[quartesixte]

Disclaimer: Anecdata.

I volunteer tutor high school kids in my local community. Particularly math and history. The biggest differentiator between the students who scale up quickly and those who scale up a bit more slowly is their aptitude for memorization.

Recent history curricula and pedagogy in HS has placed an emphasis on “analysis” and “critical thinking.” But the students who struggle all struggle for the same reason: they cannot remember at the moment of writing their paper the basic facts that give context or even give meaning to the documents they are to analyze. I can teach a kid how to do the ACT of analysis to a great level of competency but their papers will be filled with bad analysis and illogical conclusions because they do not know what they read. So, much to their protests, I train them to memorize. And that is often the last push they need to not only get good grades, but realize the joy of critical thinking itself. For now they are not wasting brain cycles trying to conjure up the facts.

Good memorization skills are a huge leverage and it is something that can be learned and practiced. It is a shame that schools are letting children let their mental muscles atrophy like this.

[somenameforme]

I'd claim (perhaps not even contrary to what you're saying) that memorization and competent analysis/understanding are really two sides of the same coin.

"Here is some long sentence that doesn't really say anything and which you've probably never read in your life before."

You could now probably recite that sentence with near perfect accuracy; at worse changing it in very slight ways that are still functionally identical. That's an absolutely remarkable degree of memorization - one pass for 22 words, 119 characters!? Of course the reason it's easy and natural is because you have an intuitive understanding of what you're memorizing and so one word kind of flows into the next to create the singular whole.

Amateur chess players often find chess masters able to recite their games from memory as evidence of some sort of super-human memory that must be what enabled them to become masters in the first place, but it's completely false. It's the exact same story - when a strong player plays or sees a game, the game tells a story to him not especially different than a very short story. And so people are not recalling random moves or positions from memory but instead the story that those moves and positions tell. A master reciting a game is no more impressive than a "normal" person reciting the plot of a famous short story, let alone one that they wrote!

So for instance I remember from high school memorizing the order of the presidents (yeah... great school...) but finding it relatively easy by instead remembering the logical stories there. For instance instead of just remembering JFK-LBJ-Nixon, etc you remember the story of JFK getting assassinated, LBJ coming to power (and JFK's wife's view of him), then Nixon coming to power and grinding the old axe he had with JFK and scrapping the space program, followed by his VP (Ford) becoming president after Watergate, then losing to good but incapable Carter which led to TV Star Reagan, etc, etc.

I couldn't tell you the order of the presidents at all, unless you give me one and then I can recount the story of how we got from him to where we are now. Because like most of all people I suck at memorization, but also am pretty decent at recalling interesting stories.

[jkaptur]

Strongly agree with everything you've said, and I'd add that elite athletes have the same seemingly-incredible recall (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHibkh57FFA) - I think for the same reasons.

[quartesixte]

This is fantastic! And a method I teach to students who I find to be narratively inclined. Works wonders, and is similar to my main method of memorization of historical facts.

[BeFlatXIII]

The opening epigraph of the textbook used by my AP Euro teacher still sticks with me 15 years later: "good history is a well-told story". Teaching the cause-and-effect greatly eases the memorization. Even if you do not remember which year Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the cathedral door, knowing it happened after the voyages of Columbus helps point you to the correct year.

[fiftyfifty]

There is a lot of evidence that I think backs up your anecdata. For example Massachusetts has the highest performing public school system in the US (arguably, but by many measures) and their curriculum is based on the content heavy Core Curriculum (not to be confused with the watered down Common Core) created by E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch was a college professor and his argument is that knowledge is a significant portion of literacy, he witnessed this first hand trying to teach college freshman that simply didn't have the background knowledge to understand the college level books Hirsch was teaching, even though they had no problem reading the words. Hirsch's books "Cultural Literacy" and "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" go into detail about this and he has some essays available online that are worth reading.

[worldvoyageur]

Anecdata plus one. My exact experience tutoring high school kids. Some could totally solve the problem, but the inability to remember the basic facts to start with meant getting the wrong answer, despite an impeccable logic trail.

