sleep disorder

assalamualaikum wbt...
banjir kt rompin makin teruk...doa2 kan keluarga saya and seluruh penduduk kuala rompin selamat, insyaAllah...


We are a sleep-deprived nation, and it puts nearly all of us at risk — in the gym, in the sack, on the job. The really good news: The cure takes just 8 hours
By: Peter Moore, Men's Health Photographs by: Chris Buck

This is a story about nothing. Its subject is you, unconscious. And me, striving for unconsciousness. It's about what's happening to us between the hours of 10:15 p.m. and 7 a.m., when we should be sleeping.

It's about me, in bed (and leave my wife out of it, you perv).

Not a lot going on between those sheets, you say? I say, Wake up! Sleep heals. Sleep calms. Sleep rebuilds. Sleep provides an opportunity for the penile exercise you don't make time for during your busy day. Sleep shuts down your body and awakens your mind. In addition to being vital, it's also bizarre and contradictory — it's the inactive activity, the void you fill by dreaming up entire worlds, the state of nothingness that means everything. Weird.

The science of sleep is only about 40 years old, and among the things yet to be discovered by researchers is...um...how sleep works, exactly. That, and how to define it. But that's sleep for you: full of mysteries and surprises.

Maybe the most surprising thing of all is that 60 million Americans do it very poorly, suffering any number of sleep disorders . And more than half of the afflicted are men, according to James Rowley, M.D., director of the sleep-disorders center at Harper University Hospital, in Detroit. Many of these guys would deny they have a problem, and those who acknowledge it probably aren't being helped. "Women get motivated when they're sleepless," says Dr. Rowley. "Men are silent."

As the years pass, the odds are that these bleary-eyed, silent guys will get even less sleep, and touch off a cascade of other miserable conditions. If sleeplessness doesn't put a sudden end to your morning commute, it can dim your brainpower and success on the job. It can sour the report your doctor gives you on your cardiac risk, make you fatter, and set you up for diabetes. It will make you fight more with your wife, kids, and house pets. Sleeplessness is the symptom that makes its underlying cause — stress, depression, pain, or all of the above — even worse.

For 15 years, I've been searching for a decent night's sleep, and I've had a major health nightmare along the way. Even though I was a committed exerciser with good cholesterol counts, I built a major arterial blockage a few years back. And it came after a 2-year bout of wretched insomnia.

Now, when I lay me down to sleep, I know the stakes are high. True for me, true for you, too, brother. For our own good, we all need to rest a little easier.

SLEEP IN THE LAND OF SIN

Nowhere is that more evident than in Las Vegas, where the wee hours take on a special pathology. I went there to spend a night in the casinos, and William Thompson, Ph.D., a gambling expert at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, was my coach. When I asked him how he'd chosen that academic specialty, he said, "When you're in Siberia, study polar bears."

And as we walk through the MGM Grand casino, they're snarling everywhere. He shows me 20 ways Las Vegas casinos push their advantage — from having people convert their hard- earned cash into worthless plastic chips before they bet to making it hard to find the exit door.

Then, as the clock ticks, the casinos make their shrewdest bet of all: that sleep deprivation will make their customers stupid.

To understand why, let's take a stroll through a sleepy human brain. Our tour guide here is William Killgore, Ph.D., a major in the Medical Service Corps of the U.S. Army, based at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He works in the fascinating area of sleep, cognition, and emotional intelligence. He explains that as Homo sapiens developed from ape to man, our brains developed, too — particularly a structure known as the prefrontal cortex, which took information from our senses, mingled it with our memories, and added shadings of emotion and understanding. As man seized dominion over all the earth, our prefrontal cortexes — the font of our humanity, of reason — led the way.

No wonder the casinos are against it.

The house's advantage is to reduce you to a more primitive beast. Glucose metabolism — the rate of energy burn in your prefrontal cortex — slows down as night turns to day. Uh-oh. A Neanderthal buzz, originating in knuckle-dragging parts of the brain, supplants your higher faculties. Evolution slips into reverse; you become less human.

So much the worse if the beast is up past his bedtime, goes to a strip show, orders a cocktail or two, and smokes a cigar. As Killgore puts it, "Your prefrontal cortex needs a break, so it shuts down. You have less emotional flexibility. You reduce your ability to make effective decisions."

When this happens in the wee hours, Las Vegas is ready: You're lost in an artificial world. Table stakes rise as the evening goes on. The $5 minimums of the afternoon rise to $20, then $50, and suddenly each hand has financial consequences; if you play long enough, the odds will get you. And these are the guys you'll see along the Strip the next morning, still wearing last night's clothes, their prefrontal cortexes aroused by coffee and stress hormones, wondering what hit them last night.

Here's what: They gambled and lost on a mechanism they may only be dimly aware of — the circadian rhythms that run their days, their whole lives. When that system orders you into bed, you'd better listen: It's just trying to keep you out of trouble.

NO SHAME IN SLEEPING IN

I don't mean to pick on Vegas. Men who go there are fully aware of the risks and undertake them anyway — the odds and their prefrontal cortexes be damned. And at least the strippers pretend to be friendly. But the casino industry is an example of foolish wagers being placed and lost all across our society. Most men consider sleep a waste of time, and bet their lives they can get along without it.

"Who needs sleep?" asks the Coors beer commercial. "I only get 4 hours a night," brags your coworker, echoing Thomas Edison, antisleep agitator and inventor of the lightbulb — a contributing factor in our drowsy lives. And the rest of us use the language of shame when we "sneak off for a nap" or point out that a coworker was "asleep at the wheel." And our sleep suffers for it. According to a survey by the National Sleep Foundation, each of us averages 2 hours and 12 minutes less sleep nightly than our great-grandparents did in 1910. And it isn't just because of high-quality late-night TV.

The 2003 American Time Use Survey shows that we're trading sleep for all kinds of things, most predictably work ("Good morning, boss!" followed, 10 hours later, by "Should we order Chinese?"), but also entertainment ("Dancing with the Stars is on!") and commuting ("I can't wait to get back on I-70 to Kansas City tomorrow!").

Think about that last one for a minute. By exchanging rack time for road time, we're almost guaranteeing that we'll add to the one-third of all car accidents attributable to drowsy driving. Worse yet, after 5 nights of partial sleep deprivation — does that sound like your workweek? — three drinks at happy hour will have the same effect that six would have had if you'd been well rested. And then you drive home. You might even make it.

That's why, at the end of most of his interviews (including one with me), William Dement, M.D., Ph.D. — a combination Christopher Columbus/Cassandra of sleep research — practically shouts his admonition: Drowsiness is a warning!

Dr. Dement, who mans the sleep desk at Stanford University, has the personal scare story to prove it. Once he was met by a chauffeur at the airport, to give him a ride to a big meeting of sleep docs. The guy was overweight, and he had grown a beard to conceal a smallish chin. You've probably seen guys like that, too. Well, don't get into their cars for a nighttime drive.

Dr. Dement's chauffeur was exhibiting the classic physical symptoms of sleep apnea, a disorder that closes an afflicted man's airway up to 300 times a night and causes monumental health problems in the process. Dr. Dement instantly saw the danger and aggressively conversed with him. Then they pulled onto a road high above the Columbia River gorge, the driver slumped, the car veered across the oncoming traffic lane, and...the good doctor shouted, the driver jerked the wheel, and obituary writers were deprived of a deliciously ironic lead.

And Dr. Dement is still alive to deliver the warnings.

TRADING SLEEP FOR WORK

His cry has swelled into a chorus. For a while, every time I called a sleep expert for this story, they refused to answer my questions until they were finished venting over the commercial airline wreck of Comair Flight 5191 out of Lexington, Kentucky, in which both the pilots and the man in the control tower were sleep deprived. Consider the lonely vigil that air-traffic controller will conduct every night from now on as he lays head on pillow.

Each of us has plenty in common with that poor soul. If we trade sleep for work, sleep for commuting time, sleep for computer time, we multiply the risk that we'll make a mistake that kills. If we're very lucky, we'll take out only ourselves.

Am I belaboring the obvious? Sleepy driving, after all, is rather like drunken sex or Washington lobbying — nobody expects anything good to come of it. But it's only the most common way that poor sleep can mess up your whole waking life.

It may help, here, to take a look at a good night's sleep, so you know what you're missing when you have a lousy one.

All day long, you're burning glucose, the fuel that drives everything you do. One by-product of that inferno is a neuro-transmitter called adenosine, which binds with receptors in your nervous system, telling it to shut down for the night. (That's why exercisers sleep better: They burn more glucose.) Reinforcing the effect of adenosine is another energy regulator: melatonin. It also kicks in toward bedtime, so you yawn, hit the power button on the remote, and head into your bedtime rituals. Do them right and you reach the bed ready for sleep. (Sex works, too: The chaser for intercourse is the hormone oxytocin — a profound sleep inducer. It's the enemy of pillow talk and cuddling, where men are concerned.)

The bridge into unconsciousness is described in stages, which reflect the pattern of electrical impulses recorded in the sleeping mind. Alpha waves hum in the calm, sleepy brain, but the instant theta waves show up on the electroencephalograph recorder, you begin shutting down your senses. This is stage one, light sleep. If your wife asks you to take out the garbage, you'll still hop to it.

Five minutes later, though, and she's out of luck. Your senses lock down, and you realize full wet-noodle status. Stage two comes quickly, and the electrical activity is vastly different on the printout. You're falling fast now, into the deep sleep of stages 3 and 4. The latter is when your body secretes growth hormone, to reward you for any muscle-building activity you might have engaged in during the day.

