I was talking to my dad the other day about the advantages and disadvantages of memorizing things and we got into an interesting discussion, the essence of which I thought would make a great topic for a blog post.
My argument against memorization has been (and will continue to be) that I don’t find topics that require lots of memorization that interesting. This is not to say that I don’t think memorization important; on the contrary, I envy those who can remember names of people and the most minute details of conversations they had. The things that I really enjoy learning, though, are the things that require a deeper understanding than that. I think that this need for fundamental understanding is one of the main things that led me to the math major as an undergrad. As our conversation continued and we talked about the way my dad studies music, we expressed differing opinions about the value of memorizing things. As a (now former) computer science student, I started to think of and bring up the “computational” benefits and drawbacks of this approach and ran into the too familiar space/time tradeoff.
On the one hand, being able to reproduce things saves you brain space. You could, for example, remember the essence of a particular recipe without remembering the exact particulars, and then reproduce the recipe just using the main idea — the dish is a savory version of some dish you’ve made before with a garnish of potatoes.
On the other hand, this on-the-fly relearning could (1) take time and (2) cost you mistakes. The other option is to memorize the recipe, item for item. Using that approach, you are less prone to error and you can put the recipe together much faster because you don’t have to reason through anything.
I realized that to me, the primary benefit of memorization is its utility as a time-saver. When information comes in a small enough package, the time you save by memorizing it once might be worth all the time you might spend reproducing it over and over later. (For those with some more technical background, I think of memorization as a caching mechanism of sorts.) Additionally, if the information is information you’re going to need to reproduce over and over, it might be worth memorizing it to save yourself the time in the long run. On the other side, if the “information packet” is unwieldy, though, and you know that you probably won’t need it that often, it might be worth “compressing” the data into its essential bits and reproducing it when you have to, so as to save yourself the headspace.
I always appreciate when the things I study and think about at work make their ways into my daily life; this was a fun example.