The cost in time to derive basic facts that would have been instantly available had they been memorized also harmed the ability, especially on tests, to get to the end within the time available. 'Drill and kill' has its merits and, if done right, gives the kids a sense of accomplishment and progress.

If you start with the wrong facts, or missing facts, you don't end in the right place.

[albrewer]

> The cost in time to derive basic facts that would have been instantly available had they been memorized also harmed the ability, especially on tests, to get to the end within the time available

I can relate to this amazingly well. I'm dyslexic, so I have trouble remembering thing in the correct "sequence" they need to be memorized in. While taking some of my math classes in college, I particularly struggled with finishing statistics exams in the allotted time since a lot of the rules were (for me) difficult to keep straight in my mind. So, I memorized the bare basic "truths" and would basically start each problem from first principles. I knew them well enough to go very quickly, but I still ran out of time in some of the exams.

I wound up with a C in the class, but the professor commented that I probably would have received one of the highest grades in the class if I had taken the time to commit more of the "shortcuts" to memory and actually finished all the exams. Nearly all the points I'd lost on the exams were from incomplete solutions.

That being said, it was still one of my favorite classes ever, and was immensely useful to me as a newly minted manufacturing engineer in a foundry.

[AlanYx]

>The biggest differentiator between the students who scale up quickly and those who scale up a bit more slowly is their aptitude for memorization....

>But the students who struggle all struggle for the same reason: they cannot remember at the moment of writing their paper the basic facts that give context or even give meaning to the documents they are to analyze.

It sounds like what you're describing isn't about students' ability to memorize, but rather about students' ability to develop their own mental models. Luquet and Piaget demonstrated that the ability to synthesize information to develop mental models isn't particularly connected to the ability to memorize the same information.

[jacobolus]

It substantially comes down to the amount of language practice those students have had over the years, starting from listening to large amounts of varied material (from conversations/books read aloud) as young children, and then from reading a wide variety of material. The kids who read, and read, and read (especially those who have someone discuss with them the meaning and structure of what they are reading, hearing, or experiencing) learn these skills to great fluency. The kids who don’t, don’t.

Some kids live in households where they listen to thousands of books by age 5 or 6, including not only stories of increasing complexity but also natural history, biography, science, technology, ..., and other kids never get that kind of attention or experience, and end up far behind in those skills.

The ability to “memorize” (i.e. learn) rests on a vast subconscious structure built up by fitting together language, starting from little bits and pieces of vocabulary, and building to subtle understandings of complicated ideas.

The way to train it is by giving the little neural net of the brain as much meaningful input as possible about the relevant parts of the world, and letting the brain fit them together in a web of connections. Not by trying to practice/drill rote trivia (say, reciting state capitals or the multiplication table).

[agumonkey]

I hypothesized that after 3/4 very different languages you start to build a different, more abstract model of linguistics (syntax, phonetics, semantics) that helps absorbing more. Just like music.

[AlanYx]

>the ability to “memorize” (i.e. learn)

I don't disagree with any of what you're saying. But piecing little bits and pieces of things together is seen as a higher-level cognitive trait in most of the cognitive literature, quite distinct as a learning concept from memorization.

[jacobolus]

My point is that when someone says “the biggest differentiator between the students who scale up quickly and those who scale up a bit more slowly is their aptitude for memorization....” this is a mis-interpretation of the evidence that the “quicker-scaling” students remember facts they read more readily. What actually distinguishes these students is fluency in comprehending and associating material conveyed in writing/speech. Which may vary slightly based on inherent traits but comes down substantially to cumulative past practice listening/reading to complicated language. By high school students have more than a decade of practice, and between the most prepared and least prepared students there is probably something like 10x difference in amount and quality of past practice, most of it outside of school. Some students are barely reading the few assigned novels and textbooks while others are reading multiple (extra-curricular) difficult books per week on a variety of subjects and having extracurricular conversations where they construct and parse complicated arguments, etc. The latter group have a huge advantage.

Students’ skill at specifically remembering lists of atomized trivia (what people often mean when they say “aptitude for memorization”) is not as important, though this is also a trainable skill for anyone who really wants to do it.