Next comes rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which Dr. Dement famously studied by inviting a chorus line of Rockettes into his New York apartment sleep lab. (There's a line you haven't tried: "I'm a sleep researcher, and I wonder if I might observe you...") Your muscles are now utterly paralyzed, your mind utterly alive. Those pursuit dreams where the grizzly leaps but you can't run? That's REM sleep.

If you forget to set the alarm, there's no need to worry, because as you run through your supply of sleep-inducing melatonin, it's replaced in your bloodstream by a surge of cortisol. It urges you to get the hell out of bed.

So you sit up in a stark panic over the 8 a.m. staff meeting and spot the rising sun out your bedroom window, and your pineal gland shuts down melatonin production entirely. Like Dracula, the gland shies from the sunlight, waiting for dark to turn on the melatonin supply once more and bed you down.

A TALE OF TWO SLEEP CHARTS

Okay, that's the Sleeping Beauty version of the overnight story. One phase flows neatly into the next, uninterrupted, and the therapeutic process sweeps inevitably toward morning light.

Then there's the way I sleep, which is kind of like the way Reggie Bush runs: all over the place. I found this out at the University of Pennsylvania sleep lab, which occupies a couple of floors in the Sheraton Hotel near the campus in Philadelphia. That's where I went through the ordeal of polysomnography; in its way, it too was a testament to the power of the sleep drive. I checked into the lab around 8:30 p.m. one night last summer and was met by a sweet, slight sleep technician named Amber.

She wired me like an NSA stakeout — three brain scanners on my scalp, a breath clip under my nose, straps to monitor chest and torso movements, a movement sensor on my leg to see if I do the midnight jig, and a finger pincer to track my oxygen levels. Thus encumbered by electronics, with a video cam further invading my privacy, I closed my eyes.

Amber woke me up at 6:30 a.m., right after an active half hour of REM sleep. The tapes show what a jumpy thing I am at night. Amber told me that my periodic limb movements might have an arousing effect, but not the kind I forward to. If this is rest, no wonder I don't feel refreshed in the morning.

Nor was Amber complimentary about my other sleep patterns. She noted my hypopneas —brief cessations of breath — which aren't a problem in a "relatively young man like me" but might become a problem later in life. This sounded like Dr. Dement's drowsy driver. But I'm nothing like that guy.

And yet, there was Amber telling me that I need to watch out, too. It could be that my throat muscles are relaxing just enough in sleep to affect my airway. The glass of wine I like to have with dinner could encourage that. Plus, I've been told I have a relatively small jaw and luxuriant tongue tissue (hey, some people consider that an advantage), so maybe I'm not so far off from apnea land.

I left the lab dazed, not only from my rough night under analysis, but also from the news that there's a lot more going on in the night than I ever realized. Later on, I met with Richard Schwab, M.D., of the Penn sleep center, and he wasn't too concerned by any of it, opining that maybe I just think about my sleep too much. He wasn't the first to suggest that. Many of the researchers I interviewed noted the tendency of chronic insomnia sufferers to ruminate on their sleeplessness. Which I understood completely: The hungry obsess over food, the sleepless focus on their eyelids — open or shut.

THE SLEEP PROFESSIONALS

In Salt Lake City, where I attended the convention of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, I picked up a useful perspective on my obsession. I'll admit that, at times, the lectures inspired delightful naps on the lawn outside the Salt Palace. But the researchers issued their share of wake-up calls, too.

One presentation, for instance, quoted the Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl. During World War II, he was deported to Auschwitz and eventually spent time in four concentration camps. He knew a few things about nightmares. Frankl's observation: "Sleep is like a dove which has landed near one's hand and stays there as long as one does not pay any attention to it; if one attempts to grasp it, it quickly flies away."

For the past 15 years, I've done everything I can to nail that sucker to my bedpost. I've drugged him. I've dusted him with stinky herbs. I've invited him to share a glass of wine with me. And lately I've enlisted an army of sleep docs to grant me the peace just to let him land.

But once that bird starts to fidget, it's damned hard to make him sit still.

I can trace my own difficulties to one blissfully sleepless night in 1990, at Michael Reese Hospital, in Chicago. That's when my son Jake was born. One estimate holds that a new baby results in 400 to 750 hours of lost sleep for his parents in the first year; between Jake and his brother Tyler, I'm officially down at least a thousand hours. More, if you pack on the added responsibilities of supporting a family, a boss, and a mortgage, plus worrying about the Cubs. You can see I've had way too much on my mind to sleep.

But the conference in Salt Lake City reinforced how critical it is to lure Frankl's bird to my bedside. Name almost any chronic threat to a man's health, and sleeplessness plays a role. Sometimes a very big one.

One hot area of research is the connection between sleep and weight gain, and I'm not just talking about the infamous Ambien abusers who hoover their fridges. Researchers at the University of Chicago have been tracking the correlation between sleep and two hunger hormones: ghrelin, which urges your body to chow down, and leptin, which tells it to push back from the table. They recruited 12 young men and limited them to 4 hours of sleep on 2 consecutive nights. It was as if they'd cut their hunger brake lines and attached a brick to their eating accelerators: ghrelin was up 28 percent, leptin down 18 percent.

Sanjay Patel, M.D., of Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, gave a fascinating presentation at the conference in which he demonstrated that people who get only 5 hours of sleep a night weigh more than longer sleepers at every age. Think of all the ghrelin surging through their veins, and the extra hours they have to eat crullers.

And in fact, the young men in the University of Chicago study who had the greatest ghrelin and leptin swings were the ones who, in surveys, most craved cake, candy, cookies, ice cream, pastry, chips, salted nuts, bread, pasta, cereal, and potatoes. If you salivated when you read that list, take a look at how much sleep you got last night.

Another group of researchers at the University of Chicago demonstrated that just 3 nights of fragmented sleep — the tossing- and-turning variety — made glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity plummet. Both of those, long-term, will elevate blood sugar, which can damage the tiny capillaries that carry oxygenated blood to your heart, your eyeballs, and your penis.

If that doesn't worry you, go ahead: Stay up late thumbing the remote. And keep doing it. There will be plenty of time to consider the consequences on the job tomorrow.

THE STUDY OF SLEEP DEPRIVATION

Killgore's most recent endeavor has been to round up young, male military recruits, torment them to wakefulness in various ways, and then administer tests that probe for many of the things that get you through the workday: making smart choices, learning new skills, working with people, pushing past failure, laughing off Dilbert moments. Sleep deprivation sabotages them all.

Your greatest fear on the job, then, might be that your boss — or worse yet, a rival — is getting enough sleep. Against that advantage, your sleepy ass doesn't stand a chance.

A lot of sleep research seems to begin with being mean to rats. In Salt Lake City, I met many pleasant, intelligent young people who had devised ingenious ways to stress out rodents — forcing them to swim against their will, or shocking their little pink feet — to see how it affected their shut-eye.

My rat empathy was particularly engaged by tests involving what the researchers called "social defeats." For instance, there's the experiment in which a young, naive rat was dropped into a cage along with an attractive female rat. After the two had sniffed and nuzzled a bit, the scientists introduced an older, aggressive male rat into the cage. This rat bastard made life hell for the younger male rat, until the young guy exposed his belly in utter defeat. He slept lousy at night, poor rodent.

Oddly enough, that perfectly describes my life in a job I once had. I reacted like the caged rat: by showing my belly and losing sleep. Like, 2 years' worth. I feared that the circles under my eyes might knit into a noose around my neck. A shrink prescribed an antidepressant/sleep inducer called Trazodone, and it got me through the dark nights.

Fortunately, the rat boss was chased off by corporate, and my life instantly improved — day and night. The spirit returned to my exercise, and I ran marathons in Vermont and New York City. I was quite the physical specimen, in fact, except for the plaque that had been building in the left anterior descending artery of my heart — a passageway aptly nicknamed "the widowmaker." I had no clue about it until I hopped on my bicycle in Martha's Vineyard, intent on a 50-miler. Chest pain stopped me, nearly for good.

I never had a heart attack — just a really good scare. And the angioplasty and stent now seem to have fixed me up just fine.

I feel better than ever, and my heart indices are superlative.

But nothing can relieve the aching question I have about why I, of all people, developed the blockage in the first place. No doctor in the world would point to my 2 years of sleepless hell as an absolute cause; it might have been genetics, or plain bad luck. But from what I now know, I wonder if insomnia almost choked the lifeblood out of me.

HOW SLEEP HELPS YOUR HEART

The old lion of the field, Dr. Dement, quite nearly wrote my epitaph when he pointed out, in the introduction to his compelling bedtime saga, The Promise of Sleep, that "if someone you know has had a heart attack, there is a good chance (especially if the victim is young) that an undiagnosed sleep disorder contributed to the problem."

How does sleep affect your heart health? Let me count the ways.

Janet Mullington, Ph.D., who hangs her mortarboard at Harvard medical school, contributed to a study that linked sleep loss with inflammation — the hot young thing cardiac researchers have been chasing around for the past decade. Essentially, if your blood carries elevated inflammation markers, your heart is in danger. "We've seen a connection between total sleep deprivation and an increase in white blood cells, interleukin-6, and C-reactive protein," she told me, naming a few horsemen of the inflammatory apocalypse. "It even happens with partial sleep deprivation."

