Memorization, Trivia and Atomic Units for Creativity

Facts matter

In the last week I have been challenged a half dozen times on why I am bothering helping my kids memorize things. What about critical thinking? What about creativity? Why bother learning trivia you can just look up?

Here is an example tweet quoting America’s Newsroom’s share of Everest reciting the presidents:

I have what I think are three good answers for this:

1. Working memory limitations

2. Atomic units and scaffolding

3. Facts are important for creativity

4. It’s not trivia

Working Memory

Humans have 5-9 slots of “working memory” — this is the famous reason why old phone numbers (sans area code) were seven digits long — about the length an average person could remember long enough to write it down or dial the number. But working memory limitations are also very important in learning.

If you want to learn how to do algebra it takes a lot of working memory slots. If you don’t have your basic math facts down, then you need to use those precious slots for the math facts. If you are using slots to calculate (6 x 7), rather than having it be automated in long term memory, then that is a slot you can’t use to understand a what a quadratic equation is. And you will need to get quadratic equations into long term memory if you want to understand matrices, and you will need matrices into long term memory if you want to understand thermodynamics. Trying to understand thermodynamics without having basic multiplication tables drilled into long term memory is almost impossible — which is why at some point many people decide they “aren’t good at math”. It’s not that they are bad at math, its that they haven’t got simpler math into their long term memory, which makes learning new math very very difficult.

This is intuitive to understand for math (which is why I use it as the main example), but it is also true in the humanities. The only reason we don’t notice it in the humanities is that most of the time school and life makes the humanities pretty easy. Even when I was in college decades ago, schools had dumbed down the humanities so much that they did not required many atomic units to do well. When I took my first year calculus course they assumed we had basic math skills. I also took an introductory class in the History of Philosophy. In that class, while they assumed we had basic reading and writing skills, there was no assumed background in any of the content we were learning. They walked us through Plato, Descartes, Marx, Nietzsche and company all from scratch. When I told this to Everest she was shocked — “you mean you didn’t know about The Prince until college? Is that normal?”

Last week someone asked me, “I get that Everest and her quiz bowl team know a lot of historical facts, but how do they learn to understand history? Like could they answer questions like ‘how did the economic, political and religious rivalries of imperial states in the 16th century drove European expansion?’ Or ‘How did Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism influence social structures, gender roles, and political authority, and what impact did that have on modern Asian societies?’” [paraphrase. I stole those from an AP history practice exam]

I asked those questions to Everest and her eyes went wide, “Are those AP history questions? I could never answer that!”

She is right that she would definitely struggle to answer those questions with what she knows now, but I think it would only take a short lecture from an experienced historian (or a Youtube video) before she could learn the answers to questions like that. It would only take a short lecture because she already has the building blocks. If you wanted to teach an average 5th grader to be able to answer those types of questions competently you would need to start by explaining what happened in 16th century Europe; What the slave trade was; Who Martin Luther was; What the Protestant revolution was; What the Holy Roman Empire was; Who was fighting in the 80-year war — and so much more.

And, at best, every one of those new facts would be sitting in working memory. The student would need to hold all those new facts in short term memory, and then you would ask them to put them together to explain how those things affected expansion into the Americas and Africa. They would struggle.

It is hard for many adults to see this because even if they don’t know the details of the Protestant Revolution, they know there was such a thing as the Protestant Revolution. They likely know something about Martin Luther and the 95 Thesis. They know about the Gutenberg Printing Press. They know about Henry VIII and his six wives. They know there is a religion called “Anglicanism”. They have heard of the Holy Roman Empire (even if they know little about it). They know about the slave trade (or at least think they do). Heck — they know where Africa is situated compared to Europe and the Americas. They have SOME atomic units that have been put into their long term memory — they have something they can build on. But at some point in the past, all of those facts needed to be learned and memorized. For adults who have been exposed to western culture for their entire lives, most of these facts they “got for free” — but most kids do not know these things unless they are taught.

If you want to emphasize with these kids, try thinking through similar questions for a history you are not familiar with. How about this question:

“Why did Hong Wu’s Red Turban Rebellion lead to a different outcome than the Yellow Turban Rebellion? How much of the differences were driven by the Yuan’s response verses Emperor Ling’s? Explain what changes during the Tang and Song dynasties may have contributed to the outcomes.”

How many new atomic units would you need to learn before you could even begin to answer those questions? Do you think you could keep all those new names and terms in your short term memory such that you could figure all that out in a single session?

Just as you need math fundamentals to learn advanced math, you need fact fundamentals to learn advanced history. And don’t even think about trying to learn biology without memoization.

Atomic Units and Scaffolding

One of the fundamental techniques of learning I discovered in the past year was that it is a lot easier to add a fact if you can connect it to an existing fact. Learning ten random facts is a lot harder then learning ten facts about one specific thing. If your plan is to learn ten facts about every country in the world, you will do a lot better by learning ten facts about each country one at a time (and learning adjacent countries one after the other) than if you try and start with one fact about each country (say learn all the country capitals).

