The Memory Problem

I have been reading a book by Joshua Foer called ‘Moonwalking with Einstein’. The book describes the journey of the author to the finals of the US Memory Championship. Through this journey the author shares his research on history of memory, more specifically memorization.

Over many years starting with my father and then my friends and finally with colleagues at work, I have had debates about importance of memory in academics. In India, to a large extent, even now (though dwindling at a rapid rate) rote learning is the method of “stuffing” information in the heads of students. Application of knowledge is given lesser importance and assessed sporadically. These debates have yielded mixed results. My father’s input had the first impact on me as a teenager. He said, “How can you meditate over an idea until you have memorized it?”. Friends and more importantly colleagues have argued otherwise.

Being in the education field modern curriculums emphasize less on memorization. The focus is more how a student will acquire that information and more importantly apply it. This last part has had unanimous acceptance everywhere. At the end what good is the education if one cannot apply it. But even here one cannot do away with memory. One still must recall, for example, Newton’s laws of motion to apply them. No one debates the importance of recall either. Bloom’s taxonomy clearly states that recalling is one of the fundamental skills that a student should possess.

The situation that I want to bring to notice is that the education system has confused rote learning with memorization. Memorization is often confused with rote learning with good reason as other methods of memorization aren’t known or not popular. As I have realized, by reading Joshua Foer’s book, is that there are many ways of memorization like ‘memory palace’ method, ‘person-action-object’ method, etc. These can very well be used to store information aiding in recall for application of knowledge.

The other situation is the dependence or reliance on technology to store information. Virtually every piece of information can be stored or can be found use technology. This has apparently altered our brains according to a psychiatrist friend of mine. The debate about memorization takes me back to the debate about whether automation is good for the economy, something I wrote about in one of my previous blog posts (see The Schumpeter Diagnosis). Is the change in learning environment due to change in one variable i.e. memorization good for us in the long run? Is reliance on technology for memory good for us in the long run? From Foer’s book we learn that there was similar uproar after the Gutenberg press was invented. Till that point in history the only method of gaining knowledge was by remembering things and reproduction of  any written work had to be done by hand. Hence, with printing press, one did not have to memorize content any more. They could store it externally, in books. Needless to say, it did not create much of a problem in the long run as people have become smarter and proliferation of books has led to education of the masses. But is it different this time?

But, there is a warning. It is said that destruction of library of Alexandria set the world back by atleast a thousand years. Is destruction of external storage of information possible? If so, by how many years will humanity be set back?