Peter Kreeft, in one of his absurdly presumptuous Socrates books, took a swipe at what he called “external memory” (in this case, a tape recorder being carried by one of “Socrates”’ student associates). Considering his rather violent abuse of the Socratic method to also condemn rock music and put principle over compassion in the abortion debate (a point I actually agreed with for a long time before realizing that the principle in question was arbitrary), I feel safe in saying the argument here would make no sense to him.

On the other hand, there’s a book called “The Barmaid’s Brain” in which the title essay describes exactly this sort of phenomenon in reverse—service personnel who trade some mental acuity for prodigiously large short term memories. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the book (the author struck me as being a little hung up on the “dumb blonde waitress” stereotype) but at least that much did make sense.

*puts on cognitive psychology hat*

This actually doesn’t surprise me one bit. We’ve known since the Romans that memorizing declarative facts is hard, but remembering spaces, pathways, images, and stories are usually easier. This is why many of the earliest recorded sagas have mnemonic hooks, and the Art of Memory was developed to aid memorization. Flashcard-style memorization works through sheer repetition, but isn’t very efficient.

This is such an interesting area.  As a person in an intellectual, non-medical profession, I used to be appalled at the rote memorization my girlfriend had to do in med school anatomy.  However, I do have to wonder how memorization plays into knowledge and the ability to synthesize and and interpret ideas based on memorized facts.  It calls back to the multiplication tables thing: where is the line between memory and understanding?  According to my mother, as a little kid I could recite my favorite book before I could actually read it…when did I learn to read?

I was really fascinated by this study.  One of the comments I’ve seen repeated over and over is that this allows us to be more creative and more productive.  I’d love to see research into this again in another generation.  My generation has always had the internet and I wonder what having it for multiple generations will do.  The thought patterns it produces will be common place.  I read a study a few years back in which the researchers noticed that people that multitask don’t produce good results in their tasks as someone who is just focusing on one task.  I don’t see that in my peers.  We’ve been multitasking since birth.  I feel unstimulated it I’m not doing a half dozen things at a time.  I doubt I’m alone in that.  I just hope we’re getting to the point where the people who think technology is awesome and great for growth as a civilization outnumber those who think it makes us lazy and copmlacent.

The rote memory of a doctor allows them to look up facts much better - and sometimes just remember faster, which is important in medicine - so that’s unlikely to change.  It’s been found that doctors tend to get stuck on the lists of medicines they memorized in school, and not change as the science does - so that points to some place where the rote memorization is a handicap, as well.

Personally, even before the internet I always worked hard to remember where information was, as opposed to just information.  Mostly because I find mnemonics easy to screw up rather than good ways to memorize things cleanly.

Since the internet, I’ve found that the paths to things change constantly.  I use programs to keep track of what nicknames friends have used in the past, even, because many will change their information and they might tell me, but I certainly won’t remember when they told me!  And what I googled yesterday might not be here today:  Case in point, I liked the picture of one of the concept cars from Nissan last year, but this year they changed that page and no one seems to have saved that particular picture!

I think librarians have always been this way.

It makes me wonder how this trend interacts with increased confirmation bias, where the internet seems to have enhanced the intensity of sub-populations who base all their reasoning on entire alternative sets of “facts.”

At least, so it seems to me anecdotally.

I look forward to the day when people who go on cable news shows all have very easy to navigate mini-computers in front of them, so when they’re jumping into an argument, they are better armed with actual facts that they have verified before they start flapping their jaws.

This is already an incredibly easy and inexpensive thing to do, but the cable news networks aren’t doing it. Because they’re not concerned with accuracy or facts. But hey, maybe you’re right and as time goes on we as a society will become more insistent on that kind of accuracy because of the way our information is structured. I hope so.

The cable news heads already have laptops on their desks and still lie like dogs anyway.

I mean, it won’t change anything about Fox News—-they’d probably ban such devices-

Nah, they’d just require guests to use in-house machines pre-programmed with whatever that week’s version of reality is acceptable.

Current cable news heads are too old and hidebound to bother, but in a couple of generations it’ll probably be standard practice.

My wife hates when I whip out the google-box to look up something in the middle of a conversation, but I will be damned if I am going to spend 30 minutes arguing over a fact I can look up in 30 seconds - which allows for more time to argue over the interpretation of that fact wrt to the subject at hand.

I just hope we’re getting to the point where the people who think technology is awesome and great for growth as a civilization outnumber those who think it makes us lazy and copmlacent.

