Don't Memorise - The Real Consequences of Over-Memorisation

(light music) - What's up guys, it's Justin here. And if you're new to the channel, I'm a doctor in New Zealand, and I help students study and manage their time more efficiently. Today, I want to talk about memorization and why memorization is probably one of the most necessary evils in studying.

And both, it's necessary, and it's evil in that the more you memorize, the more you are at risk of really screwing yourself over in the future. And this is something that I kind of already sort of knew, but when I was in high school and early university it just didn't really click. I didn't really care.

No one really explained it to me in a good way. - Don't care, don't care, don't care, still don't care. When I actually learned about learning psychology and how learning works and the neuroscience behind it, formally, I realized that I'd been learning wrong the entire time I'd been studying, which is pretty much my entire life up to that point.

And so here is the thing, when we learn information, we are consuming knowledge, right? That's a given. That's clear.

But let me draw that out schematically, 'cause this is gonna make it make a lot more sense. There's information that we need to learn. And I'm gonna represent this information as this tree.

So these bits of information here are like facts. These are the things that we are presented with. These are the things in our text books that the teacher tells to us that read about it in the lecture slides.

These are the things that we try to memorize. All those facts and all those details that we need to know that we get examined and assessed on. But the reason that those facts exist are fundamentally because there are these other concepts that exist below it or behind it.

And so it causes a chain reaction of facts to perceive other facts and other facts and other facts and those we call concepts. So concepts give rise to facts. So for example, courses that I have are under a brand called, finding gravity, and that's because gravity is a concept.

And if we find the concept, then we unlock a lot more learning. So we don't have to memorize the fact that if I drop this reasonably expensive, I do believe over-priced Apple pencil, it's gonna fall, and it's gonna make a sound. We don't have to memorize that, because we understand the fundamental concept of gravity.

And that reduces the amount of things we need to memorize by a lot. For example, imagine if you needed to memorize how every single thing and every object in the world would fall as an individual fact. Luckily we don't have to do that, because we just fundamentally know gravity.

It's the same for a lot of our other learning. We understand cause and effect. We understand how pressure can effect volume, and so that allows us to understand things and see how it works without having to memorize it and just commit it through rote and repetition.

So the more that we can understand that way, the more authentic and genuine and deep our learning is. And the less we do that way, the more we need to end up learning through memorization. And memorization is a very repetitive, tedious, time consuming process, which soaks up a lot of our time.

So when our learning is skewed, so that we're doing a lot of this and not a lot of this, we end up spending a lot of time on the learning, because there's lots of facts to digest and rote learn. When we do the opposite, when we spend more time on the basic concepts and less time on the facts, then we save time, because the time spent over here to learn the concept naturally gives rise to the facts, which means that we don't even have to memorize a lot of these, because it just naturally makes sense much like how it's very natural how the leaves are where they are on a tree, because there's a twig that attaches to it and a branch that attaches to that. Knowledge is much the same in that information which makes sense is very logical.

We don't have to memorize that. But what's the harm in memorizing it? Well, there's a couple different types of harm.

In biology, there is a concept called mimicry. And mimicry means that you have these animals which pretend to be other animals for some kind of evolutionary advantage. For example, I'm pretty sure there's a theory going around that says that cats try to make themselves look like cobras to be more intimidating.

But the idea with mimicry in education is that you're mimicking an expert, so you don't have the knowledge that an expert has, but it may appear that way on the surface. Now the problem with mimicry in biology is that a cat is not a cobra, and it is, I guess this is an arguable point, but I think most would agree, a cat is not as dangerous. If you were to challenge a cat versus challenging a cobra, you're probably gonna have better luck when you challenge the cat.

Likewise, if you are challenging some insect, when that insect's challenged, it's going to lose. And this is the same for education as well. When we're challenged, our knowledge starts to break down, because it was only surface level thick.

From the surface, it looked like we were impenetrable with our knowledge, because we had memorized all the specific facts that we needed to to feel and sound like an expert. But when we look at it from a different angle, we find that actually that knowledge doesn't hold up. It's very fragile, and well-consolidated knowledge shouldn't be fragile.

It should be very robust. We should be able to go from any point and move to any other point very freely. So as an example, think about a hobby that you really enjoy or like or think about something you know really, really a lot of like when I was in high school, I played so many games, I could think about anything about that game, and I would be able to link it to anything else within that game.

That's knowledge as well. And that knowledge is not fragile. That knowledge is very deeply known and integrated and well-connected.

