2023-04-11_How_to_Invest_in_Your_Children_at_a_Very_Young_Age_Part_12-Require_Your_Children_to_Memorize_and_Teach_Them_How
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00:01:00.180 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance,
00:01:01.680 | a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:01:03.180 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need
00:01:04.980 | to live a rich and meaningful life now
00:01:06.980 | while building a plan for financial freedom
00:01:08.480 | in 10 years or less.
00:01:09.680 | My name is Josh Ruchite. I'm your host.
00:01:11.180 | Today, we continue our series on
00:01:12.980 | how to invest in your children's minds.
00:01:16.180 | And I did not intend this series to be as long as it is,
00:01:19.460 | but we're in the thick of it,
00:01:20.660 | and I know I've got great feedback
00:01:22.160 | from many of you that has been very useful.
00:01:24.160 | I think that's very practical,
00:01:25.660 | and I'm going to continue and see this through.
00:01:29.160 | In short, today, I want to share with you
00:01:31.360 | why I believe that it's important
00:01:33.460 | that you encourage and require your children
00:01:37.060 | to memorize as a way of strengthening their minds.
00:01:41.860 | And there are two components to this episode.
00:01:43.660 | First, I want to make a short apologetic
00:01:46.860 | for why it's important that your children memorize things,
00:01:51.560 | even in a day of omnipresent access to information
00:01:57.860 | through digitally and Internet-connected devices.
00:02:00.960 | And then part two is I want to share with you
00:02:04.560 | why I think it's important that your children take training
00:02:08.060 | in how to actually memorize things more effectively.
00:02:12.160 | Why memorize? That's the first question.
00:02:15.460 | I think all of us are aware of the fact
00:02:17.060 | that it's easier and easier for us
00:02:21.560 | to externalize our brain and to have access to information.
00:02:26.860 | In a world in which we can ask Google or Siri
00:02:29.760 | or whoever the next iteration of an electronic voice is
00:02:34.760 | for any specific fact or piece of information
00:02:38.260 | that we need to know,
00:02:39.460 | it seems less and less relevant and important
00:02:41.860 | for us to drill meaningless lists of facts into our heads.
00:02:46.760 | We are all connected to devices that can help us
00:02:50.260 | to recall any piece of information we want to recall.
00:02:53.960 | And I think it's important to use those systems.
00:02:57.960 | I think if you could go back a couple hundred years
00:03:00.060 | and introduce something like Evernote to an author,
00:03:03.860 | he would have immediately seen the potential
00:03:06.660 | of the ability to build a second brain,
00:03:08.960 | to build an external repository of notes
00:03:11.760 | and thoughts and comments, et cetera.
00:03:13.860 | So I'm not here arguing against using the tools of the day.
00:03:18.260 | I'm as grateful as you are
00:03:19.660 | for the ever-present access to a search engine,
00:03:23.760 | the information of the web, et cetera.
00:03:25.760 | We're living in an incredible age.
00:03:27.760 | But with every benefit,
00:03:29.060 | there's often a counteracting drawback.
00:03:32.760 | And one of the drawbacks of our using these tools
00:03:35.960 | more and more is quite simply
00:03:38.360 | that we are exercising our brains a little bit less.
00:03:42.660 | I am personally persuaded, though I cannot prove it,
00:03:46.260 | this is my opinion, and I'm not a neuroscientist,
00:03:49.060 | but I am convinced that the brain is best viewed
00:03:51.360 | as a muscle, and with more use,
00:03:55.260 | the brain becomes stronger.
00:03:57.460 | With less use, the brain becomes weaker.
00:04:00.960 | And so we should be seeking to exercise
00:04:03.360 | the muscle of our brain as much as we can,
00:04:06.860 | as much as we are capable of.
00:04:08.860 | And in fact, if you think about many of the shows
00:04:10.860 | that I have done in this series,
00:04:12.060 | talking about how to help our children to be smarter,
00:04:15.760 | a lot of it simply involves exercising the brain
00:04:18.360 | in different ways.
00:04:19.760 | I first became aware of this a number of years ago
00:04:22.660 | when I was interacting with a neighbor of ours.
