Memorization in Internet Age

What's the point of memorizing a bunch of facts you could easily look up on the web?

i agree, memory is not limited in that sense. a better analogy is memory in some sense is sorted. topics that are used daily are generally near the 'front' of the que while older topics slowly fade to the background.when fading to the background i envision a bubble forming around certain topics allowing one to use and reference them unconsciously at a macro level, but leaving the micro information hidden.an example would be when i worked in games and did a ton of 3d math to animate and m

I have a memory like a goldfish and it has done me no harm. In fact I would say that if you want to keep up, don't worry about memorising. Your head has only so much room and stuff is only a click away these days. Most of the new stuff I know has been from looking up again things I should know and finding there is now a better way. YMMV

While having a good memory is important for cognition, it is just as important to be able to forget memories. There are probably limits to how efficiently our brains can scan memories for information relevant to a given situation and having more memories decreases the efficiency of this process. Also, when you can find almost all knowledge about anything on Google in just a heartbeat, it's inefficient to try to memorize most things. As Einstein said, "Never memorize what you can look u

Remember: forgetting is useful.

your brain is an LRU cache. It'll prioritize what you're using daily and what knowledge you need to rely on. It's completely normal to forget stuff, even the fundamentals

maybe we are delegating knowledge, we feel we don't need to remember everything, we just need the headlines ?

The article laments this but I think it's important to understand forgetting as an essential part of progress. We all have finite mental capacity and attention. Time spent learning outdated tools and processes is time not available to use for more valuable ends.We understand this deeply when it comes to software architecture where encapsulation and information hiding are fundamental principles but it applies everywhere. There is a value in not knowing, or not needing to know, because it

I'm the complete opposite. I'm convinced my brain has some kind of overly aggressive internal garbage collection. Knowledge/tools that I haven't derived utility/benefit from get purged. I will say that something I've book-learned in the past can be re-learned more rapidly if I run into that problem in the future, but it's grossly inefficient and of little benefit.

I think this is the most reasonable answer, and perhaps the memorization stuff is more of a measurement of who paid the most attention in the most recent of class taking... I just feel as I progress in my career and do ever more complicated things, I'm shedding more and more ready knowledge of any specifics, but perhaps making and ever more complex map of how to find what I need.