Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong
This seems to be about memorization as opposed to understanding (or skills).<p>I've always seen myself as having a poor memory, but found that if I focused on understanding, I could remember easily. I thought this was because understanding itself is simpler (so there's less to remember), and one can reconstruct the facts from this understanding (also, verify them).<p>This is treating understanding as a theory, in terms of which the facts can be stated more briefly than without.  An abstraction, if you like, that factors out commonalities/redundancies. If A always implies B, then you can just need to rememeber "A".<p>But later, I've realized that in fact, I do remember a great deal of detail that isn't derived from understanding. Perhaps understanding actually requires a lot of domain knowledge - facts - that the understanding is about. You can't "understand" in a vacuum. So, now I think that's it's just that somehow, causal connections and explanatory relationships stick in my memory more easily - they are certainly more <i>interesting</i> to me (because meaningful), so that helps with concentration and therefore memory.<p>I actually once tested my opinion that I couldn't memorize, for a university exam, and found - to my amazement - that I could.  It really was surprising.  But I didn't score nearly as well as I usually did, since I wasn't focused on understanding - which is what it is all about, IMHO.