Similarly, between the kids who play sports or do other physical activities all the time and have some amount of expert coaching and the kids who only play sports in PE class, there is probably something like a 10x difference in cumulative quantity/quality of past practice. Which ends up making it seem that some students are “athletic” and others aren’t.

And similarly for music, electronics, carpentry, abstract mathematics, cooking, shooter games, or whatever other skills you look at.

[Wowfunhappy]

I was having a conversation/debate with a friend this past weekend along similar lines:

I have an extreme amount of trouble memorizing basic facts, and so I can't recall a lot of historical dates. Things I didn't know which bothered her included the year America signed the declaration of independence and the year we entered World War I.

But, I knew how long World War I lasted, and that it coincided with the Spanish flu, and proceeded an economic boom period which ended in the Great Depression and then World War II. I'm quite good at remembering stories, and so I knew the context of these events—just not the specific year they happened.

Which I think is fine. Context is what matters.

My friend said that for her, knowing the date is what lets her recall the context. Because of what she memorized as a child, she's able to form a timeline of history in her head, and see when things happened and how they coincide. And I will admit that I sometimes have trouble forming a similar timeline, and it's a handicap. But I mostly manage; I have a limited number of hours in my life and I focus my energy where it makes the most sense.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that people are different. It may be that most students are like my friend and the children you tutor (which is something I should keep in mind, as I'm actually training to become an elementary school teacher). But it's not necessarily true for everyone. I resent the fact that when I was in high school, I had test questions which asked "what year did Christopher Columbus arrive in America". I studied for hours trying to commit these facts to memory, and I still got the questions wrong. But if the test had asked "how did Christopher Columbus's arrival in America affect the European economy", I could have answered easily.

[seanmcdirmid]

Perhaps that explains why Indian and Chinese secondary education can perform so well for their top students: even if they emphasize memorization rather than critical thinking, at the end of the day they can still pick up the latter without suffering from the former.

[moritonal]

I have dyslexia (specifically a weakness in memory) and agree with everything you say. When not armed with a decent computer I can use as a crutch for my memory I'm noticeably weaker at critical thinking given the time spent recollecting fundamentals.

[andai]

What software do you use? I have a poor memory and heavily used Notational Velocity as an external brain, but it's Mac only and I'm looking for alternatives.

[wenc]

I use Google Docs because it’s available on all platforms. I also carry a paper notebook.

I rarely refer to my notes again but the act of jotting them down creates a context, which acts as a hook for me. Even then my recall isn’t perfect but I haven’t run into situations where this has disadvantaged me greatly.

[falcolas]

Speaking for myself, vimwiki notes I review somewhat regularly.

[queuep]

> Good memorization skills are a huge leverage and it is something that can be learned and practiced.

Any recommendations in how to get better at memorization?

[orzig]

Anki (or similar). Spaced repetition is the most underrated tool I know of. And I barely use it: 8 cards per day, probably 1.5 minutes total with a noticeable bump in ease of professional life

[queuep]

Ah.. I thought it was more of so you could practice remembering stuff. Like some people remembers what somebody said in a meeting 3 months ago and some don’t even knew we had a meeting about it

[quartesixte]

You know, funnily enough, as someone who considers themselves to have a good memory, I cannot for the life of me remember most meetings, or most conversations for that matter in any sort of verbatim.

What I do focus on is remembering key details, as well as key emotional responses and postures. I try to take away from any sort of interaction any 1) new details that I find to be important and 2) how they reacted to other bits of information.

This helps me create a sort of holistic picture of a person, which I then take with me to my next interaction with them. I find this ultimately more useful than remembering the actual things said, as for the most part the counterparty does not either. However, their fundamental emotional posture(s) and motivations rarely change that quickly and having that knowledge helps me shape conversation faster and better.

[bitexploder]

You can 100% use spaces repetition for that. Just depends on what facts you want to spend time committing to long term memory.

[SamBam]

My understanding is that "learning memorization" is really the process of learning to do the work to memorize, through explicit strategies like spaced repetition.

I don't think people become better at "effortless" memorization. Instead they learn what it is they need to do if they want to remember something.

