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.

Surprisingly few people grasp this concept, and from my point of view the idea that rote memorisation is a waste of time is remarkably dangerous.

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.

Thanks Arnor :) As you say, nowadays we have less uses for our memory: that's why paper, pen and iPhones are for. I'm trying to use the memory palace technique to help my language learning (you know, like Icelandic ;), but it is also good to remember things like "hey I should do this by tomorrow" that appear when you are in the shower, or shaving. When you usually have no gadget around (waterproof iPhone, anyone?).

I usually carry many gadgets around (iPad, Ben Nanonote, iPod Touch, pen and paper are usually always with me) and as such, it is far easier to write down important stuff. But when I don't have them available, let's visit some standard palace and put the stuff there.

As for memory supermarket... If you always go to the same supermarket, you can use it as a palace, in the appropriate places you just put some kind of reminder, like a lemon avalanche or the big Bread Man.

We tried this technique out last week for, memorizing new words on a foreign language.

The interesting thing (besides that it is working fairly good) was that you don't have to come up with your own familiar places, routes, etc, but a site can do this for you and it would still work. I can show you a new place on streetview with some visual cues and you will still remember the places there.

And it is actually easier to get started, than when you have to do that on your own.

This technique works very well with names. Meet a person once, store his/her quirks alongside a name in the mental palace and every time you meet this person you can give a personal greeting.

Now imagine doing that on your first day at work in a big company, or remembering the name of someone you met on a conference two years ago.

I see computers as addressing a different part of the problem.

Lets take as a given that people need a way to recall pieces of information for use in the future.

1. Initially people would probably just wander around aimlessly and hope that their natural capabilities would be sufficient. Apparently this was not the case.

2. To reduce these short comings people developed memory techniques to better organise the information to be remembered. By chunking pieces of information in mnemonics and associating facts to these memory journeys they were better able to remember them.

3. Next people developed the technology of writing. This tool had a number of advantages over the previous techniques: less effort was required to store the information, it maintained its accuracy over a longer period of time, and the information didn't need to be recorded (memorised/written) by the person who would need to use it in the future. The method also had disadvantages: this new external form of memory required the person to take something extra along with them, as the number of pieces of information became larger it becomes harder and harder to sort through them to find the correct piece whereas the human brain doesn't seem to become as `distracted', and the individual pieces of information become less connected.

4. I see technology as helping to reduce these disadvantages. The internet means I can check email from any computer in the world and not just at the one computer it was composed at. Search engines assist in finding a particular piece of information within a greater body of information. I am not aware of a great example of information synthesis but I suppose that certain parts of text mining are making steps in this direction: eg, sentiment mining Twitter or trend detection.