What's in Our Heads
Only with facts at my fingertips could I play with information and see patterns I had never glimpsed before.
From Memory Craft, by Lynne Kelly (emphasis mine):
'Why memorise anything? We’ve got the internet now. We can just google it.' I hear this so often that it scares me. I never hear: 'Why exercise? We can just order everything online.' . . .
But you can only look up information that you already know exists. When you look it up, you are burrowing down to specific factual knowledge. What I hadn’t understood until I started committing data to memory, is that it is only with facts at my fingertips that I could play with information and see patterns I had never even glimpsed before. It’s only with a factual base that I believe we can use our higher levels of thinking effectively. If you’re going to be creative, then you need to create with robust materials. Memory lays down the foundation on which you can build ever more complex layers of information and thinking and analysis.
