Knowledge and Memory

Knowledge and Memory

By Gary Rea

For many years, I have often been astounded at what most people don’t seem to know, as well as what people erroneously believe. My own long-term memory is quite lengthy and detailed, owing to a lifelong habit of introspection and much repetition of my reminiscences, which has the effect of reinforcing my memories. These reminiscences aren’t deliberate or planned for, they just happen, usually because some new experience or information has triggered a cascade of old memories and then any new information becomes an addition to what I have already known. Such is the schematic nature of human memory. Each new experience becomes integrated into the web of memories built up in one’s mind over the course of a lifetime.

The vast majority of people, however, seem to be rather lazy minded and, as a consequence, they don’t or won’t spend very much of their time thinking about things in any depth, or reminiscing about those things they have experienced, learned or otherwise been exposed to during their lives. In fact, this is reinforced by an anti-intellectual mindset that has long permeated American culture, in particular. I can recall encountering this throughout my life, especially when I was in school. Those students who spent more time on their studies were not regarded as the “cool” kids in class, but as “nerds,” instead. This attitude has its counterpart in the attitude criminals have toward law-abiding “working stiffs” who are regarded by “career criminals” as “suckers” for living by society’s rules. Its little wonder, then, that some of the “cool” kids went on to become dropouts and criminals. As a further consequence, then, they have easily forgotten much of what they have heard, seen, learned or thought about, all to their own detriment, as well as the detriment of society, in general.

Memory, being the key to learning, is perhaps the most important thing we will ever possess.

Without it, we cannot learn at all, for true learning involves the permanent retaining of what we have learned. How can one be said to know what they can’t even remember any longer? Simply put, they can’t. Without memory, there can be no real knowledge. Having been exposed to information at one or more times during one’s life is absolutely useless and meaningless if we cannot remember what we were once exposed to.

Because memorization is so utterly dependent upon repetition and rehearsal, it is vital that we spend a lot of our time revisiting information that we have accumulated over time. Many types of information will easily slip away from us and become lost forever if we don’t exercise our mind by rehearsing what we have learned. In other words, we must use it or lose it. For example, take

my knowledge of the Spanish language. As a child and adolescent, I went through six years of studying Espanol, from the third grade to the ninth grade, skipping a year in the eighth grade. All of that study, save for the last year of it, consisted of learning words and phrases, their meanings, pronunciation and how to converse and write in the language. But, it wasn’t until the ninth grade that I was finally exposed to Spanish grammar and, having skipped a year, plus winding up with a ninth grade Spanish teacher who was distracted and not very effective had the effect of undermining my interest in Spanish. As a consequence, I didn’t learn very much about the grammatical structure of the language.

But, the main thing that affected my knowledge of Spanish was not having much use for it outside the classroom. Growing up in Oklahoma City, geographically situated nearer to Mexico than to Canada, I had thought, when I was a third grader and was offered my choice of either French or Spanish as a foreign language to study (that being the first time such studies had become required in the Oklahoma Public School curriculum), that I would probably find Spanish more useful, given my proximity to Mexico. This was long before there was any sizable Hispanic population in Oklahoma City.

Over the fifty-two years since I was in the ninth grade (at this writing in 2019), I have had very little need for any foreign languages, including Spanish, despite a couple of years in the late 1990s during which I worked with many Spanish speaking people in a manufacturing plant in which I was a draftsman. While I did make efforts to brush up on my Spanish, mostly by talking to a pretty young lady from Columbia during our daily lunch breaks, after I left that situation and went to work for a different employer, I no longer had that refreshment of my memory of Spanish. Hence, now, at nearly sixty-seven (next month, as I write this), I am left with very little knowledge of Spanish any longer. Living in Seattle, as I have for the last ten years, I am daily exposed to Spanish speakers on the street, but their speech seems more foreign to my ear than at any time since prior to beginning my Spanish studies in the third grade. I was once able to follow Spanish language news broadcasts on the shortwave radio my father gave me when I was a teenager, while I was still studying the language. I was adept enough at it that, when my father asked me what was being said, I could give him a rough synopsis of what I was listening to and he said, “Really?!” Today, when I’m around people talking to each other in Spanish, I can barely recognize more than a few scattered words and perhaps a sentence, now and then, but I can’t recall what they mean anymore.

Because of, not only the failure of most people to commit any time to rehearsal of their memories, but also the “dumbing down” of the school system over a period of some four or five decades, I am continually amazed at how little most adults these days seem to know of things that I have known since my childhood. For me, the age of ten (1962, for me) was a pivotal year in my intellectual development. I had changed neighborhoods and, thus, schools, and I was also enrolled in a class that consisted of both fourth and fifth graders (myself being in the fourth grade, at the time). This combined fourth and fifth grade class was due to the size of my generation, the post-WWII “Baby Boomers,” who had not been anticipated, much less planned for, thus school overcrowding had become a serious problem and, thus, the need to combine two grade levels of students in the same space. Although we fourth graders were told, the first

day of class, about this arrangement and were advised to disregard most of what was going on between the teacher and her fifth graders, it was impossible to avoid some cross-pollenation of sorts between us.