That’s the rub about technology; it can do both at the same time, depending on the context. That’s why I think it’s important to be able to think critically about technology (in the broadest sense of the term “critically”) even if one maintains a generally “progressivist” view about technology’s effects on society.

On the other hand, there’s a book called “The Barmaid’s Brain” in which the title essay describes exactly this sort of phenomenon in reverse—service personnel who trade some mental acuity for prodigiously large short term memories. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the book (the author struck me as being a little hung up on the “dumb blonde waitress” stereotype) but at least that much did make sense.

Jay Ingram, recently retired host of “Daily Planet” on Discovery Canada, one of Canada’s most respected science communicators (basically the list consists of David Suzuki, Jay, and Bob MacDonald), Member of the Order of Canada, writer of assorted award-winning books on science, many of them on the weird things concerning the human brain. And that is a ridiculously simplistic and a tad insulting description of what the essay is about.

For those who haven’t read it, the essay compares German beer-hall barmaids with cocktail waitresses and the differences that they’ve developed in mental abilities in relation to their jobs. Specifically, the beer-hall workers score low on tests involving thinking about the behaviour of liquids in containers , but score very high in tests of strength, agility, coordination, spatial awareness, and balance…just the things you need to carry multiple litres of beer in open containers around crowded beer-halls without spilling anything, which is what their job depends on. The cocktail waitresses, on the other hand, score prodigiously high marks in tests of remembering lists, even out of order, because their job depends on knowing multiple who ordered what kind of different drinks where, and the better you are at that the higher tips you get.

@12:
My wife hates when I whip out the google-box to look up something in the middle of a conversation, but I will be damned if I am going to spend 30 minutes arguing over a fact I can look up in 30 seconds - which allows for more time to argue over the interpretation of that fact wrt to the subject at hand.

I know what you mean! I know people who would rather argue about trifling details rather than just look it up and move the conversation forward. It’s like some people don’t want basic facts to be set in stone *coughconservativescough*

The cable news heads already have laptops on their desks and still lie like dogs anyway.

There may be a simple, non-conspiratorial explanation: they simply don’t know how to look.

In my office, I’m pretty much the go-to guy for finding out something: someone needs to know something, they’ll ask me, even though they have computers on the same network with the same internet access and thus the exact same access to the same information sources. But because I’ve spent so much time over the years looking for things, I can take shortcuts to information sources, phrase searches to narrow down the results faster, know which sources get me results fast, which are the most accurate, and which are the most comprehensive but perhaps slower. And when you get results, quickly assessing which are most likely garbage and which are most likely something that should be checked. My wife is an information specialist, a professional librarian, and we’ll often race to see who get the answer first, but even she checks with me for some things because she knows I can do it better, just because I’ve had to do it more on a wider range of topics using different sets of tools. Find out information on a book, she’ll beat me. See if that person who sent an email claiming to be a soldier is legit or not (to use one example that came up a few months ago) and I’ll be all over that whereas she doesn’t know where to start.

So just giving someone a computer and internet access isn’t enough, they have to do it so much that it becomes second nature and automatic to be able to do it fast enough to be useful in a live conversation.

There may be a simple, non-conspiratorial explanation

The explanation that cable news talking heads lie off their asses isn’t incredibly complicated or controversial.

Not that you’re necessarily wrong about their likely aptitude for looking up information on the Internet, but it’s not like these people are getting dragged out of their beds and into a newsroom without notice. They’re touted as experts, so they should already have a decent amount of accurate information at their disposal, Internet skills or no. So the simplest explanation is, in fact, that they’re lying off their asses.

While technology is a net improvement IMO, it should be viewed as a way to extend and enhance our human capabilities.  Not as a crutch to avoid doing the hard work of critically understanding what one is doing with that technology like I see with many younger students and older colleagues who cannot perform basic arithmetic for daily tasks such as providing/making change without whipping out a calculator or asking a more mathematically inclined junior employee to do the math for them. 

One of the comments I’ve seen repeated over and over is that this allows us to be more creative and more productive.

Depends on what someone means by being “more creative”.  From the way I’ve seen it used IRL, it is often shorthand for those wishing to excuse flaky behavior* and/or a tendency to try using others to do the hard work of researching/looking up/figuring out something they could easily have done themselves.  Worse, those who do this also tend to denigrate those of us who are willing to take the time to do the hard work ourselves and expect others to do the same as “dull” and “uncreative”. 

* I.e. Not showing up for a performing gig at all.  Nearly every friend who is a performing musician has countless stories of an ex-band member who left everyone else hanging because of that.

