Moonwalking With Einstein- Analysis on How to Learn
School taught us what to learn, but it never taught us how to learn.
Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein was the first text that allowed me to understand why some people perform exceptionally without studying, and why others struggle with exams so much. The differentiating factor is that some capitalize on proven memory techniques, regardless of whether it is a conscious or unconscious effort.
Moreover, it offers insight as how we can live our life to the fullest, on how we can remember the things that matter most to us, and deter the curse of memory loss from old age.
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“Isn’t it striking how easily you remember that?” said Ed, before clicking through to another slide: a deer on the left and the Nietzsche book on the right. We all knew that one, too. In fact, he went through thirty slides, and everyone in the room recognized every single one of the photos we’d seen before. “Now here’s the fascinating thing,” said Ed, pacing professorially at the front of the linoleum-tiled auditorium. “We could have done this with ten thousand slides, and you would have performed almost equally well. Your memory for images is that good.”
“Here’s the most incredible thing about the test I just gave you,” Ed declared. “We could play this game several years from now and ask you which of these photos you’ve seen before, and you’d actually be able to point to the right one more often than not. Somewhere in your mind there’s a trace from everything you’ve ever seen.”
[Our] biggest failing may be that we forget how rarely we forget.
Oftentimes, we rely on rote memory, of reading words off of paper and hoping they don’t slip from our minds. Meanwhile, all of the memories of our experiences aren’t letters drawn out and organized on a piece of paper. They’re vivid, chronological images of all that we did, saw, and experienced.
Our eyesight was originally devised to comprehend and understand the world around us. In fact, the very concept of writing and reading was only developed a couple millennia ago.
Thus, we should capitalize on our primitive visual memory for what it was actually designed for.
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Even so, over the last three decades, most psychologists have grown less optimistic that we in fact possess perfect memories of the past, just waiting to be uncovered. As neuroscientists have begun to unravel some of the mysteries of what exactly a memory is, it’s become clear that the fading, mutating, and eventual disappearance of memories over time is a real physical phenomenon that happens in the brain at the cellular level.
There is an interesting correlation between memory degradation and the 80/20 principle, also referred to as Zipf’s Law. Of course, we will forget the majority of the experiences within our lives, but some just remain intact in our memory. There are random memories, but those moments which we cherish the most are unforgettable.
In fact, neuroscientists have mapped the very process of memory degradation as an exponential decay function.
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The twelve-digit numerical string 120741091101 is pretty hard to remember. Break it into four chunks—120, 741, 091, 101—and it becomes a little easier. Turn it into two chunks, 12/07/41 and 09/11/01, and they’re almost impossible to forget. You could even turn those dates into a single chunk of information by remembering it as “the two big surprise attacks on American soil.”
It’s interesting because we utilize this method, called chunking without thinking about it. Phone numbers, for example, are designed to be regurgitated in three chunks, instead of memorizing nine separate digits.
Additionally, the size of the chunks can vary drastically. When I memorized digits of pi for a competition, it was often in chunks of 3, 4, or 5 numbers at a time, but sometimes, I found it easier to memorize as little as 2 or as much as 6 at a time.
To make it easier, I found that I memorized almost like memorizing lyrics to a song. While memorizing, I developed a specific rhythm, and I noticed others have developed their own cadence too. It’s never monotonous.
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An avid runner, he began thinking of the strings of random numbers as running times. For example 3,492 was turned into “3 minutes and 49 point 2 seconds, near world-record mile time.” And 4,131 became “4 minutes, 13 point 1 seconds, a mile time.” SF didn’t know anything about the random numbers he had to memorize, but he did know about running. He discovered that he could take meaningless bits of information, run them through a filter that applied meaning to them, and make that information much stickier.
An example of creating associations that cater to your strengths, interests, and talents. It’s easier to employ former knowledge and connect the concept than it is to architect a completely new one.
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It is said that a student of sexing must work through at least 250,000 chicks before attaining any degree of proficiency. Even if the sexter calls it “intuition,” it’s been shaped by years of experience. It is the vast memory bank of chick bottoms that allows him or her to recognize patterns in the vents glanced at so quickly. In most cases, the skill is not the result of conscious reasoning, but pattern recognition. It is a feat of perception and memory, not analysis.
This is what differentiates the top 1% from the rest, how they could work so much more efficiently and effectively. They have had exposure.
For example, Warren Buffett could probably predict the future trajectory of a stock better with just one glance than a finance student with months of intensive research.