Since the age of seven, I had developed a keen interest in the Paleolithic Era, having been exposed to my father’s (a civil engineer by profession) books on prehistory and archaeology, as well as my conversations with him about these topics. As a result, I have followed the subject throughout my life to the present and my present interest keeps me reading and learning about the latest developments in genetic anthropology and the use of DNA in tracking ancient migrations. Today, when I encounter people, many of them around my age, who don’t even know the meaning of the word “paleolithic,” I find it quite astounding. This often leaves me wondering how it is that people who went through the same public school system I did (more or less, owing to its being federally controlled), at approximately the same time, are not at all aware of such things. Part of the reason for this may be due to religious differences (many people who were brought up in very religious households were exposed to “Creationism” during the seventies and eighties, when the public schools were being sued to force the inclusion of “Creationism” in science classrooms), but I suspect the aforementioned lack of rehearsal of people’s memories is the chief culprit. Still, it is almost incomprehensible, to me, how anyone in the generation who was so familiar with the latest studies of the stone age, which were in the news and spawned the animated TV series, “The Flintstones,” could possibly have avoided learning what “paleolithic” means and then retain that knowledge into adulthood. After all, I had certainly learned the term, myself, and like most of what I have learned over the course of my life, I still retain it, along with my memory of where and when I learned it and even the names and faces of the teachers who taught it to me, as well as those of my classmates. I can even recall what the classrooms looked like.

For many subjects I have been familiar with since my childhood, this disparity between myself and my peers, and especially between myself and the two generations of adults who have followed the “Boomers,” has been a constant source of amazement and amusement for me.

Many things I knew by the age of ten, and certainly by the time I graduated from high school, seem to have escaped most people today. I do, however, from time to time, encounter people who seem to have retained what they learned all those years ago, and no doubt these are people who share my propensity to reflect upon a wide range of subjects as a constant daily habit, even if not a deliberate one. But, I’m afraid that, for the vast majority of people, this seems to be a rarity.

Entire subjects that I vividly recall being taught in school well over fifty years ago are still with me, as well as my memories of being in the classroom learning them. There are many subjects I was taught in school that I have since further reinforced by continuing education, both formal and informal. Yet, for many people, their experience of their education seems to have come to a standstill at some point, much as my education in Spanish did. Beyond the ninth grade, I never again studied Spanish, having never really found a use for it, and thus, I have paid the price of losing all that I had once known about it.

Yet another example of the importance of continual rehearsal in retaining of knowledge is my experience with the guitar. At thirteen, I was given my first guitar as a Christmas present, but I didn’t begin to really learn the instrument until I was nineteen and in the Air Force, where I was working with five coworkers who also played the instrument. After playing for about ten years or more, I gradually began to spend less time at it, owing to a growing disinterest in playing rock, folk and blues (precipitated by completely losing any interest in top 40 radio, a attitudinal change brought about by the sudden popularity of disco. When Stephen Stills attempted a stab at disco on his solo album, “Thoroughfare Gap,” I decided that was the end of rock music) and I had begun playing alto saxophone. Since I had never learned jazz guitar, I felt no real interest in the instrument anymore, as I was more interested in playing jazz, and especially playing horns. In fact, some six years later, still, I acquired a trumpet and began playing it in addition to the saxophone. I should note that, during the seventies, while in my early twenties, I spent a lot of time and energy picking up and learning various instruments any way I could get my hands on them. I played them all by ear, and I seemed to have quite a facility for being able do so without ever having played them before. Of course, my informal experiences with each tended to result in widely varying levels of proficiency, if I can call it that, but during a span of only a few years, I managed to dabble at, not only guitar, but piano, drums and percussion, banjo, violin, mandolin, cello, electric bass, harmonica and an assortment of end-blown wooden flutes I’d picked up here and there. I would spend hours each week invading a popular music store in a shopping mall I hung out at, trying my hand at various instruments, until finally being told to leave.

By the end of the eighties, I was not only not playing guitar anymore, but I had sold the last of my three guitars. In the years since the early nineties, I didn’t play guitar at all, until about 2004, when I decided to pick up the instrument again. So, after investing in an acoustic and an electric guitar again, I thought I’d simply pick up where I had left off. Imagine my shock in finding that I had not only forgotten much of what I once knew, but I couldn’t even recall the chords to my own songs! I was so discouraged by this that I sold the two guitars and gave up on the idea of returning to playing guitar. Then, one day in 2017, thirteen years later, I decided that I was going to relearn the instrument. Since then, I have very slowly and gradually begun to get back some of what I had once known, but I am nowhere near being able to play as well as I once did.

