Blog Post: In Defence of Memorisation

Hello my wonderful patrons! I hope you enjoy this one :). I feel like memory is unfairly maligned, and wanted to give a word in its defence.

—————————

Memory and memorisation get such a bad rap nowadays. We decry the “rote memorisation” of outdated education systems, and speak of “merely memorising” something, as if remembrance is almost antithetical to “real learning”. There are few currents of thought I find myself more opposed to. I think we severely undervalue memorisation, and that, used properly, it is one of the most valuable, interesting, and fulfilling parts of learning anything. It is, to a great extent, the foundation upon which everything else is built.

Of course, there is an obvious reply to such romantic ideas about memory, which is to say there is no need to memorise things anymore. Surely the point of memorising in the past was because we would not have easy access to this piece of information again. If you only had the chance to read a great book once, then of course you would want to commit it to memory as much as possible. But we no longer live in that world. We have the internet at our fingertips (and more recently, any number of large language models). We have another solution to the problem that memorisation was meant to combat. If you can’t remember something, simply look it up. In this context, shouldn’t memorisation take its place alongside other skills of days gone by like carriage-driving and papyrus-making - all well and good for the time, but now replaced with a better alternative? To put it mildly, I strongly disagree.

The implicit assumption when people talk about memorisation in these terms is that committing something to memory is simply a matter of recording something. We often think about memory in these kinds of terms. We think of “storing things away” in our minds, and of pieces of information being “in our heads”. This spatial metaphor is all well and good, and I actually think it reflects the experience of having remembered something pretty accurately. But the process of remembering is not at all like putting something in a box.

Recently, I’ve been reading Alexander Nehmas’ book Nietzsche: Life as Literature. And, as I try to do with many of the books I read (though I am lazier than I would like to be in this respect), I attempted to commit a few of his key arguments to memory. For example, Nehmas has a very distinctive interpretation of the Eternal Recurrence, which sees it not as a cosmological thesis, nor as a simple thought experiment, but a reflection of the fact that for Nietzsche, there is no division between essential and accidental properties. This is a highly interesting point, and contrasts with a lot of other interpretations of the eternal recurrence that I had read, so I wanted to remember it.

Don’t worry about whether you agree with Nehmas here, I just want you to look at the process I have just described. This memorisation was not at all like passively having something stored away. It was an active engagement with the text, that forced me to prioritise a piece of information above other, similar pieces, and make a value judgement as to what was best to choose to remember. This is not the dreaded “rote memorisation" of having a series of facts assigned to you, it is a self-directed, active process that made me reconsider what I found distinctive and interesting about Nehmas’ book. It prevents us from drifting into a passive state where we just let what’s on the page “wash over us” and then just as quickly evaporate off of us. We will inevitably forget most of what we read, but going into a book with having already chosen to memorise 2-3 things from it means that, at the very least, that will stick in your mind.

And, of course, in practice, it is not just those 2-3 things you will remember. They will trigger a whole host of other associations and ideas that you have not actively committed to memory, but are brought to mind by the memorised point. For instance, when I recall to mind Machiavelli’s point from The Discourses on Livy, that Republics are generally more stable than Principalities, this inevitably reminds me of a bunch of related facts that I did not actively commit to memory about why Machiavelli thought this. So even without meaning to, I have inadvertently memorised that Machiavelli thought people fight harder in Republics than in Monarchies, that he thought limited political conflict between the classes was beneficial for a city's development, and so on. The actively memorised proposition was a coat on a peg, and in its pockets was a load of miscellany that I had forgot I’d even left there. So while memorising 2-3 points from a book sounds a bit pointless, since most of the book will be forgotten, there are two replies. One is that if you don’t memorise those 2-3 things, then even more will be forgotten, and the second is that they will probably remind you of more than you initially expected.

“But surely learning has to go beyond simply memorising things!” I hear you cry. And certainly it does, but memory is not in opposition to these deeper levels of understanding, it is a step along the way of getting there. I am not suggesting that we all sit down and commit entries of the Encyclopedia Britannica to memory (though if you have done that, I would like to extend a formal invitation to join my pub quiz team). I am suggesting that by committing something to memory, we allow for those further types of learning to be achieved.

We can think about it like this: those deeper levels of learning are achieved through reflection, through toying with an idea or a fact, and through connecting it with other related facts. Say you want to deepen your understanding of the writings and thoughts of George Orwell. Well, if you don’t have any of his ideas in your memory, then you can only access them when they are on the page in front of you, or shortly afterwards when they are still kicking about in your short-term memory. But if you can recall them at will, then you can engage in that deeper reflection process at any time. Moreover, the next time you are reading someone else, you can relate their ideas back to Orwell’s without having to go back to your copy of his essays to check whether there is any connection. If learning is partly about drawing connections between different ideas, then you can have more connections if you have more nodes (i.e., pieces of memorised information) to start with. I am not arguing that having a large amount of nodes is in itself a good thing. I am arguing that the number and type of possible connections goes up the more nodes you have at your disposal.

So I know it is much easier to google something than to memorise it, but I hope I have provided at least some motivation for, occasionally, going through the extra trouble.