00:04:27.160 | And this neighbor was an elderly man.
00:04:29.360 | He had been very kind to me when I was young.
00:04:31.160 | I'd hung out with him a lot when I was a young boy.
00:04:33.760 | And he was getting older,
00:04:35.060 | and he was starting to show signs of dementia.
00:04:37.260 | But he would come down to our house,
00:04:39.360 | come down the road to our house, stay at my house
00:04:41.560 | where my grandparents were, be a friend,
00:04:43.260 | and just basically be a companion.
00:04:44.760 | He was always in, he was there every day.
00:04:46.060 | He was the guy who was checking up on the neighborhood.
00:04:48.360 | As he got older, he started to experience
00:04:50.960 | certain signs of dementia.
00:04:53.160 | And along the way, one of the things
00:04:55.960 | that he got interested in was doing jigsaw puzzles
00:04:59.660 | as well as doing crossword puzzles.
00:05:03.660 | And one of the things that his wife,
00:05:05.360 | who was a lot younger than he was, noticed
00:05:08.160 | was that as soon as he started engaging
00:05:10.460 | in that mental effort of doing crossword puzzles
00:05:13.960 | and jigsaw puzzles, his dementia symptoms subsided
00:05:19.260 | and stabilized a good bit.
00:05:21.160 | He had several more years of a properly functioning brain
00:05:24.660 | than he otherwise would have had
00:05:26.860 | because he was exercising his brain.
00:05:29.660 | And it really stuck with me as a young boy.
00:05:31.860 | There was no study on this.
00:05:33.260 | There was no evidence.
00:05:34.660 | There was no good academic research.
00:05:37.260 | This was just an anecdote from a neighbor.
00:05:38.960 | But it seemed obvious to me that this is probably true.
00:05:42.060 | And while I haven't always done what I aspired to
00:05:44.860 | of strengthening my own brain, I've noticed
00:05:47.360 | that if we want our brains to work well,
00:05:49.460 | they need to be exercised.
00:05:51.160 | And that exercise comes in different ways.
00:05:53.660 | At its core, one of the fundamental forms
00:05:55.660 | of exercise is simply memory.
00:05:58.060 | Now, I've dabbled around here and there
00:05:59.860 | with some of the commentary
00:06:01.160 | that various neuroscientists talk
00:06:03.360 | about how memories are stored,
00:06:04.860 | how they're lodged in the brain, et cetera.
00:06:07.160 | I couldn't present an effective teaching
00:06:10.160 | on that at the moment.
00:06:11.960 | But I am convinced that the more we exercise our memory,
00:06:16.460 | the more effective our memory becomes.
00:06:19.860 | And at its core, this is the fundamental reason
00:06:22.460 | why we should not neglect memorization
00:06:26.160 | in the training of our children.
00:06:28.360 | Rather, we should emphasize
00:06:30.460 | that they have some ongoing,
00:06:32.360 | consistent requirement to memorize.
00:06:36.660 | Let me read a few from a few articles.
00:06:39.760 | Let me begin with a New Yorker article
00:06:41.060 | published almost a decade ago
00:06:42.360 | called "Why We Should Memorize" by Brad Lighthouser.
00:06:46.360 | "Much of our daily lives would be dizzyingly unrecognizable
00:06:49.760 | to people living a hundred years ago.
00:06:51.760 | What we wear and what we eat,
00:06:53.260 | how we travel, how we communicate,
00:06:54.960 | how we while away our leisure time.
00:06:57.260 | But surely, our occasional attempts
00:06:59.360 | to memorize a poem would feel familiar to them,
00:07:02.160 | those inhabitants of a heyday of verse memorization.
00:07:06.460 | Little has changed.
00:07:07.960 | They too, in committing a poem to memory,
00:07:10.060 | underwent a predictable gamut of frustrations.
00:07:13.360 | The pursuit of stubbornly elusive phrases,
00:07:15.860 | the inner hammering of rote repetition,
00:07:18.360 | tantalizing tip of the tongue stammerings,
00:07:20.960 | confident forward marches
00:07:22.460 | that finish in an abrupt amnesiac's cul-de-sac.