Her study also showed increases in blood pressure and heart rate when people are denied sleep. Hypertension is one of the factors that can cause arterial plaques to rupture, and the next step is the blood clots that race to a narrowing in a heart artery, and kill.

But not me. Or at least, that's my plan.

I'm happy to report that for the sleep starved, there is a relatively new solution available, and it has nothing to do with that Lunesta butterfly alighting on my brow, nor inviting the Rozerem beaver into bed with me. (Not that I'm antidrug; many sleep docs I spoke with called the current generation of drugs safe and effective, especially when you compare them with the barbiturates that snuffed Marilyn Monroe and Elvis.)

The cure du jour for insomnia is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). A 2006 study revealed that it's as effective as a sedative in inducing sleep. The best news is that, unlike pills, which stop working when you stop swallowing them, CBT encourages sleep long after the sessions have ended.

Michael Sateia, M.D., of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in Lebanon, New Hampshire, is leading the way toward getting more practitioners trained in CBT. The bedroom hell he describes among his insomniac patients has much in common with the one I've experienced during my worst spells. The bed, he told me, can become a negative place. Instead of evoking warm and relaxing feelings, it can arouse tension and negative expectations. Dr. Sateia told me, "I've had patients whose hearts literally pounded when they even looked at their beds."

It turns out that one of the biggest enemies here is the otherworldly glow of the alarm clock. Even those dimly glowing numbers can mess with your pineal gland, which is extraordinarily sensitive to light. You see the digits 3:14 a.m., and it thinks, Sunrise! The resulting cortisol flow can help fuel the rumination that keeps insomniacs awake until dawn actually comes.

The coming of the true dawn is nothing to be trifled with, either. On the floor of the convention hall in Salt Lake City, I met Larry Pedersen, the founder of the company that produces the Litebook, a lightbulb array he told me could help manage my melatonin levels. "It can give you more energy during the day," Pedersen told me with evangelical fervor, "and a full burst of melatonin at night, when you really need it."

I was ready to wave him off, until he cited chapter and verse on the studies that show how light of a certain amplitude can manage melatonin levels — shutting it down in the morning, so it can build up better in the evening. Bright sunlight will do that. (Seen any recently?) A light box will, too. I took a fair amount of abuse in my office for using one — until I recounted the melatonin knockout punch it delivered at night.

CBT can also help, by using stimulation control before bed — no caffeine within 12 hours of bed, no wine with dinner, and nothing too exciting (WWE, for instance) in the bedtime hour. You keep to a regular schedule of waking, and maybe even push bedtime to build sleep pressure. You don't hit the hay until you're certain it won't hit back.

CHANGING THE NIGHTLY ROUTINE

Naturally, I arranged for a few CBT sessions myself, and found instant progress with a psychologist named David Glosser, Sc.D., based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He proved his bona fides with me when, in the midst of a barrage of personal questions, he asked which side of the bed I sleep on. Before I could answer, he said, "The left. All guys sleep on the left." He noted that the left arm — your free one, when you roll to the right — is the hairy, horny one men initiate sex with, because it's hooked into the hairy, horny right side of the brain. Guilty as charged.

Glosser changed my bedtime routine, encouraging me to stay up a little later, so that when I fell into bed, I'd be more likely to fall straight to sleep. And he asked my wife and me to switch sides of the bed, to change things up; now I'll look forward to her left hook. And he insists that if I'm not sleeping, I should leave the bed. But not for online poker. Reading time will benefit.

The most important thing he did for me, though, was change my outlook toward sleep. He broke my habits of obsession and worry, and helped me just let the night be. In essence, CBT renovated my bedroom, and my attitude, into a zone of relaxation and peace.

Just the place for Frankl's bird to settle for an evening, in fact.

So, what happened to me that night, in Vegas? I was all psyched up, ready to gamble. I'd set aside a pot to blow, and approached the roulette wheel, lauded as a simple place to lay down a bet and enjoy the action. But for me, stack after stack vanished into the black hole at the croupier's elbow. So I moved on to blackjack, which carries the best odds in the casino. I'd had a little luck at it that afternoon, when the stakes were lower. I won a few big hands that night, but soon my chips disappeared.

I'd imagined an all-night session, running up my totals and witnessing the drama of Vegas till dawn. But I'd busted out before midnight. What to do?

My prefrontal cortex knew the drill. I walked slowly, then with determination, toward the elevators that would carry me upstairs, to my room. I was headed for a good night's sleep.

It's the surest bet you can make, my fellow gamblers.

memorising technique... mnemonic

Alhamdulillah, i just pass my winter exams....lega sangat2. some of my friends sekarang ni ade kt uk, germany...eurotrip. aku kt sini aje, maybe abiskan jln kt bandar simferopol ni....disamping masalah universal...apelagi, ekonomi la. oklah, ni tips untuk memorise material for exams. maybe dah terlambat utk sem ni, tp sem depan2 still ade, still exam. to my friends yg still struggling for exams good luck...agi idup, agi ngelaban!!


Mnemonic any device for aiding the memory. Named for Mnemosyne, the personification of memory in Greek mythology, mnemonics are also called memoria technica. The principle is to create in the mind an artificial structure that incorporates unfamiliar ideas or, especially, a series of dissociated ideas that by themselves are difficult to remember. Ideally, the structure is designed so that its parts are mutually suggestive. Grouping items in rhymed verse has long been a popular >mnemonic technique, from the “gender rhymes” of the Latin grammars to the verse for remembering the number of days in the months (“Thirty days hath September, April, June and November . . . ”).

Numerous attempts have been made to invent mnemonic systems—generalized codes to improve all-around capacity to remember. The Greek and Roman system of mnemonics was founded on the use of mental places and signs or pictures in terms of the location of the items of interest. The method combines a familiar structure locus and the item or thing to be remembered. This mnemonic method, which is referred to as loci et res, is an effective way to remember a series of items in serial order. The most usual method is to choose a large house, of which the apartments, walls, windows, statues, and furniture were severally associated with certain names, phrases, events, or ideas by means of symbolic pictures; to recall these it is only necessary to search over the apartments of the house until the particular place is discovered where they had been deposited by the imagination. In accordance with this system, if it is desired to fix a historic date in the memory, it is localized in an imaginary town divided into a certain number of districts, each with 10 houses, each house with 10 rooms, and each room with 100 quadrates, or memory places, partly on the floor, partly on the four walls, partly on the roof. Using this system, the traditional date of the invention of printing in Europe (1440) could be fixed in the memory by mentally placing a book or some other symbol of printing in the 40th quadrate, or memory place, of the 4th room of the 1st house of the imaginary town.

Scientific interest in mnemonics was heightened in 1968 when the renowned Soviet psychologist Aleksandr R. Luria wrote The Mind of a Mnemonist, which suggested the field was worthy of deeper psychological study. Luria was particularly impressed with the ability of individuals to remember long lists of numbers for periods of years.

Mnemonists use a variety of procedures to facilitate recall. One method, called linking, associates any pair of items—a pen and a chair, for example—and then links those items with a third, the chain proceeding indefinitely. Interaction, and not mere association, is necessary; one could imagine the pen writing on the chair. This method has proven effective with grammar-school children as well as with adults. Other methods include rhymes (“i before e, except after c”) or substitution (the name Tchaikovsky can become “chew-cow-ski”; Reagan becomes “ray-gun”; etc.). One point stressed by mnemonists is that the imagery has to be bizarre if it is to be effective. Simple or common associations are said to be quickly forgotten.

In fact, mnemonic devices, all of which depend upon the use of some method of coding of what is to be remembered, may be very useful in limited fields, especially if the coding is made up by the person who is going to use it. Completely generalized and impersonal mnemonic systems are apt to break down, largely because of their inevitable complexity and ambiguity; thus their importance has declined.



Memory the retention and retrieval in the human mind of past experiences.
That experiences influence subsequent behaviour is evidence of an obvious but nevertheless remarkable activity called remembering. Learning could not occur without the function popularly named memory. Practice results in a cumulative effect on memory leading to skillful performance on the tuba, to recitation of a poem, and even to reading and understanding these words. So-called intelligent behaviour demands memory, remembering being prerequisite to reasoning. The ability to solve any problem or even to recognize that a problem exists depends on memory. Typically, the decision to cross a street is based on remembering numerous earlier experiences.

Practice (or review) tends to build and maintain memory for a task or for any learned material. Over a period of no practice what has been learned tends to be forgotten; and the adaptive consequences may not seem obvious. Yet, dramatic instances of sudden forgetting (as in amnesia) can be seen to be adaptive. In this sense, the ability to forget can be interpreted to have survived through a process of natural selection in animals. Indeed, when one's memory of an emotionally painful experience leads to severe anxiety, forgetting may produce relief. Nevertheless, an evolutionary interpretation might make it difficult to understand how the commonly gradual process of forgetting survived natural selection.
In speculating about the evolution of memory, it is helpful to consider what would happen if memories failed to fade. Forgetting clearly aids orientation in time; since old memories weaken and the new tend to be vivid, clues are provided for inferring duration. Without forgetting, adaptive ability would suffer; for example, learned behaviour that might have been correct a decade ago may no longer be. Cases are recorded of people who (by ordinary standards) forgot so little that their everyday activities were full of confusion. Thus, forgetting seems to serve the survival of the individual and the species.

Another line of speculation posits a memory storage system of limited capacity that provides adaptive flexibility specifically through forgetting. In this view, continual adjustments are made between learning or memory storage (input) and forgetting (output). Indeed, there is evidence that the rate at which individuals forget is directly related to how much they have learned. Such data offer gross support of contemporary models of memory that assume an input-output balance.

