Mind Skills

Memorization Builds Brains

By Amy E. Barr at The Lukeion Project

 

    Charles attended his local gym every other day for months but nothing about him changed. He was no more fit and no more flexible than when he had first joined this ultramodern facility. To him it was a mystery! He attended the very epicenter of fitness and health so often that the front desk crew knew his name. He put in a full hour each weeknight. He put in two hours on Saturday. The other regulars knew exactly where to find him during his habitual visits. Charles made zero progress and saw no results but yet he continued to attend. His failure to make gains was no surprise to anyone who knew him. Charles refused to lift any weights, work on any cardio equipment, or take part in any swimming or cycling opportunities. 
    This sounds ridiculous. Charles paid the membership fee after extensive research looking for the right facility with the right coaches. He even bought a handsome exercise outfit which allowed full flexibility and to show-off any future gains. All this only to enter the gym and do nothing but see others lift weights, swim, exercise, climb, move, and stretch. 
    Charles attending an expensive gym for sizable parts of his week and doing nothing to improve his heart and muscles is very much like a student who plans to navigate 12+ years of education without once memorizing anything.
    Never being asked to engage one’s brain in this manner explains our public educational plight, at least in the U.S. though certainly the practice continues to spread to other nations. Never memorizing anything means that students live in the perpetual state of first steps and first impressions with no ability to climb the educational ladder to anything more complex. The brain is a muscle. It needs work and heavy lifting. Looking at charts, videos, and other students doing the work creates no benefit for yourself though it will certainly fill one’s day.
    Working memory, our superficial thoughts, takes any first exposure to new information and begins to engage the brain into a sorting exercise. The brain must decide if information needs to be stored short term, long term, or only briefly engaged and quickly forgotten. At best, working memory can keep around 7 items stored before everything gets jumbled. 
    If you look at your vocabulary flash cards for your Latin class only once or maybe twice before evaluating your retention, you’ll probably get around 5 to 7 things right and the rest wrong. If you enter a room to meet a bunch of new people, good luck. You might remember 5 to 7 names if the only thing people tell you is their name and nothing else like “nice to meet you” and “lovely day isn’t it!” Our brains are usually thinking up clever responses and we’ll not likely remember any names at all if we aren’t making a real effort. 
    Long term memory is what gives you the top score on your quiz and the ability to greet your new teammates when you see them again in a couple of days. Working memory is, at best, a tiny holding place for a handful of facts that will fade before the hour has ended. An educational system that is not built around developing long term memory skills condemns a student to live in mental deficit, like a case of amnesia. 
    Depending on how you prepare long term memory facts, you can store information in your mind for days to years to a lifetime. Learning the fundamentals of a subject for one year and then applying fundamentals the next as you add newer and more complex elements requires long term memory. This success requires memorization. If you’ve come from the vast majority of brick-and-mortar schools you’ve likely never been expected to memorize much. You’ve certainly never been taught methods to help yourself because “trendy education” has thought it old fashioned as our nation’s scores plummet lower than any other developed nation. The inability to develop topics over years means students limp through life with only a jumble of ideas temporarily stored in working memory and nothing more than hopes to look it up online.
    “When will we ever need algebraic formulae?” you might ask. Good luck moving up to more complex levels if you are juggling pages of facts you never learned but only saw. You can’t. Your brain can’t juggle working memory and the introduction of new concepts beyond that small group of 5-7 facts. You aren’t progressing because you are never learning. You are never learning because you have cognitive overload by asking your short-term memory to try to the job of long-term memory. Comprehension collapses. Your brain can’t juggle information and tires quickly, your learning slows, you get frustrated, and then you lose all motivation. 
    Listing the necessary outcomes of only using short-term working memory and never memorization sounds like a typical diagnosis of a learning disability: low comprehension, mental fatigue, delayed learning, frustration, disinterest, and low motivation. What if we didn’t need to hire all those classroom assistants? What if we started teaching students how to memorize and then expected them to progress beyond the basics by having long term memory functioning normally if not robustly?
    Let working memory do its job (juggling 5 to 7 new facts) but then move the important things into long term memory every night. The outcome makes an average student into a genius in today’s terms: increased comprehension (you memorized yesterday’s facts and can juggle the new ones today), increased mental stamina (you have sorted out how to process information efficiently and have confidence that you can keep doing it), faster learning (you don’t need to spend half your time looking up the things that you should have memorized but never did), and increased enthusiasm (look at that successful exam or project after the hard work paid off!)
    Having mastered what memorization can do for you, you get to move on to application (build that engine or complete that experiment or participate in that cool project), creation (apply what is known to new problems that must be solved), evaluation (swiftly sort out good ideas form bad ones to plan even better projects). 
    n the modern educational arena, too many have made a choice between memorizing a thing and understanding a thing. Use both as a tool to aid the other.