Why memorization still matters
Is Google making us dumber? Why memorization is the key to generating novel insights
My high school journalism teacher Mr. Tyler once posed a question to our newspaper staff: Since we have Google, why memorize anything when we can simply look it up?
Fast forward ten years later, and I've finally re-approached the question. As a Team Memory advocate, I know I risk playing the part of an octogenarian curmudgeon — Alas, today's young people can't memorize anything, and that's why they're so lazy and undisciplined, and it'll be the downfall of our current society! — but I'll try to make the most intellectually honest version of the argument.
At its core, by encouraging people to 1) simply look everything up and 2) discard the information once they're done,1 we implicitly reinforce a culture of surface-level thinking.
On first inspection, it certainly makes sense to purely rely on Google: in a world that is continually generating exponentially more information and data, then we should just look things up. If things are changing so quickly, why memorize them now? Plus, we have all these cool tools that allow us to access information quickly and seamlessly.
Unfortunately, this approach is maladapted to our world because it conflates information and knowledge. It assumes that atomic, raw information is the only commodity that matters. While we have an ever-growing amount of information in this world, much of it is useless and has an incredibly short half-life. If you don't have a foundational understanding, you won't be able to filter through all the noise. Differential insights can't be gleaned from the results of simple parameters entered into a search query, but instead lie at the intersection of multiple ideas.
In our complex, intertwined world with increasing amounts of information, the ability to re-think trumps raw intelligence, superior information, or any other number of advantages.2 I would push even further: the will to think theory of intelligence shows that you need more re-thinking cycles to get enough depth on topics to synthesize useful insights. It's not just about re-thinking, but reworking ideas too — it's all about the number of iterations.
The problem is not that people have easy access to information itself, but it's the continual discard of each piece of quickly-accessed, context-less information. Looking things up and failing to remember robs us of learning iterations and pushing further by staying on the bus. Taken to the extreme memory-less world, when you are exposed to a new idea, you have nothing in your existing mental framework to collide that new idea with.3 Such a practice precludes exploration and deeper contemplation.
Researcher Gary Klein has pointed out that there are a few different ways of generating insights, and I find that much of novel innovation comes from connection insights. Connection insights are generated from linking disparate ideas to form newly synthesized formulations. As an example, Richard Feynman would famously keep a running list of multiple open problems in his head, and would test new techniques and theories that he encountered against these problems — he famously credited this process as one of the reasons for his great discoveries.
Developing complex insights is predicated on being able to hold and manipulate multiple ideas in your working memory. Without dedicating concepts to memory, we're stuck to surface-level understanding that can only be represented as retrieval-sized pieces of information.
The people who urge memorization as some sort of barometer for willpower, cultural sophistication, or intelligence are missing the point. I certainly don't believe that our civilization and culture are on the precipice of imminent collapse simply because kids no longer memorize Shakespeare in school.
At the same time, Google should not be the first and end state of your question. Rather, it should be the start of your exploration. It can be an incredibly powerful tool if you use it as a lever to further your discovery.
My ultimate belief is that we go as high as our ability to glean foundational understanding, which we represent as better abstractions and greater thinking tools. Much of human understanding follows a common path in which you begin by memorizing simple primitives that you don't fully understand. After using these basic formalisms for some time, they are no longer consciously considered and become deeply internalized. But the beginning always starts with memorizing these basic ideas and working with them until they crystalize into a deeper understanding.
Let's think deeper and continuously re-think and re-work our ideas together.
This two-part conjunctive formulation is a crucial distinction in my argument. I'm not arguing against Google and looking things up; after all, I've learned so much from Googling ideas and topics. What I am against is the Googling and immediate discarding of the piece of information.
This is also one of the main points of Adam Grant’s Think Again.
There's an interesting computer architecture analogy here. A world in which people can only hold one idea in their heads at a time is functionally equivalent to CPUs only having a single register. Imagine if your CPU only had one register, and you could only load and operate on one piece of data at a time. You couldn't do much interesting computation at all.