Whatever its origins, forgetting has attracted considerable investigative attention. Much of this research has been aimed at discovering those factors that change the rate of forgetting. Efforts are made to study how information may be stored; that is, to discover the ways in which it may be encoded. Remembered experiences may be said to consist of encoded collections of interacting information; and interaction seems to be a prime factor in forgetting.

Psychologists of the modern era, from their earliest speculations about remembering to the formulation of most of their latest experimentally based views, commonly have assumed that the critical problems are concerned with the physiological mechanisms by which events and experiences can be retained so that they can be mentally reproduced, either in their original mode or with the assistance of signs and symbols that are regarded as equivalent to that mode. Memory is thus usually considered to function perfectly in proportion to its literal accuracy of reduplication. Investigators have generally supposed that anything that influences the behaviour of an organism endowed with a central nervous system leaves—somewhere in that system— a “trace” or group of traces. So long as these traces last they can, in theory, be restimulated and the event or experience that established them will be remembered. The experimental psychology of remembering—all modern experts claim to base their conclusions upon experimental evidence—endeavours to discover methods for identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for the persistence and length of persistence of traces and for their restimulation.

Measuring retention

Standard sentences, prose passages, and poems have been used to control input in studies of retention; but discrete verbal units (such as words or sets of letters) are most frequently employed. The letters usually comprise lists of consonant syllables (three consonants; e.g.,RQK) or so-called nonsense syllables (consonant-vowel-consonant; e.g., ROK). The order in which verbal units are to be learned and to be recited may be left to the subject (free recall). A schoolchild who can recite the names of all African countries probably has learned such a free-recall task. Units also can be presented serially (in a constant order), the subject being asked to recite them in that order; reciting the alphabet in the usual way represents such serial learning.

Pairs of words may be offered; in such paired-associate tasks the subject eventually is asked to produce the missing member of each pair when only one word is shown. This is akin to learning English equivalents for words from another language.

For these and similar tasks investigators commonly permit subjects enough practice trials to reach some preselected criterion or level of performance. This level effectively defines an immediate retention score against which later forgetting may be measured. Subsequent tests of retention are then made to investigate the rate at which forgetting proceeds. This rate tends to vary with the methods used, basically those of recall, recognition, or relearning.


Subjects may be asked to reproduce (recall) previously learned data in any order or in the original order in which they were learned.
In a free-recall test the instructions might be: “Yesterday you learned a list of words; please write as many of those words as you possibly can as they occur to you.” For the paired-associate task the subject may be told: “Yesterday you learned some pairs of words; I will show you one word from each pair and you try to give the other.” He may be paced, being limited to a few seconds to produce each word; or he may be unpaced, being given no rigidly specified limits.

If retention of any kind is to be measured over different periods (e.g., an hour, a day, a week) a separate group of individuals should be used for each period. The reason is that the very act of remembering constitutes practice that keeps memory lively, tending to give misleading underestimates of the rate of forgetting if the same subjects are tested over successive intervals.

Recognition

The subject's task is simpler in tests of recognition, since reproduction or retrieval (as in recall) is not required. The subject simply is asked to remember previously presented information when it is offered to him again. For example, he may be given a list of words for study; on the subsequent test of retention these are mingled with additional words, the subject being asked to identify (recognize) the original words. Apparently the recognition test stresses ability to choose between “old” (studied) data and “new” words, although this need not mean that choices are based only on temporal discrimination (awareness of time distinctions).

In an alternative variety of recognition test, each word studied might be paired with a new one, the task being to choose the old member of each pair. Or, the test words might be presented one at a time for identification as old or new. Sometimes learning and testing are combined: a very long list of words may be presented one at a time, some being repeated; the task is to recognize the repeats.

Some recognition tests stress memory of the order of presentation. The subject learns a serial list (reciting in a prescribed order); the list then is scrambled, and he is tested on his ability to rearrange it appropriately. Order may be based on how units are arranged in space (e.g., printed on a page) or on their numerical position in a series or on associative information. Thus, if a paired-associate list has been learned, the test may consist of the unmatched presentation of all units with a request to pair them properly. This sort of recognition seems to emphasize associative attributes. If some elements on the test were not presented originally, the temporal attribute also may be involved.

Relearning

The number of successive trials a subject takes to reach a specified level of proficiency may be compared with the number of trials he later needs to attain the same level. This yields a measure of retention by what is called the relearning method. The fewer trials needed to reach the original level of mastery, the better the subject seems to remember. The relearning measure sometimes is expressed as a so-called savings score. If 10 trials initially were required, and five relearning trials later produce the same level of proficiency, then five trials have been saved; the savings score is 50 percent (that is, 50 percent of the original 10 trials). The more forgetting, the lower the savings score.

Although it may seem paradoxical, relearning methods can yield both sensitive and insensitive measures of forgetting. Tasks have been devised that produce wide differences in recall but for which no differences in relearning are observed. (Some theorists attribute this to a form of heavy interference among learned data that has only momentary influence on retention.) Six months or a year after initial learning, some tests may give zero recall scores but can show savings in relearning.

When relatively long retention intervals (usually hours or days) are used, the methods are said to involve long-term memory. In a sense, methods for studying short-term memory are miniaturized versions of these. A list may be as short as one item, level of proficiency is very low, and retention intervals are in seconds (or minutes at most).

For example, the subject may be shown a single nonsense syllable for a few seconds' study. Next he is given a simple task (such as counting backward) to occupy him for a half minute so that he cannot rehearse, and then is asked to recall the syllable. Forgetting is observed to occur over such short intervals, tending to be greater when length of interval increases, as in long-term memory. The same procedure can be used with a single paired-associate item or with a short list of four or five pairs. In a short-term counterpart of serial learning, a string of about eight single-digit numbers or letters is presented very rapidly (say, two per second), and the subjects are asked to recall them in the order in which they were presented. Recognition tests also can be adapted for measuring short-term retention. When only one presentation is used for learning, however, relearning measures are obviously unfeasible.

Time-dependent aspects of retention; storage and retrieval

Some workers theorize a distinct short-term memory system of sharply limited capacity that can retain information perhaps only a few seconds and a long-term system of relatively unlimited capacity and retention.
Among typical people, short-term function seems limited to about seven separate units (e.g., seven random letters or unrelated common words). Thus, one may consult a telephone directory and forget the number before dialing is completed. Information seems to enter long-term storage by such processing as rehearsal and encoding, as if short-term retention is a way station between incoming information and more enduring memory.
Other theorists do not distinguish short- and long-term systems as inferred from observed differences in capacity and retention. Positing only one storage system, they attribute short-term phenomena to very low levels of learning. Those who postulate distinct systems point to the results of injury to a specific brain region (the hippocampus): (1) information stored prior to hippocampal damage seems to be retained; (2) sufferers seem incapable of new long-term storage; (3) the short-term functions appear to be unimpaired and subjects perform as well as ever in tests of immediate memory (e.g., for a set of random numbers). It is as if new information no longer can be transferred from some sort of short-term system to relatively enduring storage.

Other data that bear on the controversy among theorists come from studies of people without known brain injury. When one has just seen a new list of words one at a time, the initial words in the list tend to be recalled best (primacy effects), those at the end next best (recency effects), while items from the middle are least likely to be recalled. This is quite consistently found as long as recall begins immediately following presentation of the last word. If, however, a short interval follows, during which the subject is otherwise occupied to prevent rehearsal, the recency effect may completely disappear; words at the end are no better recalled than those in the middle. Primacy effects are essentially undisturbed, while a delay as short as perhaps 15 seconds is enough to abolish the recency phenomenon. Although some suggest that recency effects depend on a separate short-term memory system and that primacy effects are mediated by a long-term system, a single memory function also may be invoked to accommodate the findings. Nevertheless, interest is growing in multisystem theories on the grounds that they enhance appreciation of the processes involved in establishing relatively enduring memory.

Investigators concerned with physiological bases for memory seek a kind of neurochemical code with enough stability physically to produce a structural change or memory trace (engram) in the nervous system; mechanisms for decoding and retrieval also are sought. Efforts at the strict behavioral level similarly are directed toward describing encoding, decoding, and retrieval mechanisms as well as the content of the stored information.

One way to characterize a memory (or memory trace) is to identify the information it encodes. A learner may encode far more information than is apparent in the task as presented. For example, if a subject is shown three words for a few seconds and (after 30 seconds of diversion from rehearsal) is asked to recall and then another triad of words is given under the same procedure, then another, and so on, then if all triads share some common element (e.g., all are animal names), poorer and poorer recall is observed on successive trials. Such findings may be explained by assuming that the learner encodes this animal category as part of his memory for each word. Initially, the common code might be expected to aid recall by sharply delimiting the word population. Successive triads, however, should tend to be encoded in increasingly similar ways, blurring their unique characteristics for the subject. An additional step provides critical supporting evidence for such an interpretation. If a final triad of vegetable names is unexpectedly presented, recall recovers dramatically. The subject tends to reproduce the vegetable names much better than he does those of the last animal triad; recall is about as efficient as it was for the first three animal names. This particular shift clearly seems to provide escape from earlier confusion or blurring, and it may be inferred that a common conceptual characteristic was encoded for each animal name.

