I frequent a corner of the internet where people are occupied with figuring out the best ways to organize their personal knowledge. This includes finding the perfect software to take notes, strategies for making information more useful and also ways to leverage your own memory. But, when it comes to memory, there is some disagreement in this corner of the internet.
Some people say memory is a thing of the past. We have computers now, they argue, and they are way better at storing and retrieving information. This leaves us humans more time to do the work that the computer can’t: Connecting the dots, seeing the big picture, be creative.
Offloading knowledge to silicon
This is the core philosophy of Tiago Forte, creator of the online course Building a Second Brain (that I took a while ago). It’s all about using digital tools to save the best ideas and organizing them in a way that they are useful for your creative output. He jokingly calls people following his method Second Brainers – and people who, in his eyes, rely too much on memory are First Brainers.
First Brainers believe training your memory is beneficial. They often use or experiment with some sort of spaced repetition practice to memorize things. This is when you use digital flashcards to regularly quiz yourself and try to actively recall information.
Tiago Forte’s foundational premise is that computers are better at storing and finding information than our own brains are. Where our memory is faulty, computer memory is perfect. And while we have a hard time remembering things when we need them, the search function gets you there within seconds. That’s hard to refute.
To make associations, data must be loaded into memory
But it’s the corollary of this that I disagree with: That human memory is pretty much useless and shouldn’t be paid too much attention to. That facts can be looked up online and therefore you should fully focus on connecting things and trying to see the bigger picture.
I think this is really a reductionist view of the learning process. Robert Bjork, an eminent memory researcher one of the pack leaders of the First Brainers, would agree with me. “The people who criticize memorization – how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they read?”, he says in a WIRED article. Bjork uses children as an example, who learn new words through intense practice – “and every time we enter a new field we become children again.” The author of the article concludes: The human brain is a marvel of associative processing, but in order to make associations, data must be loaded into memory.
Of course it matters what kind of data we’re talking about. Memorizing hundreds of digits of Pi is maybe cool but not that useful, I agree. But what about ideas, insights, theories about how the world works? I use the spaced repetition note taking tool RemNote to regularly quiz myself on the most imortant points in articles and books I read because I want these things to become part of my thinking.
Memorize the basics, become a better thinker
An experiment showed that chess masters are really good at memorizing chess boards – but only when the constellation of figures makes sense. If the pieces are put on the board randomly, the experts aren’t better at recreading the board than beginners.
The researches concluded that the experts recognized chunks: Combinations of figures that are familiar to them and thus easier to recall. A set of data can thus become a single chunk of information if we memorize it. This chunk can then basically be used as a single piece of information.
Now, let’s say you memorize some chunks about a topic you’re learning about. Those can serve as the foundation for further and more complex thinking within this topic. Your first brain can then do its magic and form patterns between those and gain beautiful insights. Wouldn’t you have an advantace if you could use more interesting and complex chunks in your head to toy around with?
Unify the brains!
I can hear people asking now: Are you a First Brainer, Roman?
And I say Nay! I find the discussions between first and second brainers interesting, but in the end I really think it’s a useless (if not harmful) dichotomy. I reject the notion that software should be seen as something that works as a seperate entity from your brain, as an additional brain.
I’m way more excited about looking for a ways how software can be an extension to my existing brain and work with it in harmony.
I’m a Unified Brainer.
Further reading:
Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm. The mentioned article in WIRED is a fascinating deep dive into the topic of software and memory and I highly recommend it.
Augmenting Long-term Memory. In this article, the physician Michael Nielsen explains how he uses the spaced repetition software Anki to understand complex scientific studies.