[bitexploder]

Memorization only works well if your approach leads to chunking. They have done studies on chess players specifically, which supports what you are saying. Masters are no better than a beginner at memorizing a random chess board. This critical mass of memorization, when finally encoded into chunks is what I think a lot of people are describing as the “aha” of memorizing to conquer complex topics. So it isn’t really the blind memorization, but the process of learning and getting information and concepts into coherent and related chunks.