Any characteristic or attribute of a word may be investigated in this way to infer whether it is incorporated in memory. When recall does not recover it would seem that the manipulated characteristic has little or no representation in memory. For example, grammatical class typically does not appear to be encoded; decrement in recall produced after a series of triads consisting of verbs tends to continue when a shift is made to three adjectives. Such an experiment does not indicate what common encoding characteristic might be responsible for the decrement, suggesting only that it is not grammatical class.

Encoding mechanisms also may be inferred from tests of recognition. For example, subjects study a long list of words, being informed of a multiple-choice memory test to follow. Each word studied is made part of a test item that includes other carefully chosen new words (distractors). Distractors are selected to represent different types of encoding the investigator suspects may have occurred in learning. If the word presented for study is chosen by the subject, little can be inferred about the nature of the encoding. Any errors, however, can be most suggestive. Thus, if the word presented for study was TABLE, the multiple-choice item might be TABLE, CHAIR, ABLE, FURNITURE, PENCIL. If CHAIR is incorrectly selected, it may be suspected that this associatively related word occurred to the subject implicitly during learning and became so well encoded that the subject later could not determine whether it or TABLE had been presented. If the wrong choice is ABLE, acoustical resemblance to TABLE may have contributed to the confusion. If FURNITURE is erroneously chosen, perhaps conceptual category was prominent in the encoding.

Since it is not related in any obvious way to TABLE, the word PENCIL may be intended as a control, unlikely to be a part of the memory for TABLE. If this is the case, subjects should be more likely to select distractor words other than PENCIL (if indeed they have been encoded along with TABLE).

Although a subject may have encoded in ways suggested by particular distractors, he still may be able to choose the correct word. Or he may have encoded in ways not represented by the distractors.
Evidence has been accumulating to suggest that a long-term memory is a collection of information or of attributes that can serve in discriminating it from other memories and can function as retrieval cues. In addition to verbal attributes, visual images may be a part of the memory; emotional responses produced at the time the memory is established may be incorporated.

The common experience of having a name or word on the tip of the tongue seems related to specific perceptual attributes. In particular, people who report the “tip-of-the-tongue” feeling tend to identify the word's first letter and number of syllables with an accuracy that far exceeds mere guessing. There is evidence that memories may encode information about when they were established and about how often they have been experienced. Some seem to embrace spatial information; e.g., one remembers a particular news item to be on the lower right-hand side of the front page of a newspaper. Research indicates that the rate of forgetting varies for different attributes. For example, memories in which auditory attributes seem dominant tend to be more rapidly forgotten than those with minimal acoustic characteristics.

If a designated (target) memory consists of a collection of attributes, its recall or retrieval should be enhanced by any cue that indicates one of the attributes. For example, on failing to recall the term horse (included in a list just seen), one may be told that there was an animal name among the words. Or he may be asked if an associate term (say, barn or zebra) helps him think of a word he missed. While some additional recall has been observed with this kind of help, failures are common even with ostensibly relevant cues. Though it is possible that the cues frequently are inappropriate, nevertheless, if words were not learned (encoded or stored) with accompanying attributes, cuing of any kind should be ineffective.

Theories of forgetting

When memory of past experience is not activated for days or months, forgetting tends to occur; and any theory of forgetting must cope with this primitive observation. Such auxiliary phenomena as differences in the rates of forgetting for different kinds of information also must be accommodated.

It has been theorized that as time passes the physiological bases of memory tend to change. With disuse, it is held that the neural engram (the memory trace in the brain) gradually decays or loses its clarity. While such a theory seems reasonable, it would, if left at this point, do little more than restate behavioral evidence of forgetting at the nervous-system level. Decay or deterioration does not seem attributable merely to the passage of time; some underlying physical process needs to be demonstrated. Until a neurochemical basis for memory can be more explicitly described, any decay theory of forgetting must await detailed development.

A pre-eminent theory of forgetting at the behavioral level is anchored in the phenomena of interference; in what are called retroactive and proactive inhibition. In retroactive inhibition, new learning interferes with retention of the old; in proactive inhibition, old memories interfere with the retention of new ones. Both phenomena have great generality in studies of any kind of learning, although most research among humans has considered verbal learning.

People may, for example, learn two successive verbal lists; the next day some are asked to recall the first list and others to recall the second. Still a third (control) group learns only one list and is asked to recall it a day later. People who learn two lists almost unfailingly will recall much less than do those in the control group. The amount by which controls exceed those who recall the first list is a measure of retroactive inhibition; the degree to which they are better than those who recall the second list is a measure of proactive inhibition. While retroactive inhibition usually will be observed in relearning, it is unusual to detect proactive deficit under such circumstances.

Theorists attribute the loss produced by these procedures to interference between list-learning tasks. When lists are constructed to exhibit varying differences, the degree of interference seems to be related to the amount of similarity. Thus loss in recall will be reduced when two successive lists have no identical terms. Maximum loss generally will occur when there appears to be heavy (but not complete) overlap in the memory attributes for the two lists. One may recall parts of the first list in trying to remember the second and vice versa. (This breakdown in discrimination may reflect the presence of dominant attributes that are appropriate for items in both lists.) Discrimination tends to deteriorate as the number of lists increases, retroactive and proactive inhibition increasing correspondingly, suggesting interference at the time of recall.

In retroactive inhibition, however, all of the loss need not be attributed to competition at the moment of recall. Some of the first list may be lost to memory in learning the second; this is called unlearning. If one is asked to recall from both lists combined, first-list items are less likely to be remembered than if the second list had not been learned. Learning the second list seems to act backward in time (retroactively) to destroy some memory for the first. So much effort has been devoted to studying conditions that affect unlearning that it has become a major topic in interference theory.

Retroactive and proactive effects can be quite gross quantitatively. If one learns a list one day and tries to recall it the next, learns a second list and attempts recall for it the following day, learns a third and so on, recall for each successive list tends to decline. Roughly 80 percent recall may be anticipated for the first list; this declines steeply to about 20 percent for the tenth list. Learning the earlier lists seems to act forward in time (proactively) to inhibit retention of later lists. These proactive phenomena indicate that the more one learns the more rapidly one will forget. Similar effects can be demonstrated for retroactive inhibition within just one laboratory session.

Such powerful effects have led some to theorize that all forgetting is produced by interference. Any given memory is said to be subject to interference from others established earlier or subsequently. Interference, theoretically, may occur when memories conflict through any attributes. With a limited group of attributes and an enormous number of memories, it might seem that everyday attempts to recall would be chaotic.Yet even if all of the memories shared some information, other attributes not held in common could still serve to distinguish them. For example, every memory theoretically is encoded at a different time and temporal attributes might serve to discriminate otherwise conflicting memories. Indeed, when two apparently conflicting lists are learned several days apart, proactive inhibition is markedly reduced. Assuming memories to be multiple-encoded, interference theory need not predict utter confusion in remembering.
Sources of interference are most pervasive and should not be considered narrowly. For example, any memory seems to be established in specific surroundings or context, and subsequent efforts to remember tend to be less effective when the circumstances differ from the original. Alcoholics, when sober, tend to have trouble finding bottles they have hidden while intoxicated; when they drink again, the task is much easier. Some contexts also may be associated with other memories that interfere with whatever it is that one is trying to remember.

Each new memory tends to amalgamate information already in long-term storage. Encoding mechanisms invariably adapt or relate fresh data to information already present, to the point that what is coded may not be a direct representation of incoming stimuli. This is particularly apparent when input is relatively meaningless; the newly encoded memory comes to resemble those previously established (i.e., it accrues meaning). For example, a nonsense word such as LAJOR might be encoded as MAJOR.
To recall any nonsense word correctly requires that an appropriate decoding rule be a part of the memory; but coding rules are subject to forgetting (interference) in the same way that any attribute is. Qualitative changes in memory may result when the information presented does not allow precise decoding; thus, when one sees a drawing of a jagged figure that resembles a star he might encode it as a star, knowing full well that it is not perfect. Subsequent decoding in recall (or recognition) thus produces only an approximation of the original jagged figure; it may well be influenced by other equally imprecise decoding rules already stored. In like fashion, somewhat incoherent sentences may become more reasonable during encoding; they tend to be reproduced in memory tests more coherently. When the learner has trouble making sense of any new stimulus (when he cannot specify encoding and decoding rules with precision) the decoded memory tends to resemble previously established memories.

Although interference has attracted wide support as an account of forgetting, it must be placed in perspective. Interpretations that emphasize distinctions between short- and long-term memory and that posit control processes for handling information are potentially more comprehensive than is interference theory. Behavioral evidence for interference eventually may be explained within such systems.
In addition, a number of deductions from interference theory have not been well supported by experiment. The focus of difficulty lies in the hypothesis that interference from established memories is a major source of proactive inhibition. The laboratory subject is asked to learn tasks with attributes that have varying degrees of conflict with memories established in daily life. Theoretically, the more conflict, the greater the proactive interference to produce forgetting. Yet a number of experiments have failed to provide much support for this prediction.

Interference theory also fails to account for some pathological forms of forgetting. Repression as observed in psychiatric practice, for example, represents almost complete, highly selective forgetting, far beyond that anticipated by interference theorists. Attempts to study repression through laboratory procedures have failed to yield systematic data that could be used to test theoretical conclusions.

Correlates of rate of forgetting

Although forgetting normally is expected to begin as soon as practice ceases, at times an exception (known as reminiscence) has been reported. In reminiscence, memory seems to improve without practice; retention is even better if tested after a rest period than if tested immediately after learning trials stop. Observed only over periods of a few minutes, this elusive phenomenon produces very small improvements, and forgetting follows. Scores of studies designed to elicit reminiscence have failed to do so, yielding only evidence of forgetting. Reasons for the conflicting findings have not been identified.

