Why Do We Need to Know Things by Heart

I'm sure you have a horror story about your time at school when you were forced to know a list of rivers, states or countries by heart. You felt that it was a waste of your time and that in the age of the internet, it's borderline insulting.

So here am I, in an uphill battle to convince you that memorizing things can be very important in your life knowledge quest.

For it, I want to talk about a concept of mental scaffolding (inspired by Neil Levy's external scaffolding, via https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34507927). Over the course of the day, we stumble upon several bits of relevant insights — you can spot those when your brain does a "uh! that's interesting!". These insights accumulate and your brain slowly fades them away from your mind. It's like a house of fading cards.

This happens simply because your brain needs to attach these insights onto something — a concept you already know, for example — for it to stick.

Have you ever read a book that had so many new concepts (new words, new frameworks, etc), that made it unbearable to read? This happens implicitly in our brains every day. We throw away good insights because we don't have where to store them.

The solution is this — having some scaffolding where these insights can grab onto. And that scaffolding is made of neural pathways you already have. In other words, it's made of previous knowledge on the same topic. Knowledge that you... memorized somehow.

Kings of Portugal as a history spine

Let me give you a concrete personal example. I enjoy reading about history, and specifically about the history of Portugal. For years, I felt that all the hours I invested in reading were useless, as I couldn't explain to someone a particular event, as it was confusing in my head in the first place. One day, I decided to give a new strategy a try — to memorize all kings (there were 37 in total from 1143 to 1910, so it's not that big of an effort), and roughly their years on the throne. Today, when I hear about a story of a king in Prussia, I always think: "Who was the Portuguese king or queen at the time?"

The Kings are my mental scaffolding of those 1,000 years of history.

The methodology that your teachers used to force you to memorize was probably wrong, if you didn't feel there was any reason to do it. But hopefully showed you how this might be useful.

Give it a try

Start super small. You like gardening? Maybe you can use months to remember the names of plants that grow each month or when they flower. Pick a topic you like and make sure your scaffolding is within mental arm's reach (meaning, it's close, but you need to work a little bit to get there).

Is this just a useless trick to learn history?

No, not at all. Think about the news you consume all day. They are filled with concepts that would benefit greatly from having some mental scaffolding: economic concepts, political concepts, even legal concepts.

If you have scaffoldings for each of these, you will remember a statistic that is particularly relevant for your argument much faster, and more permanently. This will make you a better thinker. And the world is in dire need of better thinkers.