Why We Memorize.

It's important not to cut corners, not to avoid challenge, but to go through it. Let's say you have a quiz coming up and you have to memorize these terms. It sucks - why do I need to memorize all these terms? How is just basic memorization going to help me? But right after that you have a test, and now you have general knowledge. Maybe you haven't even dug deep, don't truly understand why these things are, but you have them memorized. So when it's time to actually deeply understand these concepts, you kind of know - “oh, I have heard of those names before” - so you start to connect them.

I can attest to this even in something as simple as when I tried playing the ukulele a few years ago. It didn't take me much time to get a little bit of mastery over it - strumming a pretty nice tune, like "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." But to get there, I still had to remember all these chords.

I loved the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." So that was the goal - I wanted to be able to play that song with a beautiful strumming pattern, with all the notes transitioning perfectly. So I practiced for hours, every day. It was a little bit uncomfortable having to keep making mistakes over and over again. Sometimes it just feels like you're ramming your head into the wall, but it's important to remember that you're improving with every single strum, every single minute that you practice.

Eventually - learning lots of basic songs, memorizing all the chords, practicing my chord switches, getting better at strumming cleanly - I was able to play "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" with thumb picking on the top string, in a down, down, up, up, down, up strumming pattern that I really liked.

Why did I have to memorize where all my fingers had to go? I didn't truly understand it, but then I realized - “if I put my fingers here, it's going to make these sounds.”

If we connect that back to the history quiz, where we had to remember all these events and their dates, it might not have made sense at the time. But then when it comes to the actual test and trying to combine everything together - this happened on this day and this happened on that day - and now it all makes sense. It's all contributing to our holistic understanding of something.

If you logically try to connect everything - you're going to be able to apply that to other areas in your life - then you're actually learning, not just memorizing. It's important to go deeper than the surface level. We know why we memorize - it's the structure you connect into real understanding later - look at the ukulele chords.