Tyler Cowen has written about how he reads non-fiction much faster than most people, but he is not significantly faster when he reads fiction. He can skim through most non-fiction looking for new facts he was unaware of, but he can’t do that with fiction (I’ll also note that while he says he read fiction at the same speed as “most people”, I’ll bet Cowen can read fiction like the Iliad, the Inferno or Shakespeare much faster than most Americans — because he has put the vocabulary and sentence structure used in books like that into his long term memory).

The more you have learned the easier it is to learn more. Learning compounds.

I spoke to someone last week who was telling me he was taking a class to be a paramedic. Every time he encountered a new term or acronym (there are a lot of acronyms in the medical field), he would add it to an Anki deck. It did not take long before he had all those ‘atomic units’ in his long term memory. When he was reading a text that mentioned CCEMTP and the C/D ration or ACLS and the BVM, he could take the acronyms in stride and learn the content the text or lecturer was trying to teach. His less diligent classmates would have to figure out the acronym from context, or pause and look it up. Every time they did so they had to use up one of their limited working memory slots. That cognitive load makes it more difficult to learn the new content.

Memorization for Creativity

Three decades ago I coached a high school improv comedy team. Improv is very much about being in the moment. You don’t want to spend a lot of time “thinking” while you are performing. You need to respond to your partner and (usually) do the next obvious thing.

Only what is “obvious” to one performer is not obvious to another. And hopefully what is obvious to a performer is not obvious to the audience — the laugh comes from the connection that happens on stage that surprises the observer.

But that only works if the performer can both be obvious, in the moment, and surprising at the same time.

One event my team competed in was called “Theme”. The referees (yes, this was competitive improv comedy) would give the team a “theme” — usually one word and something like “peace” or “growth” or “guilt”. The team would then perform a series of short sketches around that theme — ideally each sketch ending with a laugh or punchline.

Most teams would do very obvious stuff.

“Peace” would be about a family fighting or generic world leaders signing a peace treaty. “Guilt” would be about a boyfriend feeling bad about cheating on his girlfriend. Many teams would stall out before their four minute time limit, or they would repeat the same variations multiple times to fill time.

One thing I did with my team was learn “common knowledge” — things that many people in the audience were likely to know to some degree. We did sessions on the well known bible stories, Shakespeare, popular literature, mythology, historical events, and more. Then we would run exercises where we would take a theme and try to find the connection between that theme and each of the stories we had learned. Creative people can find a connection between a given theme and just about any existing event.

Say the theme was “Growth”. Now match “growth” to the following myths:

• Hercules cleaning the stable

• Thor earning the right to pick up his hammer

• King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone

• The spider Anansi in the pit with the tiger

• William Tell shooting an arrow off his son’s head

Now do it again for the theme, “justice”, now again for the theme, “showmanship”, now for “Guilt”. Some of the connections will be better than others and some will create funnier “punchlines”, but it is not too hard. It is much easier than if I asked you to come up with five vignettes of any kind that demonstrate different aspects of “guilt” without this structure behind it.

In an actual performance the team is not going to force the theme into those specific five situations. Instead they will have installed hundreds of “situations” into their long term memory. Now when they get a specific theme their unconscious can pull from those hundreds of situations and find the one that best exemplify the specific theme - something that is “obvious” to the individual performer. Even better, because the whole team has studied the same few hundred situations, when a performer starts aVichy France, the rest of the team has the context to follow along.

The team can easily perform 10-20 scenes with situations that seem to fit the theme perfectly. Guilt scenes, instead of being variations on a couple cheating on one another take on new nuance. From the top of my mind I came up with:

• Pandora releasing all the bad things into the world

• Judas betraying Jesus

• Lancelot betraying Arthur with Guinevere

• Lady Macbeth washing the sin from her hands

• Truman feeling bad about the atomic bombs

Through this exercise and weeks and week of practice my team was able to create extremely sophisticated comedy scenes (and qualify for nationals finals five times — with the “theme event” being their most consistently highest scoring in the country).

The team increased the creativity through what was effectively memorization of new facts and getting those facts into their long term memory.

It’s Not Trivia

Before leaving to go to the History Bee National Championship one family let their school know they would be missing a few days of classes. The teacher responded with, “oh, that trivia thing?”

Most trivia nights at bars are just that — trivia. They ask questions about popular TV shows and music and celebrities. I was at one last week and one of the questions was “How much money did all of the Conjuring Films gross combined”. That is definitely a trivia question (and not a very good one).

But the questions asked in Quiz Bowl and the History Bee are not like that. The details the kids need to know to do well are facts about things like Chinese Exclusion Act, the Hundred Years War, or paintings by Vermeer. Those are not things that will help you do your taxes, or cook your weekly meals, or even earn you a job at Google — but they are important details about the history of the world we live in.

One could say that knowing the causes of World War I and what role the liver plays in bodily functions is “trivia”, but then we need a new word for what they do at bars on Tuesday nights.

Calling all knowledge “trivia” does a disservice to knowledge. Which may be another reason why the accumulation of knowledge has been so under-emphasized in our current culture.

Keep learning,

Edward (and Everest)