[kiba]

If it's worth looking up multiple times, it's worth memorization.

The reason is that being able to recall at will have a much lower latency than a google search or tabbing through your iphone or android device.

People disparages memorization as mindless, but that's only if you memorize mindlessly about stuff you don't need to know. You can memorize smart, such as your multiplication table.

[yohui]

Conversely, if you actually find yourself looking something up multiple times, won't you naturally start to remember it?

Our tests hark back to the days when to "look up" something meant going to the library and flipping through an index. Internal recall will remain faster than external look-up for some time yet, but as the balance shifts the current setup will appear increasingly archaic.

[kiba]

This is only true if we don't use technology to improve our mind. Some people like to believe that the computer will become oracle, but some human beings takes advantage of the computer in the opposite direction to improve their ability to recall information.

For example, human memory follows the law spaced repetition and forgetting curve(our ability to retrieve information exponentially decay). We can take advantage of this by remembering or exercising our memory at the last possible to keep our knowledge. That mean we can efficiently review information as needed. Moreover, as we constantly review information, we only have to repeat them later and later in the future. In pyschology, spaced repetition is one of the least taken advantage discovery. Only in the past two decade or so, did we start using computers to speed up the process of remembering and learning.

That's only by taking advantage of human biology. it's possible in the future that we will enhance the speed and computational ability through bioengineering and neuroprosthetics. More over, the propagation of information is limited by the speed of light. So it's likely those with memory at close at hand will have an advantage over people's whose memory is far away, hence longer latency.