Learning: Memory as a component, and prep work in cooking

So I ran across this yesterday.

You know, a math professor I really respect liked to say that "Intelligence is just structured memory". And he's right. Memory is so important, just like prep work is an important part of cooking. 

At some point during high school though I started scoffing at the notion of memorizing things, and the attitude grew with me during college as well. I think it was when I started getting more into philosophy and mathematics that I prioritized the generating of thoughts and ideas, and processing/understanding them as way more important than memory. I rebelled hard against that Asian ideal of rote memorization, and sort of demonized it in my head.

Yes, learning is about understanding and not just about memory. But you need memory, some kind of memory, or else you'll never actually learn anything, you won't change. It's like saying that cooking is not prep work and dicing vegetables and glorifying all the master chef work, recipe research, with absolute disregard for anything that happens before.

But anyone who cooks knows that prep is extremely important, mise en place is extremely important. How you do it is important -- cutting vegetables and meat into even pieces, placing things so as to reduce cognitive load when doing the "cook" part. 

There is a direct relation to learning and thinking as well: you need to have stuff memorized, like really well-memorized, if you want to make sure you don't think in circles, waste time, miss things and misunderstand things and just learn very inefficiently in general. Memorizing provides the foundation for the processing later on, much like the processor works with bits in memory or the cook works with evenly cubed carrots for his curry. 

At some point I forgot this. Or perhaps it's better to say I never actually learned it. Either way, I got into the habit of learning like how I cook now: doing the memory part as an afterthought (most of the time less than an afterthought because I never consciously gave it any thought) only when I absolutely needed it at the time. Although I've gotten better at this, during cooking I often forget to prep and start getting the spices out, looking for stuff, chopping vegetables while something's already in the pan. There's basically no structure to that at all, no thought to optimization. Particularly because I discount the holistic important of memory and focus on the method that I feel is "right" because it appeals to my philosophy and sense of beauty. Prep work is gross, memorizing things is inglorious. Almost a Heidegger-esque revulsion to "manual" labor. 

But when I do have quick-access to things in memory, particularly the very ingrained, muscle-memory type, the processing goes a lot smoother since I don't have to shift my mental resources around trying to remember different things constantly. There's a lot less interrupts and my learning speed increases exponentially. In general, I think that although you shouldn't be stuck in the basics trying to perfect them forever, having a strong (or at least existent) foundation often exponentially increases your learning rate.