| 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. |