Degree of learning

The degree of learning is found to be directly associated with the amount of practice. In a metaphoric sense, specific memory may be said to grow stronger and stronger as practice proceeds. Even after a task can be performed or recited perfectly, continued practice (sometimes called overlearning) increases the “strength” of the memory. The rate of forgetting is slower when the degree of learning is greater. If there were one universal prescription for resisting forgetting, it would be to learn to a very high level initially; results seem even better when learning trials are not bunched together. Practice trials may be given en masse in a single session or the same number of trials may be distributed in sessions held on different days. The interrupted schedule is far superior to massed practice in that the rate of forgetting that follows distributed practice is much slower. The laboratory evidence also confirms the belief that cramming for an examination may produce acceptable performance shortly afterwards, but that such massed study results in poor long-term retention. Information learned in widely distributed practice appears less susceptible to interference; memories established under distributed schedules also are less likely to produce proactive inhibition than are those learned in massed trials.
Mnemonic systems

The principle that new information is encoded to previously stored data has been used in an effort to aid memory function. When encoding techniques are formally applied, they are called mnemonic systems or devices. (The popular rhyme that begins “Thirty days hath September . . . ” is an example.) Verbal learning can be enhanced by providing an appropriate mnemonic system (even to a bright college student who may have devised efficient systems of his own). Thus, paired associates (e.g., DOG-CHAIR) will be learned more rapidly if they are included in a simple sentence (e.g., The dog jumped over the chair). Imagery that can relate different words to be learned (even in a bizarre fashion) has been found beneficial. Some investigators hold that pure rote learning (in which no use is made of established memories except to directly perceive the stimuli) is rare or nonexistent. They suggest that all learning elaborates on memories already available. This could be taken to mean that the rate of forgetting would be the same whether or not a formal mnemonic system were used in learning.

Indeed, there seem to be no experimental results in which formal mnemonic instruction has resulted in forgetting more rapidly than when such special training is not given. Yet, while there often is no difference in the rate of forgetting, a number of studies indicate slower forgetting following instruction in a mnemonic system. These discrepancies may mean that some mnemonic systems are more subject to interference than are others. Perhaps the methods used fail to adequately distinguish between learning and forgetting.

Factors that influence the rate of learning should be distinguished from those that affect the rate of forgetting. For example, nonsense syllables are learned more slowly than are an equal number of common words; if both are studied for the same length of time, the better learned common words will be forgotten more slowly. But this does not mean that rate of forgetting intrinsically differs for the two tasks. Degree of learning must be held constant before it may be judged whether there are differences in rate of forgetting. Rates of forgetting can be compared only if tasks are learned to an equivalent degree. Indeed, when degree of learning is experimentally controlled, different kinds of information are forgotten at about the same rate. Nonsense syllables are not forgotten more rapidly than are ordinary words. In general, factors that seem to produce wide differences in rate of learning show little (if any) effect on rate of forgetting. (Despite discrepant evidence, mnemonic systems may prove an exception.)

Individual differences

Experimental findings seem to contradict the common intuition that people inherently differ in the rate at which they forget. This intuitive belief appears largely to derive from definite, wide individual differences in rate of learning; some people do learn faster than others. Thus, given the same number of trials or identical time in which to study, people will vary widely in the level of learning they achieve. Individual differences in forgetting then can be predicted efficiently, merely on the basis of how well each person has learned. This powerfully indicates that ordinary estimates of one's rate of forgetting are spurious, being obscured by uncontrolled differences in learning ability. One's talent for learning seems to swamp efforts to assess his inherent tendency to forget. Under less ordinary circumstances, however (e.g., selective brain injury, stroke, neurotic amnesia), the degree of learning does seem to be almost completely irrelevant to the rate at which one forgets. An amnesia sufferer may forget his own name and still may be able to remember that Sofia is the capital of Bulgaria (see below Abnormalities of memory).

Adab Membaca Al Quran

Assalamualaikum wbt...
hari ni patutnye ade consultation for tomorrow exam., microbiology. so, i woke up early. unfortunately, bile sampai kt department, takde sorang pun my classmate kat sane. kejam betui. tanya kt laborant, she said consultation at 3 o'clock. hehe...boleh gi surf net dulu....

