Category: Wanderings

Why memorising matters and what I’m doing about it

Akshat Rathi2 Comments

I hate rote learning as much as anyone can. My high school exams were a nightmare to prepare for. I detested the process of memorising facts, just so to vomit them out on an exam paper. So much so that I did not feature in the top few of my class till class 10. My teachers’ regular complain to my mum on open days at school was: “He has so much potential. He just needs to put in some efforts.”

The Indian education system made the words memorising and learning synonyms. Even during my days at one of the best engineering schools in India, I found that there were many who did much better than me because of their sheer ability to “maro ratta” (commit to memory). Ask them a critical question, one that doesn’t usually feature in an exam paper, and they would be clueless.

The UK school system is much less focused on memorising. A good portion of assessment is based on assignments done through the year. The US system, I get the impression from reading Moonwalking with Einstein, is quite opposed to memorising. I know that open-book university exams are quite common there. In the age of the Internet, it makes sense that rote learning is given as little attention as possible.

But memorising facts has an important role to play in almost all professions. For instance the more writing I do, the more I feel the need to be able to remember all the wonderful things that I read, just so that I am able to either cite them or use their ideas to develop new ones. Invention is a product of inventorying, as Joshua Foer explains.

To that end, I’ve decided that I need to take memorising seriously. So far I’ve been committing to memory without paying attention to how I do it. But as we know, to get good at something requires deliberate practice. So here is how I plan to do it henceforth.

Conceptopedia 

I’ve created my own private version of Wikipedia. It’s a google doc where I store all the information that I know related to a thing or an idea. I call it conceptopedia because, even though it’s mostly full of facts, it is a place where I externalise the memories that helped me understand a concept (hoping of course that in time I will internalise them enough to delete them from there). Example of how an entry looks: 

GM

– Science writer Mark Lynas delivered a speech in which he admitted that he made a mistake by starting the anti-GM movement. Apparently he had changed his mind much prior to the speech. He even wrote a book called The God Species praising GM in 2010.
– 1st traceable genetic modification is that from 10,000 years ago when Turkish farmers mutated the Q gene on chromosome 5A of wheat. (Ridley, WSJ, 2013)
– 50 years ago scientists irradiated the barley to create a high-yielding, low-sodium variety called “Golden Promise”. (Ridley, WSJ, 2013)
– 20 years ago scientists inserted specific sequences into rice plants to create a version that synthesises more vitamin A. They knew what letters to insert but no idea where they went. (Ridley, WSJ, 2013)
– Now precise, multiple editing of DNA is here claims Ridley. And it is being done by a private enterprise. (Ridley, WSJ, 2013)

Wherever possible, they are hyperlinked to where I got that piece of information from if I need to refer to it again. I know that this is going to be an exercise that might take quite a bit of my time, and I’m trying to build tools to make it easy. One way is to use Evernote’s Clipper add-on in Chrome (there is even an iPhone app, EverClip) to save important pieces of information with the right tags. Then once a week or so I go through the clipped bits and add them to the conceptopedia.

Mind maps

I chose to read Moonwalking with Einstein early on in my #100bookschallenge for a good reason. I want to ensure that I retain a lot more than I usually do from reading these fantastic 100 books. Normally, after a few months, I only have a vague idea of what the book was about. This time it has to be better than that.

As I wrote in the review of the book, the book gave me tools on how to remember to-do lists, phone numbers and the order in cards in a deck. Whereas what I was looking for was how to remember ideas. Foer subtly mentions that things that you often remember are things that you paid really careful attention to. If some fact blew your hat off, then you will remember it. You will also want to share it with someone which will only reinforce that memory.

mindmap

But not all facts are that amazing. So the alternative is to build mind maps. These can really work if done well, and I plan to find ways of making the most effective mind maps. The plan is to make a mind map of every article I write before writing it and of every book as I go along reading it. And of course I am planning to review each one, so that should help me synthesise that information in my head too.

What do you think about memorising? Are there any techniques you use to commit things to memory? Are there any tools for managing your notes that you would recommend?

Image from here.

 

Do not track me. Do get it.

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

I’m a Google Chrome user and there are some add-ons on the browser that should really become part of it. The first one is AdBlock Plus and the other is DoNotTrackMe.

Yes there are people who survive on online adverts. I’m a journalist, I know. But AdBlock Plus allows for non-intrusive ads. This is the future of online advertising and the add-on is only accelerating us getting there.

And DoNotTrackMe essentially does what its name suggests: it stops tracking codes from gathering information about you. There are tens of trackers that want to know various bits of information about you to “customise your online experience”. Those trackers do no good and perhaps just slow down loading pages.

DoNotTrackMe also has an added advantage: it hides all the social button figures (the buttons remain in case you want to use them). How many times do you judge an article based on how many people have liked it or tweeted it and not on your judgement? It has become a sort of unspoken currency for writers. I think that’s terrible. Apart from deciding for myself what I want to and not want to read, I read what my friends recommend. If I don’t like it then I stop taking that particular friend’s advice. I’ve been using DoNotTrackMe for over three months now, and find it really helpful.

The art and science of remembering things

Akshat Rathi2 Comments

Review of Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, as part of my #100bookschallenge.

Moonwalking with Einstein is the story of a journalist who went to cover the 2005 US Memory Championship as an assignment for an article, and then went on to win the 2006 event. He got so obsessed with the people and their achievements that he decided to try it out himself. In that one year he with trained by men which by normal standards would be called freaks of nature. They could memorise the order of a deck of cards in under 30 seconds or 800 random digits in 15 minutes (full list of records).

Foer interspaces his year with the history and science of memorising. He walks the reader through the time when poets committed to memory the works of other poets so that it could be passed down the generations. There is a record Socrates’s outrage on the use of writing and the amount of stress that was given on memory training during the time before the printing press. But Gutenberg’s invention was the final nail in the coffin for those memorisers, because common people could then start to rely on books as an external form of memory.

memory palaceSince Gutenberg there were some attempts at renewing this lost art, but it wasn’t until the likes of Tony Buzan in the late 20th century that it finally happened. Buzan built an industry around the tools and methods of increasing one’s memory, and even founded the World Memory Championship. He sold improving memory as being akin to increasing intelligence.

And although IQ scores do not depend on the use of one’s memory, there is still a good case to be made for putting in the effort to expand it. After all, new ideas are only mashed up versions of old ones. However much easy it has become to store our memories in external devices, without internalising them once again they are useless.

There is now a large community of people who use these age-old techniques (and comes up with new ones) like that of filling memory castles with outrageous images to help them commit to memory things like lists, random numbers, binary digit sequences, decks of cards, poems etc.

This is what Foer trained himself to be able to achieve, and eventually won the US competition for it. What Foer convincingly demonstrates through the book, based on scientific research and his own experience, is that expanding one’s memory is only a matter of deliberate practice.

What Foer achieved is no mean feat. But, at the end, despite being a great story, Foer’s increased memory does him little good in his daily life where paper, computers and cell phones can often handle the task better. Sure he can memorise many phone numbers, lists and even complete poems with relative ease, but he still carries with him his dictaphone and notebook. And although he doesn’t say this explicitly, it seems his memory expansion was only for things that are well-defined, clearly laid and can be written down in lists.

Image from here.