Memory and education

Stop what you’re doing, right now. Get a sheet of paper and a pencil. (Or, if you’re cocky, a pen.) Now draw a map of the world, including every country you can remember. Do not look at any sources, do everything from memory. Done? Great. Now answer the following questions: What, exactly, does pi measure? What’s the difference between an ionic and a covalent bond? What’s a nucleotide? What’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
Chances are that, based on your answers to these questions, you’d flunk any reputable high school class. Don’t feel bad; my answers weren’t any better, and I wrote the questions. What’s going on here? How is it possible that I–a member of the severely over-educated section of society, as I imagine you are–live in fear of being publicly exposed as appallingly ignorant?
A 50-volume encyclopedia could be written on all of the ways in which the brain is not like a computer, but one of the most obvious differences is that the human brain is excellent at forgetting. It erases, I would estimate, at least 20-30 ideas, names, facts, and places a second. It may be the most efficient forgetting device in existence. The reasons for this prodigious lack of recall remain obscure, but it’s likely that we need to erase the exact details of an experience or a fact in order to generalize by making comparisons to other ideas, experiences, and facts. This function of forgetting is illustrated by the case study of a man with a mind very unlike ours.

A.R. Luria’s marvelous little book “The Mind of a Mnemonist” describes a man named S. who made a living performing magnificent feats of recall; for example, after studying a table of 50 numbers for three minutes in the laboratory, he was able to rattle off all 50 numbers without a pause and without a mistake. Similarly, after hearing the first four lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, he was able to reproduce them exactly, even though he did not speak a word of Italian.
What enabled S. to perform these superhuman feats of memory was his ability, indeed, compulsion to form vivid mental images for everything he heard or read. Even numbers evoked bizarre, colorful images for him: “Take the number 1. This is a proud, well-built man; 2 is a high-spirited woman; 3 a gloomy person (why, I don’t know); 6 a man with a swollen foot; 7 a man with a mustache; 8 a very stout woman–a sack within a sack.” After generating images based on the syllables or numbers he heard or read, he would arrange these images along a street or in a coherent scene, and then would simply translate them back into their original, drier content.
Unfortunately, this superhuman memory was simultaneously blessing and curse. He was often baffled, for example, by abstract language and words that could have more than one meaning. After hearing the phrase “to weigh one’s words”, for example, he would generate a picture of a scale with a piece of bread on it in his head, and not be able to penetrate any further into the meaning of the saying. His problems were not limited to figurative language, however, as rules and complex relationships also baffled him. For example, he read and tried to comprehend the following sentence: “If carbon dioxide is present above a vessel, the greater its pressure, the faster it dissolves in water.” This simple sentence would generate, in his head, the following picture: a pan of water, above which floats two clouds: the “pressure”, and the “carbon dioxide”. If the pressure rises–is “greater”–then the water becomes more heavy. Thus led astray, he could not ferret out the meaning of the statement.
Human memory is not a simple matter of sticking little cards in little slots and then retrieving them upon command, which is why computers can memorize the telephone directory and you cannot. As we’ve seen, accurate recall of large amounts of arbitrary information requires that information to be linked to extremely vivid sensory experience. However, this ability nearly obliterates more abstract thinking, which seems to require a certain fuzziness, a letting go of the exact details of a word or a scene or a phrase.
The educational system does not encourage this fuzziness. Being able to mindlessly regurgitate the fact that pi measures the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter or that a nucleotide consists of a heterocyclic nucleobase, a pentose sugar, and a phosphate or polyphosphate group will, for the most part, lead the way to a brilliant career in school, after the conclusion of which you will realize that you have forgotten the vast majority of those facts and learned very little worth knowing.
School should, instead, focus much more on shaping the style and quality of one’s thinking, changes that will persist long after the mental ripples produced by pi and nucleotides have vanished. Rational, scientific thought is startlingly difficult to master and surprisingly unnatural. Left to their own devices, humans blindly follow authority, fail to challenge their assumptions, and make ludicrously hasty generalizations. Just a single class on skepticism, the scientific method, and introductory logic would do infinitely more to create an educated public than memorizing the state capitals, which are readily available on Google, should you wish to be introduced to them.