Adab Membaca Al Quran Al Qura'an sebagai Kitab Suci, Wahyu Ilahi, mempunyai adab-adab tersendiri bagi orang-orang yang membacanya. Adab-adab itu sudah diatur dengan sagnat baik, untuk penghormatan dan keagungan Al Quran; tiap-tiap orang harus berpedoman kepadanya dan mengerjakannya. Imam Al Ghazali di dalam kitabnya Ihya Ulumuddin telah memperinci dengan sejelas-jelasnya bagaimana hendaknya adab-adab membaca Al Qur'an menjadi adab yang mengenal batin, dan adab yang mengenal lahir. Adab yang mengenal batin itu, diperinci lagi menjadi arti memahami asal kalimat, cara hati membesarkan kalimat Allah, menghadirkan hati dikala membaca sampai ke tingkat memperluas, memperhalus perasaan dan membersihkan jiwa. Dengan demikian, kandungan Al Quran yang dibaca dengan perantaraan lidah, dapat bersemi dalam jiwa dan meresap ke dalam hati sanubarinya. Kesemuanya ini adalah adab yang berhubungan dengan batin, yaitu dengan hati dan jiwa. Sebagai contoh, Imam Al Gazhali menjelaskan, bagaimana cara hati membesarkan kalimat Allah, yaitu bagi pembaca Al Qur'an ketika ia memulainya, maka terlebih dahulu ia harus menghadirkan dalam hatinya, betapa kebesaran Allah yang mempunyai kalimat-kalimat itu. Dia harus yakin dalam hatinya, bahwa yang dibacanya itu bukanlah kalam manusia, tetapi adalah kalam Allah Azza wa Jalla. Membesarkan kalam Allah itu, bukan saja dalam membacanya, tetapi juga dalam menjaga tulisan-tulisan Al Quran itu sendiri. Sebagaimana yang diriwayatkan, 'Ikrimah bin Abi Jahl, sangat gusar hatinya bila melihat lembaran-lembaran yang bertuliskan Al Quran berserak-serak seolah-olah tersia-sia, lalu ia memungutnya selembar demi selembar, sambil berkata:"Ini adalah kalam Tuhanku! Ini adalah kalam Tuhanku, membesarkan kalam Allah berarti membesarkan Allah." Adapun mengenai adab lahir dalam membaca Al Quran, selain didapati di dalam kitab Ihya Ulumuddin, juga banyak terdapat di dalam kitab-kitab lainnya. Misalnya dalam kitab Al Itqan oleh Al Imam Jalaludin As Suyuthu, tantang adab membaca Al Quran itu diperincinya sampai menjadi beberapa bagian. Diantara adab-adab membaca Al Quran, yang terpenting ialah: 1. Disunatkan membaca Al Quran sesudah berwudhu, dalam keadaan bersih, sebab yang dibaca adalah wahyu Allah. 2. Mengambil Al Quran hendaknya dengan tangan kanan; sebaiknya memegangnya dengan kedua belah tangan. 3. Disunatkan membaca Al Quran di tempat yang bersih, seperti di rumah, di surau, di mushalla dan di tempat-tempat lain yang dianggap bersih. Tapi yang paling utama ialah di mesjid. 4. Disunatkan membaca Al Quran menghadap ke Qiblat, membacanya dengan khusyu' dan tenang; sebaiknya dengan berpakaian yang pantas. 5. Ketika membaca Al Quran, mulut hendaknya bersih, tidak berisi makanan, sebaiknya sebelum membaca Al Quran mulut dan gigi dibersihkan terlebih dahulu. 6. Sebelum membaca Al Quran disunatkan membaca ta'awwudz, yang berbunyi: a'udzubillahi minasy syaithanirrajim. Sesudah itu barulah dibaca Bismillahirrahmanir rahim. Maksudnya, diminta lebih dahulu perlindungan Allah, supaya terjauh pengaruh tipu daya syaitan, sehingga hati dan fikiran tetap tenang di waktu membaca Al quran, dijauhi dari gangguan. Biasa juga orang yang sebelum atau sesudah membaca ta'awwudz itu, berdoa dengan maksud memohon kepada Alah supaya hatinya menjadi terang. Doa itu berbunyi sebagai berikut. "Ya Allah bukakanlah kiranya kepada kami hikmat-Mu, dan taburkanlah kepada kami rahmat dan khazanah-Mu, ya Allah Yang Maha Pengasih lagi Maha Penyayang." 7. Disunatkan membaca Al Quran dengan tartil, yaitu dengan bacaan yang pelan-pelan dan tenang, sesuai dengan firman Allah dalam surat (73) Al Muzammil ayat 4: ".... Dan bacalah Al Quran itu dengan tartil". Membaca dengan tartil itu lebih banyak memberi bekas dan mempengaruhi jiwa, serta serta lebihmendatangkan ketenangan batin dan rasa hormat kepada Al Quran. Telah berkata Ibnu Abbas r. a.:" Aku lebih suka membaca surat Al Baqarah dan Ali Imran dengan tartil, daripada kubaca seluruh Al Quran dengan cara terburu-buru dan cepat-cepat." 8. Bagi orang yang sudah mengerti arti dan maksud ayat-ayat Al Quran, disunatkan membacanya dengan penuh perhatian dan pemikiran tentang ayat-ayat yang dibacanya itu dan maksudnya. Cara pembacaan seperti inilah yang dikehendaki, yaitu lidahnya bergerak membaca, hatinya turut memperhatikan dan memikirkan arti dan maksud yang terkandung dalam ayat-ayat yang dibacanya. Dengan demikian, ia akan sampai kepada hakikat yang sebenarnya, yaitu membaca Al Quran serta mendalami isi yang terkandung di dalamnya. Hal itu akan mendorongnya untuk mengamalkan isi Al Quran itu. Firman Allah dalam surat (4) An Nisaa ayat 82 berbunyi sebagai berikut: "Apakah mereka tidak memperhatikan (isi) Al Quran?..." Bila membaca Al Quran yang selalu disertai perhatian dan pemikiran arti dan maksudnya, maka dapat ditentukan ketentuan-ketentuan terhadap ayat-ayat yang dibacanya. Umpamanya: Bila bacaan sampai kepada ayat tasbih, maka dibacanya tasbih dan tahmid; Bila sampai pada ayat Doa dan Istighfar, lalu berdoa dan minta ampun; bila sampai pada ayat azab, lalau meminta perlindungan kepada Allah; bila sampai kepada ayat rahmat, llau meminta dan memohon rahmat dan begitu seterusnya. Caranya, boleh diucapkan dengan lisan atau cukup dalam hati saja. Diriwayatkan oleh Ahmad dan Abu Daud, dari Ibnu Abbas yang maksudnya sebagai berikut: "Sesungguhnya Rasulullah s. a. w. apabila membaca: "sabbihissma rabbikal a'la beliau lalu membaca subhanarobbiyal a'la . Diriwayatkan pula oleh Abu Daud, dan Wa-il binHijr yang maksudnya sebagai berikut:" Aku dengan Rasulullah membaca surat Al Fatihah , maka Rasulullah sesudah membaca walad dholliin lalu membaca aamin . Demikian juga disunatkan sujud, bila membaca ayat-ayat sajadah, dan sujud itu dinamakan sujud tilawah. Ayat-ayat sajadah itu terdapat pada 15 tempat yaitu: dalam surat Al-A'raaf ayat 206 dalam surat Ar-ra'd ayat 15 dalam surat An-Nahl ayat 50 dalam surat Bani Israil ayat 109 dalam surat Maryam ayat 58 dalam surat Al-Haji ayat 18 dan ayat 77 dalam surat Al Furqaan ayat 60 dalam surat Annaml ayat 26 dalam surat As-Sajdah ayat 15 dalam surat As-Shad ayat 24 dalam surat Haamim ayat 38 dalam surat An-Najm ayat 62 dalam surat Al-Insyiqaq ayat 21, dan dalam surat Al-'Alaq ayat 19 9. Dalam membaca Al Quran itu, hendaknya benar-benar diresapkan arti dan maksudnya, lebih-lebih apabila smapai pada ayat-ayat yang menggambarkan nasib orang-orang yang berdosa, dan bagaimana hebatnya siksaan yang disediakan bagi mereka. Sehubungan dengan itu, menurut riwayat, para sahabat banyak yang mencucurkan air matanya di kala membaca dan mendengar ayat-ayat suci Al Quran yang menggambarkan betapa nasib yang akan diderita oleh orang-orang yang berdosa. 10. Disunatkan membaca Al Quran dengan suara yang bagus lagi merdu, sebab suara yang bagus dan merdu itu menambah keindahan islubnya Al Quran. Rasulullah s. a. w. telah bersabda: "Kamu hiasilah Al Quran itu dengan suaramu yang merdu" Diriwayatkan, bahwa pada suatu malam Rasulullah s. a. w. menunggu-nunggu istrinya, Sitti 'Aisyah r. a. yang kebetulan agak terlambat datangnya. Setelah ia datang, Rasulullah bertanya kepadanya:" Bagaimanakah keadaanmu?" Aisyah menjawab :"Aku terlambat datang, karena mendengarkan bacaan Al Quran seseorang yang sangat bagus lagimerdu suaranya. Belum pernah akumendengarkan suara sebagus itu." Maka Rasulullah terus berdiri dan pergi mendengarkan bacaan Al Quran yang dikatakan Aisyah itu. rasulullah kembali dan mengatakan kepada Aisyah:" Orang itu adalah Salim, budak sahaya Abi Huzaifah. Puji-pujian bagi Allah yang telah menjadikan orang yang suaranya merdu seperti Salim itu sebagai ummatku." Oleh sebab itu, melagukan Al Quran dengan suara yang bagus, adalah disunatkan, asalkan tidak melanggar ketentuan-ketentuan dan tata cara membaca sebagaimana yang telah ditetapkan dalam ilmu qiraat dan tajwid, seperti menjaga madnya, harakatnya (barisnya) idghamnya dan lain-lainnya. Di dalam kitab zawaidur raudhah, diterangkan bahwa melagukan Al Quran dengan cara bermain-main serta melanggar ketentuan-ketentuan seperti tersebut di atas itu, haramlah hukumnya; orang yang membacanya dianggap fasiq, juga orang yang mendengarkannya turut berdosa. 11. Sedapat-dapatnya membaca Al Quran janganlah diputuskan hanya karena hendak berbicara dengan orang lain. Hendaknya pembacaan diteruskan sampai ke batas yang telah ditentukan, barulah disudahi. Juga dilarang tertawa-tawa, bermain-main dan lain-lain yang semacam itu, ketika sedang membaca Al Quran. Sebab pekerjaan yang seperti itu tidak layak dilakukan sewaktu membaca Kitab Suci dan berarti tidak menghormati kesuciannya. Itulah diantara adab-adab yang terpenting yang harus dijaga dan diperhatikan, sehingga dengan demikian kesucian Al Quran dapat terpelihara menurut arti yang sebenarnya.

SESUNGGUHNYA AGAMA ITU MUDAH

Assalamualaikum.....

long time tak jengah blog ni...maafla kerana masa tak mengizinkan. maklumlah, student. Last week, is the dateline to settle missed classes, hand the assignments, settle postponed tests etc. and last week i also trapped in 'chaos', camne nak settle test internal med ni. susah betul. and not to forget, surgery. no wonder every students that i've met said that surgery is a very toutured subject. the last day to hand on the assignment was verty hectic for me. i've not sleep the night before to finish my last four assignments. i've got my butt numb after 10 hours sit on my hard chair!! (no joke). thank god that i've settled everything smoothly the next day. and i got my permission on sitting the examinations. Alhamdulillah..
luckily, i have a very supportive family, especially my dad. i love you dad!! my bros, i alway miss them. esspecially my little brothers. not to forget my nephews. and my aunties, grandma & grandpa, my friends (esp those with me in SMAR), and also my beloved teachers.

our topic this time is agama itu mudah....sabda Rasulullah SAW, dalam sebuah hadith yang mane saya tak ingat perawinye...'Permudahkan dan jangan disusahkan, berilah berita gembira jang menyedihkan'
article ni saya dapat dari sebuah web. harap2 dapat memberi manfaat kepada kite sume...InsyaAllah

Oleh Ummu Malik

Kerap kali manusia mengulang-ulang perkataan ini (yaitu ucapan "Sesungguhnya agama itu mudah"), akan tetapi (sebenarnya) mereka (tidak menginginkan) dengan ucapan itu, untuk tujuan memuji Islam, atau melunakkan hati (orang yang belum mengerti Islam) dan semisalnya. Yang diinginkan mereka adalah pembenaran terhadap perbuatan mereka yang menyelisihi syari'at. Bagi mereka kalimat itu adalah kalimat haq, namun yang diinginkan dengannya adalah sebuah kebatilan.

Ketika salah seorang diantara kita ingin memperbaiki perbuatan yang menyalahi syari'at, orang-orang yang menyalahi (syari'at itu) berhujjah dengan perkataan mereka : "Islam adalah agama yang mudah". Mereka berusaha mengambil keringanan yang sesuai dengan hawa nafsu mereka, dengan sangkaan bahwa mereka telah menegakkan hujjah bagi orang yang menasehati mereka agar mengikuti syariat yang sesuai dengan Al-Qur'an dan Sunnah.

Orang-orang yang menyelisihi syariat itu hendaknya mengetahui bahwa Islam adalah agama yang mudah. (Akan tetapi maknanya adalah) dengan mengikuti keringanan-keringanan yang diberikan Allah Jalla Jalaluhu dan RasulNya kepada kita.

Allah Jalla Jalaluhu dan RasulNya telah memberi keringanan bagi kita, ketika kita membutuhkan keringanan itu dan ketika adanya kesulitan dalam mengikuti (melaksanakan perintah) yang sebenarnya.