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The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. A board of randomly arranged chess pieces has no context—there are no similar boards to compare it to, no past games that it resembles, no ways to meaningfully chunk it. Even to the world’s best chess player it is, in essence, noise.
At the same time though, specific moments at specific areas on the chess board may seem familiar to a grand-master, and he or she could utilize that to their advantage.
Additionally, if everything is the same, if complete mastery is attained and there is no noise, then there leaves no purpose in life. There will be no opportunity to progress and grow.
And our innate human nature always propels us to strive for better.
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“I’m working on expanding subjective time so that it feels like I live longer,” Ed had mumbled to me on the sidewalk outside the Con Ed headquarters, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “The idea is to avoid that feeling you have when you get to the end of the year and feel like, where the hell did that go?” “And how are you going to do that?” I asked. “By remembering more. By providing my life with more chronological landmarks. By making myself more aware of time’s passage.”
The Power of Time Perception covers this in depth. It underscores techniques to control our perception of the passage of time.
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The following refers to an experiment conducted to study our perception of time without reference:
Very quickly Siffre’s memory deteriorated. In the dreary darkness, his days melded into one another and became one continuous, indistinguishable blob. Since there was nobody to talk to, and not much to do, there was nothing novel to impress itself upon his memory. There were no chronological landmarks by which he could measure the passage of time. At some point he stopped being able to remember what happened even the day before. His experience in isolation had turned him into EP. As time began to blur, he became effectively amnesic. Soon, his sleep patterns disintegrated. Some days he’d stay awake for thirty-six straight hours, other days for eight—without being able to tell the difference. When his support team on the surface finally called down to him on September 14, the day his experiment was scheduled to wrap up, it was only August 20 in his journal. He thought only a month had gone by. His experience of time’s passage had compressed by a factor of two.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
It’s interesting because I found that unfamiliarity infuses you with newfound energy. Whenever I wake up anywhere but at home, I’m instantly alert.
It’s like when you’re driving along a familiar path. It’s boring, rote, and monotonous. But traversing on a new road instantly transforms your state of mind in becoming more tentative.
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This phenomenon of unconscious remembering, known as priming, is evidence of an entire shadowy underworld of memories lurking beneath the surface of our conscious reckoning. Though there is disagreement about just how many memory systems there are, scientists generally divide memories broadly into two types: declarative and non-declarative (sometimes referred to as explicit and implicit). Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car, or what happened yesterday afternoon. EP and HM had lost the ability to make new declarative memories. Non-declarative memories are the things you know unconsciously, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while looking at it in a mirror (or what a word flashed rapidly across a computer screen means). Those unconscious memories don’t seem to pass through the same short-term memory buffer as declarative memories, nor do they depend on the hippocampal region to be consolidated and stored. They rely primarily on different parts of the brain. Motor skill learning takes place largely in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neo-cortex, habit learning in the basal ganglia. As EP and HM have so strikingly demonstrated, you can damage one part of the brain, and the rest will keep on working. Indeed, most of who we are and how we think—the core material of our personalities—is bound up in implicit memories that are off-limits to the conscious brain.
It’s helpful that Foer included some science to help us understand the underlying processes of how we function the way we do.
However, the human brain is still one of the least understood things in the universe.
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“The thing to understand, Josh, is that humans are very, very good at learning spaces,” Ed remarked from his perch on the boulder. “Just to give an example, if you are left alone for five minutes in someone else’s house you’ve never visited before, and you’re feeling energetic and nosy, think about how much of that house could be fixed in your memory in that brief period. You’d be able to learn not just where all the different rooms are and how they connect with each other, but their dimensions and decoration, the arrangement of their contents, and where the windows are. Without really noticing it, you’d remember the whereabouts of hundreds of objects and all sorts of dimensions that you wouldn’t even notice yourself noticing. If you actually add up all that information, it’s like the equivalent of a short novel. But we don’t ever register that as being a memory achievement. Humans just gobble up spatial information.”
In fact, spaces are one of the primary tools memory champions utilize. They project the fact they wish to memorize upon a specific place, and when they are attempting to recall it, they simply go into that room in their mind and retrieve it.
For example, if you wish to remember to buy milk, you could envision a giant purple cow croaking on your kitchen counter. The absurdity of that image will instantly allow you to remember the task the next time you think about your kitchen counter.
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When forming images, it helps to have a dirty mind. Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex—and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.
Gold.