As long as the internet is there for us, knowing how to find something matters more than just knowing it.

It’s always been this way, at least since those newfangled dictionaries, encyclopedia, and card catalogs.  The Internet are those things just writ much, much larger.  As KeithM points out, being able to search effectively is perhaps the new literacy.

But that’s all to the good as long as we allow know-it-all space for Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit.

As an academic and researcher, I have long maintained that it is more important to know how and where where to look for information than to memorize huge masses of it (and I have an excellent memory).  That said, in any discipline or occupation, there is a certain core, often quite large, of information that you need to have in your memory, but there is an even larger amount, which is not often used, which it is better to look up when you need it.  Research skills, and the accompanying problem solving skills, are much superior to memorization skills.

KeithM:

Yes, Jay Ingram. His name slipped my mind and I didn’t want to go downstairs and look for my copy.

That said, the thing that struck me as strange is that he focused mostly on women when it seems like it should apply to both sexes. You do realize suspicions of gender bias are usually on topic here, yes? In this particular case, what Amanda posted does validate what Ingram wrote about, but hints of gender bias are the kind of thing that make it necessary to use other sources to verify results. That’s science.

exholt,

there’s a joke from the 50s or so about a jazz instrumentalist who was invited to help perform a piece with Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic:

He showed up and rehearsed as hard as anyone in the orchestra, and Leonard Bernstein noted this at their last rehearsal from the podium.  Leonard also took the opportunity to chastise members whose own records weren’t as flawless as said jazz musician.  Bernstein even invited him to the podium to say a few words, and his guest’s response was as follows:

“I felt it was the least I could do man, since I won’t be able to show up for the gig.”

I look forward to the day when people who go on cable news shows all have very easy to navigate mini-computers in front of them, so when they’re jumping into an argument, they are better armed with actual facts that they have verified before they start flapping their jaws.

Screw that. What we need is shock collars, like the ones they give dogs for the Invisible Fence thing, that are hooked into laptops held by people offscreen doing real-time fact-checking. Every time a talking head lies about something, she or he gets shocked.

Hey, I’d watch that!

The ability to research is good—but what do you do when your smart phone batteries are dead?

I’m over 40—and what I’m seeing in younger co-worker is a frightening lack of some basic skills, such as being able to make change without a calculator.

@James: I think mental math is inappropriately untaught, especially given how the vast vast majority of us can master it easily as children.  My students who have to do “real math” get hung up in keeping track of the constants and switching back and forth to the calculator to do 9/3.

As long as the internet is there for us, knowing how to find something matters more than just knowing it.

I would argue that this has always been the case, the internet just makes it faster and easier.  I remember in physics lab (o so long ago) I had two partners, one of whom could not design an experiment to save his life.  (Note: our professor never explained in full how to set up an experiment, rather part of the grade was how well you filled in his gaps.)  That one lab partner made a big deal about how he had all of the constants and equations memorized.  I showed him the inside cover of the textbook where all of the constants were listed and this amazing thing called an ‘index’ which would show you which page to turn to to find the equations you needed.

The ability to research is good—but what do you do when your smart phone batteries are dead?

Recharge them.

Seriously.  I am old enough to have been taught how to calculate square roots using the algorithm.  I can still do it too.  But so what?  It is still far quicker to plug my device in or change the batteries than to do it in my head or even on paper.  And what if I need a cube root or some other n-root?  Yes I know how to calculate it by hand but I am very unlikely to get a correct answer in anything remotely resembling a reasonable amount of time.

At my HS in freshman year (10-11 years ago now, yeesh), there was a guest lecturer who talked, vis the internet, about how Plato had been only 50/50 on literacy for just this reason: it let us remember more overall but degraded our own memory. Plato used the term “pharmakia” (sp?), which is both “medicine” and “poison” in Greek.

