Why I've Decided to Memorize Things

Turns out memorizing things can be pretty useful..

Like all good students of at least the three decades, I learned to see memorizing as an inferior learning method. I still hear teachers’ cries “rote memorization wont help you in the long run”. This situation is made worse by teachers putting creativity and memorization at odds with one another (Hoque, 2018). Maybe they were right in one regard, rote memorization is pretty boring and one dimensional. Especially considering the work of Qureshi, et al. (2014), who showed the qualitative motivation and participation gains of another memory technique, and the retention improvements as mentioned by Ahour and Berenji (2015).

I’ve known that something more was out there since about 2014. I ran into a MOOC about memorizing poetry that seemed fun. I took it for a while, memorized a part of Romeo and Juliet. The fact that I still remember parts of it even after several years distance from reading any Shakespeare should have been a sign for me.

Almost a month ago, I decided to pick up the technique that I learned during the MOOC. I was reading the book Systems Thinking, Systems Practice by Peter Checkland and realized that I was frustrated with reading books and not remembering the major and minor points from the books I read. I knew that the technique was called a “Memory palace”— I learned later that it’s more formally called the “Method of Loci”— and so, I decide to google something along the lines of “How to memorize a book memory palace”. I found someone offering a free 4 course lesson on how to do them in a more robust way than I had learned them previously, and decided to dig in.

That was almost a month ago, here’s what I’ve memorized so far—I’ll talk to you about the benefits of having memorized them here in a bit:

• 2 Poems (verbatim): 1 Langston Hughes, 1 Kahlil Gibran

• 1 Summary of Course Material on Systems Thinking (DSRP)

• Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, major and minor points

• Systems-related chapters of The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, major and minor points

• John Boyd’s Destruction Creation, major and minor points

• An article about thematic analysis, just the sequence

I’ve deliberately made a distinction for you between what I have memorized verbatim (poetry) and what I only needed to memorize the major and minor points of (literally everything else). I decided early on that I didn’t need to a book word for word—though I did find resources on how to do that if I ever prove crazy enough to try it—and that it was the major and minor points, the arguments of the author, that were of importance for me to memorize. (I just thought it would be fun to memorize poetry by heart).

But why? Why spend this time memorizing this stuff?

Memorizing things, and the skills around doing so, make the content more alive. They feel more tangible and, therefore, more able to be manipulated. This manipulation is the best part for me. I can recall two disparate concepts, say a Langston Hughes poem and the two major system archetypes mentioned in The Fifth Discipline, and start purposefully trying to make connections between the two.

Right now I’m laying in bed, just finished with some reading homework for some college classes. I decided to try and commit a few concepts to memory: the types of organizational change, levels of change, drivers of change, and a research paper detailing 8 factors to keep in mind for organizational change in public organizations. I can’t tell you where these things will be used again, only I can be sure that as long as I’m writing and thinking that gaining the ability to memorize things in a way that maximizes my recall has given me agency over the things I learn.

Reference:

Ahour, T., & Berenji, S. (2015). A comparative study of rehearsal and loci methods in learning vocabulary in EFL context. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 5(7), 1451.

Hoque, E. (2018). Memorization: a proven method of learning. International Journal of Applied Research, 22(3), 142-150.

Qureshi, A., Rizvi, F., Syed, A., Shahid, A., & Manzoor, H. (2014). The method of loci as a mnemonic device to facilitate learning in endocrinology leads to improvement in student performance as measured by assessments. Advances in physiology education, 38(2), 140-144.

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Hey everybody, thanks for reading this far. Weird for me to be posting again after all this time but it is what it is I guess. I plan on using this as a means to develop thoughts, I will not be posting regularly, only when there’s an idea I want to develop. Thanks for the support in the past, but the system is different now.