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“Now, anthropomorphizing the bottles of wine is quite a good idea,” Ed suggested. “Animate images tend to be more memorable than inanimate images.” That advice, too, came from the Ad Herennium. The author instructs his readers to create images of “exceptional beauty or singular ugliness,” to put them into motion, and to ornament them in ways that render them more distinct. One could “disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint,” or else proceed by “assigning certain comic effects to our images.”
We tend to anthropomorphize things anyway. From a young age, I always projected a face onto traffic lights and cars.
Thus, we should capitalize on this natural tendency of ours to impose emotions and expressions on things we wish to remember.
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When we try to recall something from a category that includes as many instances as “lunch” or “wine,” many memories compete for our attention. The memory of last Wednesday’s lunch isn’t necessarily gone; it’s that you lack the right hook to pull it out of a sea of lunchtime memories. But a wine that talks: That’s unique. It’s a memory without rivals.
To imprint something in our minds, something has to be remarkable. Again, that principle of the purple cow.
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Cod liver oil or omega-3 supplements.
Safe things to take to enhance memory and cognitive performance.
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The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.
Ah, memorizing pi was repeated, rhythmic, almost rhyming, and definitely structured.
Although it easily trumps the former characteristics, visibility sometimes just isn’t practical. Nonetheless, it is still definitely effective, with enough practice and speed.
Memory champions memorize entire shuffled decks within minutes by crafting a visual story in their head, obviously with subtle associations to all the numbers, faces, and suits.
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Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.
Definitely. Think about a speech you memorized in sixth grade. Now think about the lyrics of a song you first heard in sixth grade.
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She breaks the poem into small chunks and then assigns a series of emotions to each short segment. Rather than associate the words with images, she associates them with feelings. “I feel how the writer feels, what he is meaning. I imagine whether he’s happy or sad,” she told me in the hallway outside the competition hall. This is not dissimilar from how actors are taught to memorize scripts. Many actors will tell you that they break their lines into units they call “beats,” each of which involves some specific intention or goal on the character’s part, which they train themselves to empathize with. This technique, known as Method acting, was pioneered in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavski around the turn of the last century. Stanislavski was interested in these techniques not for their mnemonic potential but rather as tools to help the actor more realistically depict his character. But Method acting is a technique for giving a line more associational hooks to hang on by embedding it in a context of both emotional and physical cues. Method acting is a way of making words memorable. Indeed, studies have found that if you ask someone to memorize a sentence like “Pick up a pen,” it’s much more likely to stick if the person literally picks up a pen as they’re learning the sentence.
Because we are social creatures, emotions are especially useful to capitalize upon. When someone is angry, we don’t remember the words coming out of their mouth as much as their specific facial expressions and emotional responses.
Now any memorization tactic is easier said than done. It will make perfect sense on paper, but the execution is difficult. The sheer concentration required to come up with associations will deter many. In fact, for beginners, it will probably be easier to rote memorize many things as we’ve had so much practice doing this growing up.
But like anything, with practice of these various memorization techniques, the process becomes intuitive, seamless, and incredibly efficient.
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Here are some more advanced memorization techniques:
[He] used a technique known as the “Major System,” invented around 1648 by Johann Winkelmann, which is nothing more than a simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds. Those sounds can then be turned into words, which can in turn become images for a memory palace. The code works like this: The number 32, for example, would translate into MN, 33 would be MM, and 34 would be MR. To make those consonants meaningful, you’re allowed to freely intersperse vowels. So the number 32 might turn into an image of a man, 33 could be your mom, and 34 might be the Russian space station Mir. Similarly, the number 86 might be a fish, 40 a rose, and 92 a pen. You might visualize 3,219 as a man (32) playing a tuba (19), or maybe a person from Manitoba (3,219). Likewise, 7,879 would translate to KFKP, which might turn into a single image of a coffee cup, or two images of a calf and a cub.
In the PAO system, every two-digit number from 00 to 99 is represented by a single image of a person performing an action on an object. The number 34 might be Frank Sinatra (a person) crooning (an action) into a microphone (an object). Likewise, 13 might be David Beckham kicking a soccer ball. The number 79 could be Superman flying with a cape. Any sixdigit number, like say 34-13-79, can then be turned into a single image by combining the person from the first number with the action from the second and the object from the third—in this case, it would be Frank Sinatra kicking a cape. If the number were instead 79-34-13, the mental athlete might imagine the equally bizarre image of Superman crooning at a soccer ball. There’s nothing inherently Sinatraish about the number 34 or Beckhamesque about 13. Unlike the Major System, those associations are entirely arbitrary, and have to be learned in advance, which is to say it takes a lot of remembering just to be able to remember. There’s a big fixed cost in terms of time and effort to compete on the memory circuit. But what makes this system so potent is that it effectively generates a unique image for every number from 0 to 999,999. And because the algorithm necessarily generates unlikely scenes, PAO images tend, by their nature, to be memorable.
