Memory

I may have covered this before, but I'll do it again since I feel like talking about. If I had to point to one thing that makes smart people smart, it's their ability to memorize things.

I knew someone who objected to this notion. He equated memorization with a lack of knowledge. I can appreciate that view. Teachers in grade school make you memorize presidents, and dates, and so forth. To what end? It's understanding what those events were all about and making intelligent comments that is really what we should strive for in education.

Even so, imagine if you're writing a program and keep forgetting the syntax. At some point, this wastes time, and in the worst case, it's so distracting that it's not even worth the bother.

To illustrate the importance of memorization, think about attending a lecture several times a week. If you can summarize what happened for the last few weeks without having to refer to your notes, imagine how much easier it is to learn the things you need to learn. If, on the other hand, you forget what happened in a lecture 20 minutes afterwards, then you have to go back and relearn it all.

OK, that's unfair. Most people, in fact, don't really learn that much from a lecture. Half the time they're falling asleep, the other half, they've completely lost their train of thought. In the end, sitting in the lecture didn't help. But if you pay attention, and follow what's going on, then you've saved a ton of effort when you actually have to learn the stuff in depth.

But the point is, the ability to keep focus on what's being said, and to digest it, and to remember it, really saves on time later on.

Now sometimes this memorization comes easily, albeit on the easiest of stuff. Many sportscasters have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game, remembering results of games, what happened in each game, the key plays, the weather, and so forth. Tony Kornheiser's knowledge for pop songs over the last thirty years is incredible, and so is Nigel's, since he's the one picking the songs.

Some of this information is moderately useless, but just the ability to remember lots and lots of stuff makes it easier to learn.

I suspect memorization is really organizing the information in your head in an orderly manner. People who are bad at names and faces don't try hard to remember faces and names. I have that problem. The easiest way to remember names is to use it right away, or at the very least, not be embarassed to ask the name a second or a third or a fourth time.

Unlike my friend who says memorization and understanding are at odds with one another, I'd say that memorization leads one to understanding.

I know there are some exceptions. There are people who know they can't remember much, but what they remember where to look things up. Most people aren't good at looking things up because it's so laborious. When's the last time you looked up the definition of a word you didn't know? Sure, the web makes that easier than ever, but you still need to be at a computer to do it.

Memorization can be difficult if you don't understand what you're memorizing. The key to understanding anything, I believe, is being able to explain it in your own words. I went to a talk where the speaker calls this being "consciously competent". He says many people are "unconsciouly competent", meaning they don't know how they know, they just know. Forcing them to be consciously competent forces one to organize that information in the head so it makes coherent sense not only to themselves, but to others as well.

That's funny, because I heard this at a short course on Java-related technologies. The stuff I remember best about it is the stuff related to learning, and this one bit about conscious competence.

My brother related another interesting anecdote. He met up with a high school buddy of his (you don't go up there to "high school"---but I digress) who he claimed had a fantastic memory. He'd remember questions on exams and the answers he put, even months after it was done. He'd remember what day of the week certain events happened.

To be fair, since my brother doesn't remember these events, his friend could be lying, and he'd never know. Even so, his friend has no particular reason to lie. But he found his friend had a tough time remembering things that happened more recently in his life, such as stuff happening in the past year.

This, he claimed, was because he had more time to think about the stuff in the past. There's a line of thought (pun somewhat intended) that says that you don't remember things, that you remember the last time you remembered things, and that through repetition or refreshing of these thoughts, you reinforce what you remember. Most often, these recollections occur when you are recounting a story to someone. The more you do it, the more it becomes ingrained.

I recall Abe Lincoln claiming that it was hard for him to remember things, but when he remembered something, he remembered it. He likened it to etching something in metal. It's hard to do, but once done, it never goes away.

Knowing that people remember with different abilities, I knew that this would affect how I taught things. In particular, repeating stuff, rephrasing stuff, would cause it to reinforce. The funny (or sad) thing is that it would work far better on people who memorized stuff. If repetition works well on people who don't remember well, it really does a number on those who do.

The ability to memorize may differ from thing to thing. I knew one woman who was fantastic at remembering people, which one had kids, or which country they were from, but was awful once you did something technical, and made her have to memorize technical definitions. That stuff just didn't stick the way faces and names did. I don't know why that is, although I find I have the opposite problem.

Anyway, food for thought.