Getting back to the original premise of knowledge being memory-dependent, this is illustrated by the fact that we have long had the practice of studying for an exam by attempting to memorize the material the exam will cover. Where this technique of study, sometimes called “cramming,” is flawed is in its temporary effect. It is one of the chief reasons that students don’t really learn much of anything. In order for any real learning to occur, the memorization must become long-term, and the only way this happens is via repeated rehearsal over a longer period of time, in some cases, for one’s lifetime. If the rehearsal is short-term, sporadic or discontinued at some point, the effects of it will fade over time. This is why I forgot Spanish, as well as how to play the guitar. If I don’t return to playing the saxophone and trumpet soon, I may wind up experiencing the same memory loss for those instruments that affected my guitar playing. In fact, at this point, it has already been well over twenty years since I last played either the saxophone or the trumpet and the only way I could know the effects of this would be to attempt playing them again in the present.

I can’t cover this subject with any semblance of completeness without including the effects of learning disabilities, as well. When I was growing up, the very term, let alone the concept of “learning disabilities,” not to mention their causes, consequences and proposed remedies, were unheard of. Thus, I was completely unaware that my dyscalculia, which I’ve lived with all my life, even had a name until I was forty-three years old and encountered it listed in the DSM-IV quite accidentally while working on a teaching certificate in the mid-1990s so that I could make use of my bachelor’s degree in graphic design by teaching art at the high school level (which never happened, after I found out that art programs and art teachers were being terminated across the nation, due to budget cuts). I was required to have a course in “Special Education for Teachers” and one day in class, we were exposed to the DSM-IV, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, used in the psychiatric profession as a reference for various mental disorders and conditions, as well as learning disabilities. Thumbing through it at random, I encountered a listing of the symptoms for “Math Disorder,” as it was called in America (in the UK, it is known as “dyscalculia,” which has become the preferred term). As I read this, I instantly recognized what I’d dealt with since I was a little boy and blurted out, “This is me!”

Certainly, if there is anything that can stymie one’s childhood development, it is a learning disability and, fortunately, this was the only one I ever had, but that was quite enough to keep me from ever following in my father’s footsteps and becoming an engineer, or an architect, which would have been my preference. With a learning disability to deal with, one’s prospects for retaining any memory of certain subjects (in my case, mathematics) very likely will become impossible, as you can’t retain the memory of what you can’t learn, in the first place. In my case, I am a “high-functioning” dyscalculic, able to mentally manipulate numbers to a very limited extent, not much more than simple first grade arithmetic, but with great difficulty and at a very slow pace, well behind first grade level. It has since been determined (in 2008) that the cause of dyscalculia is a congenital defect in the development of the left parietal lobe of the brain inutero.

Nevertheless, thanks to later aids, such as calculators, architect’s and engineer’s scales, and the measurement tools within Visionael and Autocad (the CAD software I used from 1992 to the end of my drafting career in 2008), I was able to do my work as an architectural and engineering draftsman and later on (1989-2008), a CAD technician, after having done manual drafting for the first eleven years. It was my father, the engineer, who had, in 1976, suggested that I become a draftsman, based upon my facility for drawing. He kindly assuaged my apprehensions about working with math, which was quite contrary to his treatment of me during my childhood, when he used to beat me for getting the wrong answer while he drilled me with flash cards for learning my multiplication tables in the fourth grade.

At that time, in the mid-seventies, hand-held calculators had become a cheap reality and I already had one, which my father reminded me of. As for using an architect’s or engineer’s scale, anyone who can use a simple ruler can easily learn how to measure with one. Having no knowledge at all of computers (I remember my embarrassment at work, one day, after I’d become a draftsman, when one of my co-workers started a conversation with me about the

computer he was building and I had to ask what the term “software” meant), in 1983, I enrolled in a CAD course at Oklahoma State University’s Oklahoma City campus and while there, I chanced to thumb through my old copy of “The Last Whole Earth Catalog” and found an old article from the early seventies by Stewart Brand, titled something like, “Computers, or Life With Dumbfuck Machines,” which completely removed any remaining apprehensions I’d had about learning CAD. Ultimately, we are utterly dependent upon our memory in order for our lives to have any meaning at all. Without memory, we can’t even function in the world and thus the tragedy of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Even without Alzheimer’s, eventually we all die, regardless of the cause, and it is then that we ultimately lose everything we have spent our lives learning.

This raises the question as to why we even bother if we are ultimately doomed to lose everything we’ve worked so hard for. I suppose the answer to that question is that our memories are for helping us to live our lives, just as it is thought that the function of our dreams is to aid our memory by integrating our daily experiences with all that we have become over time.