All Learning Comes Down to Memory

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Everyone tells you not to memorize, but that’s backwards. At the end of the day, all learning comes down to memory.

That’s what it is. Memory is the substrate of learning.

Even deep understanding is memory. It’s deeply ingrained memory.

The difference between memorizing versus understanding is not about whether you use memory. It’s about how much memory you have stored and how well it’s connected.

Facts connect up into concepts, procedures become skills, and all sorts of new ideas come from combining things that you already know.

But you can’t connect the dots if you’ve got no dots. You can’t cook with ingredients that you don’t have.

That’s why memory is not the enemy of understanding. It’s the foundation of it.

Further reading: Learning is Memory .

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