First, a quick tangent on multiple discovery. The phenomenon of multiple discovery in the sciences is that discoveries and inventions are often made by multiple scientists and inventors independently and around the same time. I believe this phenomenon happens in the art-world as well, but is less investigated. Multiple discovery is a vastly interesting topic in its own right, but for our purposes, it has some implications that relate to the importance of memory in geniuses. The reason that multiple discovery happens is not well understood and there are probably many factors, however one hypothesis is that discoverers and inventors, for the most part, do not heroically discover things by themselves. Instead, the theory goes, discovery is more a cooperative endeavor, where ideas that are almost present in a culture are brought to concrete realization by the so-called geniuses who take the final step to polish and write it down. Under this hypothesis, multiple discovery then would happen during a moment where one of these "almost-ideas" becomes so ripe in the shared intellect that many people fish it out of the cultural soup at once and simultaneously discover it. A good way to think of these almost-ideas before they are discovered is as two or more distinct existing ideas that have a yet unrealized connection between them. This is a simplification, but certainly many discoveries and inventions can be mapped onto this model. For example Velcro was invented as a connection between the way certain kinds of plant barbs stick to fur, and the need for easily fastening objects together in fashion, industry, etc.
Those who make such connections and discover or invent something new may well be geniuses, however their reliance on existing cultural knowledge is often overlooked, and relatedly I will say: so is their secret superpower of amazing memory. Certainly our geniuses do have an excellent intuition, as would be required to make unlikely connections between prevailing ideas within a culture or discipline, but an amazing memory and knowledge-base also comes critically into play during the creative moment. In order to make the connection, one needs the ability to quickly recall and hold in their mind all those prevailing ideas at once to compare, contrast, and overlay them. It is not sufficient to be able to look up ideas one at a time in books or on the internet and then see an interesting connection. The creative moment comes in the span of milliseconds, with lighting quick connections between the things currently floating around in your mind. All the ingredients for a creative moment must be in your head already for your intuition to do any work on connecting them.
I then find it strange when people disparage rote studying. It is a common trope that those with an encyclopedic memory have misprioritized, and they should instead focus energy on developing "real skills". They are the stereotypical nerd, uselessly regurgitating facts which they've learned, but creating and discovering nothing new. Certainly I agree that intuitive skills are important, and often not sufficiently trained. Genius creative moments would not be possible without such intuitive connections. However it's not often realized that those encyclopedic nerds are perhaps closer to genius than an arrogant intuitive thinker. The latter, being lauded enough about their quick math abilities and wit at parties has very little motivation to build a knowledge-base substantial enough to compliment their intuitive skills. A nerd on the other hand already has the most difficult component of genius ready to go: a massive and diverse dataset of information. All they need is a little brain training to start seeing connections.
So, you want to be smarter and more creative? Assuming you're not an encyclopedia already, you might try to study up and memorize everything you possibly can.
2 comments:
I think there is a difference between memorizing trivia and memorizing functional knowledge.
The ultimate feat of trivia memorization would be memorizing a random string of bits. But even though random static noise technically contains a lot of bits of information (i.e. it is not easily compressible), it does not contain much _structured_ information.
Learning functional knowledge involves compressing observations of the world into useful mental models that can be applied. The efficient learner avoids memorizing white noise bit-for-bit and instead tries to understand the noise from a higher level of abstraction (they might memorize an equation that allows them to describe the distribution of noise) which they can _use_.
When people criticize rote memorization, I think they are saying: stop memorizing random noise! Instead, learn the higher order concept which you can apply. And memorizing higher order concepts often involves active participation and practice applications with those concepts -- in other words, not rote memorization.
Hmmmm, great points. Fully agree that memorizing/learning higher order concepts requires participation and practice. And yes rote memorization in its own right is not something beneficial, the content has to be structured. In particular I'll concede that for many of the 'most genius' discoveries and inventions of new higher order concepts, a huge amount of practice and participation was required to understand the predecessor ideas. The invention of calculus required a lot of experience with algebra, not just rote memorization.
However, I would argue that there is a lot of space between higher order concepts and random noise, and there is a lot of room for rote memorization to shine in surfacing ideas that may have connections made between them. Consider the broad set of facts which we might call mid-level concepts, which do contain some amount of structured information, but are not higher order in the sense of being a deep understanding of a complex model that requires practice and participation. The type of stuff you might ingest in an encyclopedia article.
Taking the velcro example, the two connected concepts here are not too heady. They do require some amount of arguably higher order context with like the intuitive physics of how clothes wrap around the body, and an intuition for how hooks and fibers interact in 3d space, but neither of these needs practice and participation (besides existing as a human and putting on clothes).
I guess this is really a question of breadth vs depth of knowledge. Seems to me like after a certain threshold of depth, there becomes way more valuable connections available between ideas, but then this tapers off as limit to only the connections between the deeper ideas. Maintaining only an understanding of a very few very deep concepts I think is unlikely to produce a huge amount of connections, but those it does will be of very high depth and value. Maintaining a an understanding of a huge amount of somewhat shallow ideas will allow for many connections, but shallower ones. A diversity of depth in the memorized concepts may allow for cross level connections of high amount and high quality.
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