[lupin3ken]

So from what I understand, there is a tradeoff to whether or not you memorize something.

When you have a piece of knowledge memorized, it has the capability to be activated in parallel with other known knowledge. These parallel activations result in a new / novel idea to your neural network. If these activations haven't been had before, they may be a breakthrough in science, technology, or otherwise.

So in one aspect, if you do not memorize, you can not associate and create new things.

Luckily, with phone numbers and locations it might not be important or valuable to have them memorized. But that's hard to say. Many scientific breakthroughs and discoveries were made by people who had cross-discipline knowledge and associated two things that no one thought were valuable together. Potentially, even googleable factoids could potentially contribute to a scientific breakthrough.