Asal dari ungkapan " Sesungguhnya agama itu mudah" adalah penggalan kalimat dari hadits Nabi Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam yang diriwayatkan Abu Hurairah dari Nabi Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam bersabda : "Artinya : Sesungguhnya agama itu mudah, dan sekali-kali tidaklah seseorang memperberat agama melainkan akan dikalahkan, dan (dalam beramal) hendaklah pertengahan (yaitu tidak melebihi dan tidak mengurangi), bergembiralah kalian, serta mohonlah pertolongan (didalam ketaatan kepada Allah) dengan amal-amal kalian pada waktu kalian bersemangat dan giat" Al-Hafidz Ibnu Hajar Al-Asqalani menerangkan ungkapan "Sesungguhnya agama itu mudah" dalam kitabnya yang tiada banding (yang bernama) : Fathul Baariy Syarh Shahih Al-Bukhari 1/116. Beliau berkata : "Islam itu adalah agama yang mudah, atau dinamakan agama itu mudah sebagai ungkapan lebih (mudah) dibanding dengan agama-agama sebelumnya. Karena Allah Jalla Jalaluhu mengangkat dari umat ini beban (syariat) yang dipikulkan kepada umat-umat sebelumnya. Contoh yang paling jelas tentang hal ini adalah (dalam masalah taubat), taubatnya umat terdahulu adalah dengan membunuh diri mereka sendiri. Sedangkan taubatnya umat ini adalah dengan meninggalkan (perbuatan dosa) dan berazam (berkemauan kuat) untuk tidak mengulangi.

Kalau kita melihat hadits ini secara teliti, dan melihat kalimat sesudah ungkapan "agama itu mudah", kita dapati Rasulullah Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam memberi petunjuk kepada kita bahwa seorang muslim berkewajiban untuk tidak berlebih-lebihan dalam perkara ibadahnya, sehingga (karena berlebih-lebihan) ia akan melampui batas dalam agama, dengan membuat perkara bid'ah yang tidak ada asalnya dalam agama.

Sebagaimana keadaan tiga orang yang ingin membuat perkara baru (dalam agama). Salah seorang di antara mereka berkata : "Saya tidak akan menikahi perempuan", yang lain berkata : "Saya akan berpuasa sepanjang tahun dan tidak berbuka", yang ketiga berkata : "Saya akan shalat malam semalam suntuk". Maka Rasulullah Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam melarang mereka dari hal itu semua, dan memberi pengarahan kepada mereka agar membaguskan amal mereka semampunya, dan hendaknya dalam mendekatkan diri kepada Allah Jalla Jalaluhu, (beribadah) dengan ibadah yang telah diwajibkan Allah Jalla Jalaluhu kepada mereka.

Dan hendaknya mereka tidak membuat-buat perkara yang tidak ada asalnya dalam agama ini, karena mereka sekali-kali tidak akan mampu (mengamalkannya), (sebagaimana hadits Rasulullah Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam) " Maka sekali-kali tidaklah seseorang memperberat agama melainkan akan dikalahkan".

Maka ungkapan "Agama itu mudah" maknanya adalah : "Bahwa agama yang Allah Jalla Jalaluhu turunkan ini semuanya mudah dalam hukum-hukum, syariat-syariatnya". Dan kalaulah perkara (agama) diserahkan kepada manusia untuk membuatnya, niscaya seorangpun tidak akan mampu beribadah kepada Allah Jalla Jalaluhu.

Maka jika orang-orang yang menyelisihi syariat tidak mendapatkan "kekhususan" (tidak mendapat celah sebagai pembenaran atas perbuatan mereka) dengan hadits diatas, mereka akan lari kepada hadits-hadits lain, yang dengannya mereka berhujjah bagi perbuatan mereka yang menggampang-gampangkan dalam perkara agama.

Diantara hadits-hadits yang mereka jadikan alasan dalam masalah ini, adalah sabda Rasulullah Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam. "Artinya : Sesungguhnya Allah menyukai keringanan-keringanannya diambil sebagaimana Dia membenci kemaksiatannya didatangi/dikerjakan" Dalam riwayat lain. "Artinya : Sebagaimana Allah menyukai kewajiban-kewajibannya didatangi" Hadits lain adalah sabda nabi : "Artinya : Mudahkanlah, janganlah mempersulit dan membikin manusia lari (dari kebenaran) dan saling membantulah (dalam melaksanakan tugas) dan jangan berselisih" [Hadits Riwayat Bukhari dan Muslim] Hadits yang ketiga. "Artinya : Mudahkanlah, janganlah mempersulit, dan berikanlah kabar gembira dan janganlah membikin manusia lari (dari kebenaran)". Adapun hadits yang pertama, wajib bagi kita untuk mengetahui bahwa keringanan-keringanan dalam agama Islam banyak sekali, diantaranya : berbukanya musafir ketika bepergian, orang yang tertinggal dalam shalat boleh mengqadha (mengganti), orang yang tertidur atau lupa boleh mengqadha shalat, orang yang tidak mendapatkan binatang sembelihan dalam haji tamattu boleh berpuasa, tayamum sebagai ganti wudhu ketika tidak ada air atau ketika tidak mampu untuk berwudhu ... dan lainnya diantara keringanan yang banyak tidak diamalkan kecuali jika terdapat kesulitan dalam melaksanakan perintah yang sebenarnya.

Dan perlu kita perhatikan, bahwa keringanan-keringanan ini adalah syari'at Allah Jalla Jalaluhu dan sunnah Rasulullah Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam (dengan izin Allah Jalla Jalaluhu). Dan tidak diperbolehkan seorang muslim manapun, untuk mendatangkan
(mengada-ada) keringanan (dalam masalah agama) tanpa dalil, karena hal ini adalah termasuk mengadakan perkara baru dalam agama yang tidak berdasar.

Dan perhatikanlah wahai saudaraku sesama muslim (surat Al-Baqarah ayat 185), yang menceritakan tentang puasa dan keringanan berbuka bagi orang yang sakit atau bepergian, lalu firman Allah Jalla Jalaluhu sesudah ayat itu. "Artinya : Allah menghendaki kemudahan bagimu, dan tidak menghendaki kesukaran bagimu" [Al-Baqarah : 185] Makna ini menerangkan makna mudah (menurut Allah Jalla Jalaluhu), yang maknanya adalah keringanan itu datangnya dari sisi Allah saja, tiada sekutu bagiNya. Atau (keringanan itu) dari syariat Rasulullah Shallallahju 'alaihi wa sallam dengan wahyu dari Allah Jalla Jalaluhu. Ayat ini juga menerangkan bahwa makna mudah itu dengan mengikuti hukum Allah Jalla Jalaluhu (yang tiada sekutu bagiNya) dan mengikuti syariatNya. Inilah yang bekenaan dengan hadits yang pertama tadi.

Adapun hadits yang kedua dan tiga, maka pengambilan dalil yang dilakukan oleh orang-orang yang mengikuti hawa nafsu serta menyelisihi syariat (dengan kedua hadits itu) adalah batil, dan termasuk merubah sabda Nabi Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam dari makna yang sebenarnya, dan keluar dari makna yang dimaksud.

Tafsir kedua hadits yang lalu berhubungan dengan para da'i yang menyeru kepada agama Islam. Dalam kedua hadits itu Rasulullah Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam memantapkan kaidah penting dari kaidah-kaidah dasar dakwah kepada Allah Jalla Jalaluhu, yaitu berdakwah dengan lemah lembut dan tidak kasar. Maka dakwah para dai yang sepatutnya disampaikan pertama kali kepada orang-orang kafir adalah Syahadat, lalu Shalat, Puasa , Zakat. Kemudian (hendaknya) mereka menjelaskan kepada manusia tentang sunnah Rasulullah Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam, lalu menerangkan amal perbuatan yang wajib, yang sunnah dan yang makruh. Jika melihat suatu kesalahan yang disebabkan karena kebodohan atau lupa, maka hendaklah bersabar dan mendakwahi manusia dengan penuh kasih sayang dan kelembutan serta tidak kasar. Allah Jalla Jalaluhu berfirman. "Artinya : Maka disebabkan rahmat dari Allah-lah kamu berlaku lemah lembut terhadap mereka. Sekiranya kamu bersikap keras lagi berhati kasar, tentulah mereka menjauhkan diri dari sekelilingmu" [Ali Imran : 159] Sesudah memahami hadits-hadits itu, dan penjelasan makna keringanan dan kemudahan. Maka saya berkata kepada orang-orang yang merubah dan mengganti makna-makna hadits-hadits tersebut (karena ingin mengenyangkan hawa nafsu mereka dengan perbuatan itu) :

"Bertaqwalah kepada Allah Jalla Jalaluhu dan ikutilah apa yang diperintahkan kepada kalian, dan jauhilah laranganNya, dan tahanlah (diri kalian) dari merubah sunnah Rasulullah Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam, dan takutilah suatu hari yang kalian dikembalikan kepada Allah Jalla Jalaluhu lalu setiap jiwa akan disempurnakan dengan apa yang ia usahakan. Dan takutlah kalian jangan sampai diharamkan dari mendatangi telaga Nabi Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam lantaran kalian mengganti agama Allah Jalla Jalaluhu dan merubah sunnah Rasulullah Shallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam".

Saya mengharapkan dari Allah Jalla Jalaluhu yang Maha Hidup dan Maha Berdiri sendiri agar memberi petunjuk kepada kita dan kaum muslimin seluruhnya untuk mengikuti Al-Qur'an dan Sunnah NabiNya, dan agar Allah Jalla Jalaluhu mengajarkan kepada kita ilmu yang bermanfaat, dan memberi manfaat dari apa yang Dia ajarkan, serta memelihara kita dari kejahatan perbuatan bid'ah dan penyelewengan, serta kejahatan mengubah dan mengganti (syariat Allah).

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Disalin dari Majalah : Al Ashalah edisi 15-16 hal 33-35, diterjemahkan oleh Majalah Adz-Dzkhiirah Al-Islamiyah Edisi : Th. I/No.
03/Dzulhijjah 1423/Februari 2003, hal 5 -6. Terbitan Ma'had Ali Al-Irsyad Surabaya

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