So this one goes way back. Pretty much all technology has that divide to it; overall increased capacity in exchange for lower personal capacity. As long as there’s not an apocalypse it’s all to the good.

ditto what DrDick said.  What worries me as a historian is that the less people remember the more likely they will be to believe clowns like Bachman, Palin or Beck.  If someone they trust says “X happened” then they will be more likely to believe it because “they trust the sources.”  The more you actually remember the more likely you will be to think “hey, that’s not how it happened.”  The true-believers will also go with their authority figure, but the low-information undecided may just follow along. And let’s face it, the low-information voter is less likely to go look it up, because not looking it up is their default setting…

I have always been extremely smart but with an incredibly bad memory.  I am so glad that I wasn’t born a few decades earlier.  One of the reasons that I went into the engineering field is that it required very little memorization and much more understanding of concepts.  This was really tricky for a lot of my classmates, but I took to it like a duck takes to water.  The vast majority of my tests were open book and open notes, and they were still really hard for most people.  I actually never pulled an all-nighter cramming for any test, even finals.  My reasoning is that if I get sleep and feel refreshed, I will be able to think clearly and reason out the concepts.  I am so grateful to all my professors that never made me memorize things.

bananacat - Second semester calculus was the worst of the 3 semester series for both me and my spouse because so much of it was memorization. 
If I’m designing the internal structure of a skyscraper, the supporting structure for a bridge or any other major piece of infrastructure, I’m going to a) double check my formulas and concepts and b) have someone else triple check my calculations.  When it is a long term, expensive project that can have life-death implications, not looking up the data makes one reckless and stupid.

Much truth in the posts and the comments.  Some things just require memorization, though.  My go-to example (as a chemist) are the common names of small molecules and ions.  They have very long, very descriptive names as well, but like common animal names vs. Genus species, you can’t have a can’t be constantly pausing to look up formulas and structures.  I don’t know how better to learn that, anatomical details, etc.

ROY G BIV

Every Good Boy Does Fine

King Philip Can Order Family Good Soup.

The last I still use, and I’m a trained biologist.

Surprise, I’m going to disagree with you on this one.  The problem with those facts being on teh Internet only (and not memorized, even if imperfectly) is that one can’t manipulate, juxtapose, compare and analyze them, unless one is in front of the technology holding the info. 

Critical thinking requires that ability and the information to be IN the brain.

And NOT to sound all conspiratorial, but we’ have seen blocks of information/internet media in various countries.  Sorry, I am not confident that couldn’t happen here(U.S.)  After all, look what’s happened to our media, which through monopolistic aggregation is no longer a multi-voiced enterprise.

One problem with relying on the Internet for information is that there are many suspect or unreliable sources—so you Google something, and find the answer, but the answer is wrong.  If we’re going to go this route (and I agree that some things should just be learned) you have to also learn how to evaluate the credibility of the source.  I mean, a person could whip out their smartphone and Google something, and the answer might come from a poorly conducted opinion poll, or the Fox News web site, or a page produced by climate skeptics, etc.  There’s something to be said for having a base of knowledge that allows you to test the credibility or accuracy of sources against something.  So you have alternative universes of “facts” and the smartphone doesn’t actually settle the debate.  The Internet has allowed a lot of conspiracy theories to flourish, rather than remain obscure or die out, because it creates a place where people can have their prejudices confirmed and repeated and recruit and cultivate new believers. 

There is a famous, although possibly apocryphal, story about Albert Einstein, in which someone asked him for his phone number and he looked it up the phone book.  The person expressed amazement that such a genius did not know his own phone number, and Einstein responded that he did not fill up his brain with information he could find elsewhere. 

I always liked King Phillip Chases Old Fat Girl Scouts.

And Roy G Biv is wrong, because Indigo is a dye, not a color on the spectrum.  And so what if I know those?  I don’t remember what the other ones go to.

King Phillip Comes Over For Great Sex.

Well it’s nice to have it confirmed I guess, but I was thinking about how memory is becoming less necessary for some time.  I forget when I started thinking about this, but I could look it up in my notes.  Anyhoo, I used to have a phenomenal memory for phone numbers.  Used to be that,k you tell me a number once, I’ll remember it forever.  I can still remember a lot of numbers very easily, but mostly they are past numbers I knew.  All the new ones go right into the book (I always maintained a book) and into the auto-dialers.  I don’t know anyone’s current numbers because I just click and that’s how I get them.

oh, grow some color receptors, will yah?

Why do we register the sun’s light as white?

The sun emits all of the spectral colors—the most important being red, blue and green. By observing these three colors in varying amounts, our eyes and brains enable us to perceive all the others. Green light is actually the sun’s peak emission. This tends to surprise people as many would believe that it gives off more heat, ultraviolet rays or X-rays. Our eyes are actually designed so that when we see green light together with the other colors of the sun, we’ll always perceive them as white. Any other color that we view around us means that that light source is being reflected. Grass and leaves look green, for example, because plant life prefers blue to green light.