So this is what our knowledge should be like. This is how an expert thinks about things. And we can't get to that level of understanding if we just memorize, because memorization takes those facts in isolation.

It breaks them away from the concepts underneath, and as a result, each piece of information is isolated by itself and therefore, very weak. Now there's technically no problem as long as the only way we need to use this information is exactly the way that we've memorized it. Take away the fact that memorizing it in the first place through just rote repetition is very time consuming, if we forget about that major extremely deal-breaking flaw then there wouldn't be an issue.

But that's not the case. It's that we are normally assessed and challenged and evaluated in our formal education or otherwise on using that knowledge outside of the scope that we were originally taught it. We need to apply it so different types of problems or varying levels of challenges and often we need to combine different pieces of knowledge together to create a new kind of chimera knowledge that is like a fusion of the two.

And if you've just memorized it, you would think, "How can they possible fuse? "It just doesn't make sense. " (yelling) (laughing) - Unbelievable!

- Or the fusion that you create will be just completely not the right fusion. (screaming) And will not get the job done or you may use that as a foundation to learn something else and just learn that other thing completely wrong. For example, you may have memorized certain things about maths or physics, and then you kind of try to combine that knowledge together in a way that makes sense to you, and you can convince yourself that the Earth is flat.

But you wouldn't get that type of conclusion if you had a solid foundation. And so, because of the fact that we are inevitably challenged in ways that are from multiple different angles that are reasonably unpredictable, memorization is doomed to fail, at least in the medium to long term. But there's actually another downside to memorization which is potentially more dangerous and screws you more in the future than even this.

And that is that it stops you from developing logical foundations. So, remember when I talked about how these facts here are all built on these underlying scaffolds of information? And these underlying scaffolds are effectively the relationship between cause and effect.

Here you have a cause. Here you have an effect. And this error represents the cause and effect relationship.

That's very logical. This happened because of this thing. Or this exists because of this.

A cell behaves in this way, because genetically it does this. A hormone produces this change, because the receptor responds this way. So there's a cause and effect logical relationship between lots of different concepts spread across an entire different topic and an entire different field and discipline.

And when you learn more and more difficult things, you need more and more of these logical templates that you have learned in the past, so that you can make sense of the harder stuff. Imagine a massive, completely enormous tree. If you've spent the time to learn where every major branch and trunk and big twig or whatever comes out from, then when you get to the very, very end where there's tiny little twigs here and there, there's leaves coming off.

It's going to be a lot easier to connect that through then if you don't even know what the tree looks like in the first place. Is it over the river bank? Is it upside down?

Is it underground? There's a level of disorientation involved in that is gonna be overwhelming. And this is often why students will find it very, very difficult to overcome challenges and learn new more advanced material later on and often we call this early peaking.

It's that there is a high memorization behavior which causes them to do quite well in easier initial assessments at school, but because they haven't built this logical foundation, when they try to build the house on top of it, everything collapses and sinks, and everything now is just impossibly hard, and no one can be bothered with that. So if you're learning something like maths for example, not all of us are gonna end up being mathematicians. So in that case, why is it a bad thing to memorize maths?

Well, if we want to be a doctor or a lawyer, and what we need to be good at is biology or something else, why do we need to know calculus and statistics to a high level? Well, that's because it's the same principle. We need to learn logical foundations and ways of thinking.

Even though we may not use the knowledge we gain from maths directly, the way it teaches us to think, solve problems is navigating us to use our minds more effectively is going to confer a considerable advantage for us when we're trying to learn other topics. A great example of this is a story about how Elon Musk used his physics background to design his factory, not normally a natural pairing. And I could go into the educational theory and psychology behind the idea of using knowledge and frameworks from one subject and applying it into another, because that in itself is an incredibly powerful tool, but that will require a video all in itself, which I'm sure, eventually will come up, but only if you leave a comment down below letting me know what you think about your views on memorization.

Are you a memorization-heavy student? Or are you someone who tries to go more towards conceptual learning? And if you do try to go towards conceptual learning, what are the areas of difficulty that you face?

Maybe I can help you work through some of them. If this video was insightful or it helped you in any way, please leave a like and consider subscribing, because I'll release more videos around efficiency and studying efficiency and time management in the future. And leaving a like and a comment really helps with the YouTube algorithm to push my videos out to a wider audience.

But anyway, as always, thanks for listening. I hope it helped. Until next time, stay efficient.