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In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the “cognitive stage,” you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second “associative stage,” you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the “autonomous stage,” when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically running on autopilot. During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you’re doing. Most of the time that’s a good thing….
Notice how Foer said most. There’s three major drawbacks I could think of:
- Consequences. For example, once driving becomes an unconscious effort, we’re less incentivized to focus on the specific task of driving. Distractions become preeminent. Unfortunately, this also precedes disasters, in forms of unforeseen accidents and potentially devastating harm to you or the other party.
- Passage of Time. Time passes on regardless of whether we’re optimizing it or not. Once tasks become rote, time can pass by incredibly quickly, as we fail to concentrate on that specific task. Life is too short to not enjoy it.
- Complacency. We have a gnawing sense that things can be better, but once a certain stage is hit, our performance plateaus. Now it’s easier to settle and remain complacent as that requires no effort, but to achieve fulfillment, we must move on to other things.
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As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the “OK plateau,” the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving. We all reach OK plateaus in most things we do. We learn how to drive when we’re in our teens and then once we’re good enough to avoid tickets and major accidents, we get only incrementally better.
Foer goes beyond my own analysis, and includes the point that some people do not strive for utter excellence. Their potential plateau is not hit, but they have self-imposed a lower plateau, one of mediocrity.
I guess it all depends on how important the task is to you personally, and how much society values that task too.
Malcolm Gladwell posits in his book, The Tipping Point, that to become excellent in anything, a minimum of 10,000 hours must be dedicated.
On the contrary, Josh Kaufman, author of the immensely popular The Personal MBA, also wrote in his second book, The First 20 Hours, that only 20 hours are required to become relatively proficient at something.
There is an incredible difference between the satisfactory and the remarkable. Our job is to discern what we value most, and cater our efforts to those that carry significant meaning, and leave the rest of the clutter for 20 hours to do its magic.
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But Ericsson and his fellow expert performance psychologists have found over and over again that with the right kind of concerted effort, that’s rarely the case. They believe that Galton’s wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than simply with what we consider an acceptable level of performance.
If our potential is self-directed, this means that setting goals can be dangerous.
Yet, it’s empowering too, for it affirms that anything is possible, perhaps even beyond reason.
It’s far better to aim high and never hit your target, than to aim low and hit, all the while believing that’s the best you could do.
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What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.” Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase.” Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. The best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered. Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard. When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that’s been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly with level of performance.
Only conscious effort precedes progress and consequently, fulfillment.
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The best way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau, Ericsson has found, is to actually practice failing. One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you’re trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems. Benjamin Franklin was apparently an early practitioner of this technique. In his autobiography, he describes how he used to read essays by the great thinkers and try to reconstruct the author’s arguments according to Franklin’s own logic. He’d then open up the essay and compare his reconstruction to the original words to see how his own chain of thinking stacked up against the master’s. The best chess players follow a similar strategy. They will often spend several hours a day replaying the games of grand masters one move at a time, trying to understand the expert’s thinking at each step. Indeed, the single best predictor of an individual’s chess skill is not the amount of chess he’s played against opponents, but rather the amount of time he’s spent sitting alone working through old games.
Learning from others’ experience and mistakes is the easiest way to circumvent your own learning curve.
In fact, the entire premise of more effective memorization is based on this principle: learning from others who have already practiced and excelled in this art.
Entrepreneur and best-selling author James Altucher posits:
“The best way to hack time off the 100,000 hour rule: Hang out with people who have passed their 10,000 hours. Mirror neurons kick in and you will learn a huge amount.”
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The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing—to force oneself to stay out of autopilot. With typing, it’s relatively easy to get past the OK plateau. Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type faster than feels comfortable, and to allow yourself to make mistakes. In one noted experiment, typists were repeatedly flashed words 10 to 15 percent faster than their fingers were able to translate them onto the keyboard. At first they weren’t able to keep up, but over a period of days they figured out the obstacles that were slowing them down, and overcame them, and then continued to type at the faster speed. By bringing typing out of the autonomous stage and back under their conscious control, they had conquered the OK plateau. Ericsson suggested I try the same thing with cards. He told me to find a metronome and to try to memorize a card every time it clicked. Once I figured out my limits, he instructed me to set the metronome 10 to 20 percent faster than that and keep trying at the quicker pace until I stopped making mistakes. Whenever I came across a card that was particularly troublesome, I was supposed to make a note of it, and see if I could figure out why it was giving me problems.