[Mezzie]

It's possible to get to the point where you can become better at effortless memorization, but that takes a LOT of work. I studied 6 languages in high school and undergrad, and by the time I was in my senior year (taking Arabic + Chinese concurrently + over a decade of cumulative language classes) I remembered pretty much everything and reviewing for things like formulae/terms in other classes wasn't necessary.

It's just really hard to get there.

[hackerfromthefu]

Hi I'm interested in this, can you talk more about the process and stages you went through?

[knubie]

I've been working on an app [0] for the past few years that attempts to synthesize note card style note taking (a la zettelkasten method) with spaced repetition flash cards. Spaced repetition is the single most effective tool for efficient memorization that I've discovered.

[0] https://mochi.cards/

[gnicholas]

Cool! Is this only for MacOS, or iOS also?

[carapace]

Harry Lorayne. His books cover the techniques, you just have to use them and practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Lorayne

[text_exch]

Highly recommend Memrise https://www.memrise.com/

[3pt14159]

If we're slinging anecdata around I may as well offer mine up as a long-underperforming student that also somehow took night classes at college for software when I was 11 years old.

The teachers may force the kids to memorize, but that doesn't mean it does them any good in the long run. I met tons of kids that memorized mathematics from 8 to 13 years of age in Canada. I struggled badly with fractions when I was 8 years old. The fact that there wasn't one canonical representation broke my little brain. Before in mathematics you could always "keep going until you were done" and the number looked like 1.75 and that was it. Now you could stop at 14/8 or 1 6/8 or 1 3/4 or 7/4 or even 1.75 again! And sometimes they made me round it all the way up to 175/100 instead! Madness!

But unlike the kids in my class that seemingly did better than me in grade 4 while I was wasting my time trying to make this slippery math reliable I naturally ended up memorizing little gems like 7/2 being 3 and 1/2 because I kept at doing the actual work over and over again until my brain remembered it for its own sake. I'm not fighting my brain and trying to squash stuff that I don't care about into it, I'm letting it make the tradeoff as to what to memorize and what to keep as I keep doing the work over and over again.

By grade 6 (age 11, same time I started college) I was starting to wonder why we hadn't learned anything in a couple years in math. When you understand the building blocks or "first principles" so well, what looks to be a new lesson (the area of triangles!) barely registers because it's such a basic application of what you've already learned before. By grade 8 (age 13) I was actually complaining that we'd barely made any progress in 5 years of education. I believe my exact words were "we've basically learned nothing other than maybe the Pythagorean theorem" and I still mostly believe that.

When it comes to things like science, computer science, visual (ie, non-statistical) mathematics, and probably economics, physics, optics, and some areas of statistical mathematics we could probably move 3x as fast if we would just really hammer home the first principles until we were absolutely sure they were sticking.

We don't let babies fill containers with soup because they haven't demonstrated that they understand what a hole is and does. I feel like too often we force children to remember that 3*7 is 21 without really making sure they understand multiplication. The key to getting a child to really learn something isn't by jumping to intentional memorization. Not with mathematics, anyway. The key is to get them to reason about it and to practice over and over again. Not to memorize, but to understand and though knowledge and understanding are different things, understanding always comes with some knowledge though the reverse is not necessarily the case.

[muldoc]

On the other hand, a good memorization skill must not necessarily mean you come to the right conclusions. Your sources, peers, genetics and a mind that is by nature chaotic, do it's part.

For example, having good memory may lead you to become more arrogant. If other people praise you for your skill, you become so confident in your conclusions that you stop questioning them and rather see confirmation in an echo chamber of sources.

This arrogance is the source of much evil, I think. You see it a lot in politicians and management.

[circlefavshape]

A good memory might lead you into evil? Are you being serious?

[solveit]

There is a type of person who can only reply with "smart people can do bad things" when discussing competence in any form.

But there are only so many ways you can say "smart people can do bad things" without sounding repetitive, and it looks like they're scraping at the bottom of the barrel.

[muldoc]

Of course not. My point was that there are more important parts of the mind that need training. You can't overcome the mind's evolutionary weaknesses in perception of the world and in being in control over its inner workings by having a good memory.