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/07/17/sun_interview

While technology is a net improvement IMO, it should be viewed as a way to extend and enhance our human capabilities.  Not as a crutch to avoid doing the hard work of critically understanding what one is doing with that technology like I see with many younger students and older colleagues who cannot perform basic arithmetic for daily tasks such as providing/making change without whipping out a calculator or asking a more mathematically inclined junior employee to do the math for them.

Yawn. I’m sick to death of this criticism, partly because it’s old and tired, partly because it’s so totally off-base. I do essentially all of the arithmetic that my work and daily life requires by calculator. The issue is NOT that I don’t understand what I’m doing or how to do it. I know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide in my head. I choose to avoid doing so: the reason is that the calculator, if I press the right buttons, is 100% reliable. My brain is NOT 100% reliable (some of us just aren’t excellent at manipulating numbers in our heads - fact of life). When I’m doing putting together a reaction to amplify a gene from a limited supply of DNA, I’m not going to rely on multiplying in my head, even if I’m positive that 2.5 times 9 is 22.5. I have more important things to do, like figuring out the algebraic manipulations involved in a dilution. When it comes time to do the actual arithmetic step, I can trust my calculator and let my silly brain get out of the way. This is unquestionably an improvement for me and lots of people. As for when the batteries run out? Hasn’t happened. When it does happen, I recharge.

And feel free to get defensive about people implying that you are uncreative because you happen to like doing mathematical gruntwork in your head, but I don’t think anyone is saying that, any more than using tools to make these tasks easier implies that people like me don’t know HOW to do them - which you said rather overtly.

This goes back to the story I told back in that other discussion about getting rid of teaching kids cursive writing: when I was in university for our basic mineralogy course, you could pass the exam on hands-on mineral identification even if you got most of the names completely wrong so long as you wrote down what diagnostic properties of the minerals you observed and got most of those right, for the simple reason there are too goddamn many for anyone to remember. One of my textbooks, which I just pulled down, is An Introduction to the Rock-Forming Minerals. It covers the most basic, common minerals and their most common variants, and there are a few hundred of them. The 2009 list of known minerals had 6,293 names, with 50 or 60 being added every year.

Which was why you got more marks for explaining how you could look up what a mineral was (by indicating its diagnostic properties) then you could for simply naming off all the minerals you were handed correctly.

Much truth in the posts and the comments.  Some things just require memorization, though.  My go-to example (as a chemist) are the common names of small molecules and ions.

As I have said numerous times on other threads, most chemists remember these things through frequent use, not by intentional memorization.  I’m a chemist too and I can’t recite the periodic table, but I sure as hell know a lot about oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen, simply from working with them so many times.

What does humans perceiving white light have to do with indigo not being a useful color to remember in the spectrum?  It’s not mathematically important in calculating light colors, because it’s merely a shade - a specific dye from the middle east - not actually a spectrum color.

Every culture has its own list of colors they found important from their local environment - Japan didn’t have orange, for instance - but that doesn’t make them particularly more or less useful to memorize than the actual color wheel we perceive.

The human eye is relatively insensitive to indigo’s frequencies, and some otherwise well-sighted people cannot distinguish indigo from blue and violet. For this reason some commentators, including Isaac Asimov, have suggested that indigo should not be regarded as a color in its own right but merely as a shade of blue or violet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum

I didn’t know cyan existed outside of the color wheel, you learn something new everyday.

As I have said numerous times on other threads, most chemists remember these things through frequent use, not by intentional memorization.  I’m a chemist too and I can’t recite the periodic table, but I sure as hell know a lot about oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen, simply from working with them so many times.

Give another example: conversions between metric and imperial, which theoretically involves both memorization (the basic unit conversions) and mathematical manipulation. Easy enough to do, but the only ones I, or most people, remember, are the ones seen all the time. An inch is 25.4 millimeters, an inch and a half is about 38mm, and 2.5 inches is about 65mm. I don’t remember the last two because I’ve done the math, but because I’m also a volunteer firefighter and in metric the two most commonly used hoses (inch and a half, and two and half inch) are labeled 38mm and 65mm respectively. Similarly 30cm is about a foot, 39 inches in a meter (from seeing them on rulers all the time), 3 meters is about 10 feet, there are roughly 4 liters to the gallon, 100 kilopascals is about 15 psi (normal air pressure at sea level), 0C is 32F, 212F is 100C, , 20C is 70-something F, -40C is -40F, and so on.

