Memory is not deduction!

Welcome to another one of Damian’s rants, the last one I made got a lot of attention, I hope I can reach as many people with this one. This time we’re discussing memory! a very cool topic but also one I’ve seen misused more times than I can count, some very recently. So here are my two cents on how it relates to deduction and how to use it correctly.

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So anyone that’s ever gotten into deduction has at some point heard of amazing memory feats being used in the process, we’ve all seen Sherlock talk about his mind palace, claiming to know 243 types of tobacco ash, or know the number of a flight that takes off from London that week. Hell, whoever’s seen a deductionist do their thing in real life has probably heard them talk about how they’ve memorized the most common plants from a certain area, or the phone passwords of everyone in their class, and we’ve all probably assigned more importance to memory than we should’ve

My theory as to why this happens is simply because when we see anyone deduce, and we see memory being implicated, we latch onto it because it’s the most familiar of the two skills at hand. This leads to people developing their memory skills and orienting it towards deduction, and before you know it you’ve trained a completely different skill and you’re getting almost nowhere with your deductions

So the question becomes, what separates the two? why do we see memory be used in deduction so much and how much importance should we actually give it?

Well while memory is very much its own, complex skill, when studying deduction we should treat memory more as a tool than as a discipline. Deduction is, at its core, based on reasoning and logic, and yes, memory can be important when employing reasoning, for example as humans we inform our reasoning by past experiences, which are after all memories, but memory and knowledge mean nothing if we’re not able to apply them correctly. On the other hand, just because you don’t have the knowledge about something or someone committed to memory, doesn’t mean you can’t apply logic to gain information and reach conclusions. I may not know 243 types of tobacco ash but I do know tobacco ash means someone’s been smoking, I do know smokers take regular breaks from activities to go smoke, I do know smokers can have nicotine stains on their fingers, I know smokers carry packs of cigarettes and lighters, that their smoking gets more intense under stress, and that they can develop an intense, dry cough, all of that is information I know about an individual without ever having a knowledge bank about cigarettes in my head.

So, long story short, deduction is a skill that does not by any means hinge on memory, but that rather can be aided by it, which leads me to my next point: how do we make memory useful?

Imagine downloading the entire internet onto your phone, it sounds cool right? all the information about everything in history, and you can access it on the go no matter what, no data? no wifi? no signal? no problem, you have it all there! It’s an exciting concept, but now sit back and think about how much of that you’ll actually use, probably not even 10% of that information will be touched 90% of the time, simply because it’s just not useful for you. Now in that same vein imagine having a mind palace and filling it with all the crap you can think of, the periodic table, phone extensions for every country in the world, the 100 most common medications, all the countries in the world, and more. Now think about how much of that is actually useful to you, even better, think about how much of that is knowledge you can’t get with a 5-second googling session, the answer is almost none of it will be useful to you most of the time and all of it can just be googled.

These are the two most important things to keep in mind when filling a mind palace or memorizing anything:

• Is it actually useful for me? don’t memorize the phone extensions of every country when most smartphones today tell you what country someone’s calling from, plus, again, you can just google it, it takes 5 seconds. To quote one Sherlock Holmes (or at least the BBC version): “ordinary people fill their heads with all kinds of crap and that makes it hard to get to the stuff that matters”
• Is it information you can’t just google? Look, Sherlock Holmes was written in the 1800s, they didn’t have the entire internet in their pocket, having information memorized was basically all they could do to carry it around, unless they wanted to carry bags full of books, tomes, and encyclopedias. You don’t have to memorize everything, most information is already in your hand right now

So, for example, I do a lot of chemistry, I don’t always have a periodic table with me, and while I do have my phone I have to use information about the elements so often that looking it up actually slows down the process (seriously, I have to work with 3 or 4 different elements and check them multiple times for a single problem or lab calculation, the back and forth on a phone ends up just being annoying). So for me, it’s very useful to have the periodic table stored away in my mind palace for easy access whenever I need it (trust me, it’s saved me in countless exams)

A final, but definitely not less important point I want to hammer down is this: Make sure you know how to use the information you memorize. Look, I have the periodic table memorized, but I’ve done it in a very specific way so it maintains its structure in my head, because the place where an element is on the table actually gives you information about it, and this is something not everyone knows. I had a friend who also memorized the table and had no chemistry knowledge, and he did it in a way that was almost useless if he ever wanted to put it in practice, it was quite literally wasted mind palace space.

That’s all for this talk, I hope it was useful!

Happy Observing

-DV