Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, in his book _Why Don't Students Like School_, says that memorizing facts is important for developing higher level reasoning. Think of it as building up a large processor cache. If you have the relevant facts in your brain, you can piece them together much more quickly to build up higher knowledge. Always having to look up things on Google is like disk thrashing.
I don't know that this technique is a big win for this kind of memorization. For example, multiplication of digits probably needs to be in L1 cache. You don't want to have to search for the result in your memory palace, which seems more like main memory.
Indeed! There are some things that you need to force feed, and others that you can place in a memory palace or use in an associative array of thoughts. I.e. multiplication tables or foreign basic words need to be in your L1 or L2, but the causes of the First World War (unless it is something you are deeply related to) can perfectly be outside it.
To continue with your example, multiplication of digits gets to be in L1 having lived in main memory for long enough, and being retrieved from main memory often enough, to stay there. The same will be true of anything which is accessed that frequently, but unless things are in the main memory to begin with, they can't possibly get promoted.
There are many methods including google that help retain knwoledge outside one's brain.Cheat sheets, visualizations, intellisense, etc...
And many times, using one of those methods to recall something is faster that using memory. for example using intellisense to see what can i do with a certain object is much faster than using memory.
I think a more useful property of the human memory is the ability to connect different pieces of knowledge, both consciously and unconsciously. Connecting two pieces of knowledge using a computer is much slower and harder, and requires a lot of intellectual effort.
Exactly. You can use intelligence to find setattributevalue (or SetAttributeValue, or was it setAttribute?) easily enough, but unless you remember what it does, you won't ever look.