I dunno, it seems there are certain things that should be memorized, so that when one encounters or needs other info, you know what it belongs with.  Sort of like “file folders.”  Example: While it really isn’t crucial to know the exact date of a certain kings reign., it is crucial to know what came before/after what.  Or the date of something like the printing press, so you have an idea of how it might have affected other societal developments. It seems that those basic big event markers make other knowledge comprehensible - otherwise, how do you know what you need to look up?

The above is probably more applicable in the liberal arts than in the STEM fields.

Or the date of something like the printing press, so you have an idea of how it might have affected other societal developments. It seems that those basic big event markers make other knowledge comprehensible - otherwise, how do you know what you need to look up?

“I’m doing some work on society in the Netherlands in the 1510s…was that before or after the printing press was introduced?” (20 seconds later) “Okay, after. Alrighty then…”

The advent of portable electronic information has made a huge change in how we access information. Even with access to the biggest, most comprehensive physical library in the world, it still makes sense to memorize a fair bit because it can save you time: if you have to go look up when Guttenberg started printing, unless you happened to be in the right section of the library you’d have to go the right area, get the right book, flip to the index, then flip over to the right page, and so on. And if you weren’t at the library at the time and didn’t happen to have the appropriate book in your dorm, then yeah, it makes sense to memorize “Guttenberg - printing press - approx 1440”.

With information online, the amount of effort required is trivial, and you have an answer (with a good net connection) almost as fast as you can compose the question.

Sure, many memorized things are acquired through practical repetition.  I just find it hard to define the difference between that and what counts as “things to be memorized” in education.  Even when you have to memorize things in school, it’s not like a sequence of random numbers; it’s stuff you *use*.  Multiplication tables included.  I agree with the original point of the post, I just think memory gets discounted although it is constantly used in the synthesis of ideas.

Sure, many memorized things are acquired through practical repetition.  I just find it hard to define the difference between that and what counts as “things to be memorized” in education.

Many of the things which are required to be memorized in school are completely context-free. Here is list A. memorize list A. We won’t explain why you should know the things on list A right now, but we assure you that it will be of some use to you in the future. But it probably won’t. Memorize it, damn you!

Even the multiplication tables are often context free. Kids often aren’t given a reason why they should know what X times Y is, they’re just expected to fire it off on demand, fill out the Soduko-like table that are the homework assignment and the tests, and carry on.

When I was in high school, I took advanced math (university prep) and we were expected to memorize the trigonometric identities (sin^2 theta + cos^2 theta = 1, that sort of thing). We didn’t know why, and as soon as we didn’t need it for a test, most people promptly forgot it. Then I hit university the next year and was shown why: it’s relationships due to geometry, and graphs, and it all made perfect sense, and I had no more problems remembering those identities because I could quickly sketch out a triangle and there were the identities right there on paper in front of me, and how they related to each other.

For an American context: here are the capitals of all 50 states. Memorize it. Why? At what point in the life of the average person in the modern world will knowing the capitals of all 50 states and being able to recite it on demand be useful (outside of trivia games)?

On the other hand, someone who can list off the capitals because their job involves dealing with the state governments so they see correspondence with the city and state all the time is a contextual method that actually does relate to something practical.

I guess I’m coming at this from a different frame of reference, then - I don’t recall being forced to memorize a lot of things completely context-free like that, at the elementary level (and it was just a small-town public school).  I do remember rote-memorizing the state capitals, as it happens, but that was a voluntary thing I participated in. 
Anyway, by the time I was in high school, I began to see the evidence of my math-teacher-mother’s opinion that “if you forgot something immediately after the test was over, you didn’t learn it in the first place,” and only the people who were academically inclined bothered to memorize/learn anything for the test, anyway.  Is it just me then?  Was everyone else having their noses shoved in a book memorizing constants, instead of being taught in context?

I was able to deactivate and reformat whole areas of my brain when the Internet Movie DataBase came online. Now I don’t even sweat that shit anymore, I just look it up. Wikipedia, Wiktionary, almost any wiki period except for the fake ones like Conservapedia which is just a bunch of opinion based shit, and this piece of shit fake wiki-errors.com that I found a few days ago that masquerades as a computer error wiki, but in reality is just a shill to sell their fucking crappy-ass software.
But on the whole, the internet allows me to be a more relaxed person. I don’t have to worry about remembering a lot of things anymore, I just have to know where to look.
Nicest thing about the internet? Toss that phonebook into the recycling bin, those things are the buggywhips of the 21st Century. I can hardly wait for those things to die out. Die YellowPages, Die!!! I’ll let my fingers do the walking on a keyboard, thank you.