P.C. Shannon

In grad school, I TA’d for a professor who claimed that students finished his class knowing genetics as well as those at Harvard. He gave out these detailed definitions for terms and made the students write them down verbatim. On the tests, he give them the definitions with some words missing, and they had to fill in the blanks. It struck as a very rote, grammar school type of pedagogy, and I’m not sure that any of the students came away from the course with a very deep understanding of genetics. After all, just because you can recite a definition doesn’t mean that you understand what you’re saying. It’s the difference between knowing and truly understanding.

I bring this up in response to a recent editorial in Wired, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” in which Clive Thompson talks about our increasing reliance on computers to store key facts. He cites a study that found a number of young people didn’t know their own phone number and instead had to look it up on their phones. I usually know my own number, but I was dating Caroline for years before I’d memorized hers. Moreover, I love looking stuff up on Wikipedia or IMDB. But Thompson raises a good question: “Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?”

I don’t know that I can answer that. Thompson himself surmises, “Maybe there’s just as much value in the ability to marinate in the seemingly trivial.” That’s probably true, but I think it’s more important to learn how to think and to truly understand rather than simply acquire a large set of facts.

I think that what we really learn in school—at least after grammar school—is how to think. Physics is my favorite example because that’s the first time I was really cognizant of what I was learning. Memorizing formulae and constants is worthless if you can’t calculate the acceleration of a block down a slope (given the appropriate values) at test time. Genetics is the same. I used to tell my students at the beginning of the semester that they weren’t learning genetics, they were learning how to think about genetics and solve genetics problems, and the only way to do that was to do a lot of genetics problems.

With our collective outboard brain, it’s easy to look up facts, but without a true understanding, the facts themselves are pretty useless. For example, I could probably read about string theory on WIkipedia all day long, but I doubt it would make a lot of sense to me.  I don’t have a very good grasp of quantum mechanics, gravity, and relativity, and just throwing a bunch of facts at me is not a very good way to learn. Similarly, I could tell you about cyclodextrin, but without an understanding of and background in biochemistry and pharmacodynamics, it’s not going to do you a whole lot of good.

Personally, I’m happy to offload as much processing to computers as I can. They’re clearly superior to me at many things: storing facts, sending reminders, and performing highly repetitive tasks.  That leaves me more time and energy to focus on solving problems, being creative, making connections between facts, and trying to truly understand the things that interest me.