We could apply this to the very process of learning how to learn. We’ve hit that OK plateau a while ago for our learning speed and effectiveness. It’s time to obliterate that mental barrier.
Moreover, this method can improve our daily routines tremendously if we consciously force ourselves to do everything faster… to walk faster, read faster, scroll faster. Sure, it may not be enjoyable in the short term, but there might be long term benefits of more free time.
Of course, sometimes, it is better to take a break and enjoy life slowly. Yet, that should be a conscious decision in itself too and not a default, autopilot occurrence.
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Even though you might be inclined to trust the advice of a silver-haired doctor over one fresh out of medical school, it’s been found that in a few fields of medicine, doctors’ skills don’t improve the longer they’ve been practicing. The diagnoses of professional mammographers, for example, have a tendency to get less and less accurate over the years. Why would that be? For most mammographers, practicing medicine is not deliberate practice, according to Ericsson. It’s more like putting into a tin cup than working with a coach. That’s because mammographers usually only find out about the accuracy of their diagnoses weeks or months later, if at all, at which point they’ve probably forgotten the details of the case and can no longer learn from their successes and mistakes.
Interesting…
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One field of medicine in which this is definitively not the case is surgery. Unlike mammographers, surgeons tend to get better with time. What makes surgeons different from mammographers, according to Ericsson, is that the outcome of most surgeries is usually immediately apparent—the patient either gets better or doesn’t—which means that surgeons are constantly receiving feedback on their performance. They’re always learning what works and what doesn’t, always getting better.
Our careers may dictate our tolerance of complacency. That’s both a powerful and dangerous claim.
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Rote drills, it was thought, built up the faculty of memory. The same was thought to be true of Latin, which at the turn of the twentieth century was taught to nearly half of all American high school students. Educators were convinced that learning the extinct language, with its countless grammatical niceties and difficult conjugations, trained the brain in logical thinking and helped build “mental discipline.” Tedium was actually seen as a virtue. And the teachers were backed up by a popular scientific theory known as “faculty psychology,” which held that the mind consisted of a handful of specific mental “faculties” that could each individually be trained, like muscles, through rigorous exercise. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a group of leading psychologists began to question the empirical basis of “faculty psychology.” In his 1890 book Principles of Psychology,William James set out to see “whether a certain amount of daily training in learning poetry by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different kind of poetry.” He spent more than two hours over eight successive days memorizing the first 158 lines of the Victor Hugo poem “Satyr,” averaging fifty seconds a line. With that baseline established, James set about memorizing the entire first book of Paradise Lost. When he returned to Hugo, he found that his memorization time had actually declined to fifty-seven seconds a line. Practicing memorization had made him worse at it, not better. It was just a single data point, but subsequent studies by the psychologist Edward Thorndike and his colleague Robert S. Woodworth also questioned whether “the general ability to memorize” was influenced by practice memorizing, and found only minor gains. They concluded that the ancillary benefits of “mental discipline” were “mythological” and that general skills, like memorization, were not nearly as transferable as had once been thought.
Unfortunately, societal institutions still believe in the power of rote memorization. In Asian countries, teaching young children math and language consists of rote regurgitation for hundreds, perhaps thousands of times.
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The dichotomy between “learning” and “memorizing” is false, Matthews contends. You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.
I love these backwards phrases.
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“The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.” If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas. The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counter-intuitive. Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root inventiois the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment. This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition.
An interesting thought. A bank of knowledge is necessary for further sprouts of creativity.
Interestingly, this means that older people should hypothetically be more creative, for they have had more experiences than younger generations, a solid foundation of ideas and facts from which to link to.
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If the rest of us could turn off that top-level processing, would we become savants? There actually is a technology that can selectively, and temporarily, turn off parts of the brain. It’s called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, and it works by using focused magnetic fields to wreak havoc on the electrical firing of targeted neurons.
If we have technology now that could shut sections of the brain, imagine future technology where we could augment portions of our brain.
In fact, perhaps in the future, memorizing itself may be rendered obsolete. Knowledge could potentially just be uploaded to our minds…
But until that day arrives, learning how to learn is essential in becoming productive members of society, while achieving happiness and fulfillment.
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