What Should We Remember?

Remember memorizing things?

Sure, there’s the ever-ready example of phone numbers people always bring up whenever they’re talking about cognitive offloading and cognitive atrophy. How many phone numbers or street addresses do you have committed to memory today, and how many did you have when you were a kid?

This is the trade-off that creates the Flynn effect, where a rising tide of greater global reasoning causes IQ scores to be reevaluated every decade or so, as people get better at solving the problems on the tests.

What people during the 20th century learned how to do was to classify things in a more universal manner, using abstract thought to go beyond the realm of first-hand experience. Flynn wasn’t exactly dismissive of how important this was, but he did question whether or not this meant we were collectively smarter.

Instead, Flynn saw us as moving away from survival-based thinking to a much more hypothetical style. In other words, people could now do thought experiments much more readily.

It’s okay if you don’t remember that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215—you can easily look that date up in seconds—but it’s helpful if you know that it started out as an agreement between rich nobles and the king, and gradually snowballed to inspire foundational documents like the US Constitution and the English Bill of Rights.

In other words, we need to understand the main idea, but probably not all the specifics. We need to know which questions to ask.

Clearly, you don’t want to pull your hair out over not remembering a specific date or phone number you can quickly look up, but it’s certainly important to have enough information to use as a basis for searching. That means we need to know the person’s name if we want to look up their number, and it also means we need to know the name of Magna Carta—or what the document is, at least—in order to figure out the date.

Even if you don’t know the name of the thing, you should know what the thing is, or at least how to describe it to somebody else. After all, if you can describe what something is, you can almost certainly find it nowadays.

It’s still really different to know what something is called—that’s not the same as knowing anything about it—but it is a tool by which you can learn more about the thing.

So, it’s good to remember some names, but if you’re like me you’ve got a limited bandwidth for memorization, and you might want to use that same cognitive space for something else instead.

Every time I learn how to use a new tool that helps me remember things, I’m consciously aware that I now have just a little bit more bandwidth for thinking about the things that really matter to me. Instead of remembering 1215, I can make some connections between disparate things, or I can ask better questions in the first place.

Mental energy is a scarce and valuable resource, but the good news is that we keep finding ways to conserve what we have, and to use it on the things only we can do.

What will you use your newly freed-up cognitive space for?