them up that we call education. This process is a
physical feat involving the production of changes in physical material
in the brain. Study involves the overcoming of resistance in the
nervous system. That is why it is so hard. In your early school-days,
when you set about laboriously learning the multiplication table, your
unwilling protests were wrung because you were being compelled to force
the nervous current through new pathways, and to overcome the inertia
of physical matter. Today, when you begin a train of reasoning, the
task is difficult because you are