Memory, Memory, Mnemonics, Metacognition, Systemization, Learning, Postmodernism, and Memory

Appropriately, this is the second time for me to write this post.  I don't know whether to blame my mother-in-law's computer or Squarespace (or myself) for ironically erasing a post about memory.  I'll try to fight back impatience and frustration and craft a cogent argument.

I often play Memory in my kids classes.  This is the game where players turn over cards and try to match them from memory.  I usually play with a set of cards depicting colors and shapes (such as yellow octagon) or a set of cards depicting letters and animals (such as G, Goat).  When I first started playing Memory in my classes, I used only twenty cards arranged in a four by five matrix.  I found that such games typically lasted between five and ten minutes, and students very seldom forgot the positions and identities of any of the cards.  If there were four players, the final score would be something like 4-2-2-2.  Whoever went first or whoever was lucky enough to be last when there was only a few pairs left would often be the winner.  This unfairness usually didn't bother me, since the primary goal of the activity was to memorize English objects, and the beneficiary of structural unfairness - that is to say the winner - seemed to rotate each class in random, egalitarian fashion.

Nevertheless, my class of seven-year-olds soon insisted that we use all the cards.  As a decidedly non-micromanaging, hippy teacher, I complied and began to arrange fifty-four cards in a six by nine matrix.  I found that this bigger version of Memory took anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes to complete and changed the nature of the game completely.  The advantage of going first or last was relatively minimized, and so was the egalitarian distribution of winners.  The same students won every time we played.

In the fifty-four card version of the game, winning seemed to be a function of not raw memory skill but how fundamentally-limited memory capacity was employed.  Of course, in terms of raw memory, some students were superior to others; but for the most part this difference was marginal: Susy could remember eleven cards; Nancy could remember thirteen; Jimmy could remember ten; Johnny could remember twelve.  It couldn't have been this small difference in raw ability that was driving the emergence of lopsided final scores like 15-6-3-2. 

Instead, winning seemed to be based on the approach students took to the game.  Students with no strategy - who drew at random - were at an extreme disadvantage in the fifty-four card array, whereas students who made and followed some sort of rule - whatever it was - always seemed to win.  This rule could be, for example, always drawing new cards from the bottom left of the board, always drawing cards in clockwise order around holes, or always drawing in a counterclockwise spiral from the middle of the array. 

Students who employed some sort of general rule for drawing new cards only had to memorize the rule, the card, and the order - one constant and two variables; students who drew at random had to memorize card, x-position, y-position, and order - four variables.  Efficiency gains resulted in overwhelming victories for rule-following students, since these rules effectively reduced a game played in two-dimensional space to a game played in one neural dimension.

The ability to force ourselves into rule-following relates to what we call metacognition, or thinking about thinking.  Since the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment of the 1960s, metacognitive ability has been a greater predictor of happiness and success than I.Q.  Accordingly, I would put forth the hypothesis based on extensive anecdotal experience that teaching metacognitive shortcuts ought to be the principle aim of any elementary education system.  It is for this reason that I detest the idiotic emphasis on rote learning of facts and details which serves as the mechanism for standardized test based educational systems.

Metacognition is only one way of systematizing knowledge.  It is a fundamentally personal way of doing so, since the shortcuts that I employ may be different from the shortcuts that you employ, and specific gains in efficiency of thought are often arbitrary or unquantifiable.  In general, I believe the broader phenomenon of knowledge systemization is how civilization progresses.

What we now call "physics" represents the Newtonian systemization of formerly disparate and complex phenomena of movement.  What we call "chemistry" represents systemization of phenomena observed at the cellular and microcellular level.  (Sadly, the "founder of modern chemistry", Antoine Lavoisier, was guillotined by Glenn Beck viewers during the French Revolution.)  "Biology" has only been systemized recently in what is called the modern synthesis.  Before Watson and Crick's double-helix, biology was just stamp-collecting. 

Marxism, Thomism, Aristotelianism, naturalism, phenomenology, and other philosophical systems are less robust and arguably less useful attempts at systemizing knowledge.  So are democracy, libertarianism, conservatism, and other political ideologies.  Kanji, the Roman alphabet, linear B, hieroglyphics, and other writing systems, wallet-making, TPS Report filing, shoe-cobbling, the proper methods for growing sorghum, the intricacies of rice irrigation, the legal code, grammatical categories like nouns and verbs, religions, and really everything we have a word for (plus an infinite set of things we don't) are all systems of knowledge built on other systems of knowledge and differing profoundly in usefulness, applicability, and degree of complexity. 

In a sense, systematizing knowledge is like putting it in the bank or taking it for granted (minus the negative connotations of that phrase).  When our civilization developed the systems that now underlie most of modern computing, we took physics for granted.  This is why I can sit at my mother-in-law's laptop typing this blog entry without understanding what is actually going on below the keyboard.  (It also explains why I'm allowed to get away with general sophism, baseless speculation, and so many spelling and usage mistakes.) 

Systematizing knowledge is doubtlessly a good thing.  It allows human societies to progress (Whether that term means "move forward" or "get better" is irrelevant to my analysis.) and puts our curiosity to work combining and recombining, breaking down and building up various systems of knowledge.  Nevertheless, we can run into trouble by systematizing knowledge, because we can never be sure if the systems we have taken for granted are "correct" systems.

So when a formerly isolated from each other Civilization A and Civilization B - each having taken for granted disparate and unrelated systems of knowledge - confront each other for the first time, the result is massive misunderstanding - quite literally in the case of language differences - if not panicky violence.  Civilization A is faced with the choice of whether to forcefully assert what it just knows to be true - such as the superiority of liberal democracy, the existence of a supreme deity, the proper way to manufacture jet engines, or the capacity for technology to improve life - or to just subtract that system altogether; for example alchemy or metaphysics.

Here I make a speculative leap and hypothesize that the confusion of the postmodern world is the natural result of the uneasy, moony-style marriage of formerly isolated traditional programs.  Isolated groups systematize different knowledge differently.  We take for granted systematized knowledge at certain lower tiers on which we have built more complex systems.  Interconnectedness, freer information flow, less noise between preferences and ends, unprecedented degree of choice, and massive amounts of new data without the tools to process them naturally lead to chaos, confusion, and grasping at straws. 

This seems to make the postmodern age a new χάος resulting from the historical forceful imposition, arbitrary subtraction, or hot-rodding of systems we forgot how we once built, and which we must or are inclined to reevaluate, rebuild, and repair fully conscious of our past propensities for utter failure.