00:07:26.860 | Actually, if the process has altered over the years,
00:07:29.860 | perhaps we feel the difficulties of the task
00:07:32.560 | more acutely than our ancestors did.
00:07:34.960 | As a college professor of writing and literature,
00:07:37.160 | I regularly impose memorization assignments,
00:07:39.760 | and I'm struck by how burdensome
00:07:41.660 | my students typically find them.
00:07:43.660 | Give them a full week to memorize any Shakespeare sonnet,
00:07:46.960 | "Hey," I tell them, "pick a really famous one.
00:07:49.460 | "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
00:07:51.760 | And you've already got the first line down,
00:07:53.760 | and a number of them will painfully falter.
00:07:56.160 | They're not used to memorizing much of anything.
00:07:59.560 | In what would have been my prime recitation years,
00:08:01.960 | had I been born in an earlier era,
00:08:04.060 | junior high and high school,
00:08:05.560 | little memorization was required of me.
00:08:07.860 | But in early boyhood, I did a fair amount of it.
00:08:10.460 | My mother, who had literary ambitions,
00:08:12.460 | paid me a penny a line to memorize poems.
00:08:15.260 | The first one I mastered was Tennyson's "The Eagle."
00:08:18.760 | He clasps the crag with crooked hands,
00:08:21.860 | which brought in a haul of six cents.
00:08:23.960 | Opportunistically, I moved on to the longer "Casey at the Bat."
00:08:27.560 | It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville Nine that day.
00:08:30.560 | And Byron's "The Destruction of the Sennacherib,"
00:08:33.260 | whose title I mispronounced for decades,
00:08:35.260 | which netted me 52 cents and 24 cents, respectively.
00:08:39.060 | Some Longfellow, some Frost.
00:08:41.060 | I straggled through Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"
00:08:43.460 | and enough of his "The Ancient Mariner"
00:08:45.060 | to purchase a couple of candy bars.
00:08:46.960 | It sounds whimsical and entertaining now,
00:08:50.160 | but I suspect some dead serious counsel
00:08:52.260 | lay behind my mother's beaming encouragement.
00:08:54.960 | I think she was tacitly saying,
00:08:56.960 | "Stick with poetry. That's where the money is."
00:08:59.960 | It turned out to be level-headed advice.
00:09:02.460 | Today, I pay my bills by talking to my students about poetry
00:09:05.760 | and about stories and novels and essays,
00:09:08.260 | ultimately about memorable cadences,
00:09:10.460 | about the music that occasionally lifts off of words
00:09:13.160 | carefully deployed on a page.
00:09:16.760 | The piece goes on by the author wherein he talks about why
00:09:20.160 | and the value of memorizing, especially poetry.
00:09:23.260 | And his basic argument is simply two points,
00:09:26.960 | that poems that you have memorized
00:09:30.660 | are a form of larder or pantry,
00:09:34.560 | something that's laid up against the hungers
00:09:36.660 | of an extended period of solitude.
00:09:38.760 | You have access to these words.
00:09:41.060 | And that when you really want to have access to something
00:09:45.260 | at any moment, it needs to be in your memory.
00:09:49.360 | In addition, he emphasizes that
00:09:53.560 | when you know something by memory,
00:09:56.960 | by rote knowledge,
00:09:59.160 | you have the chance to know it on a very different level
00:10:03.360 | than if you don't know it by rote knowledge.
00:10:07.160 | It's a much deeper form of knowledge.
00:10:10.360 | Let me go now to an essay from the website Psychology Today
00:10:13.860 | called "Memorization is Not a Dirty Word" by William R. Clem.
00:10:17.860 | And in this essay, he talks about
00:10:22.160 | the value of memorization.
00:10:23.360 | I'm going to pick it up a few paragraphs in.
00:10:26.360 | In my experience with students,
00:10:27.960 | both the college students I teach
00:10:29.360 | and the secondary students that teachers tell me about,
00:10:31.860 | the biggest weakness students have
00:10:34.360 | is that they either try to remember school material
00:10:37.160 | by rote memorization,
00:10:38.960 | or have no strategy at all,
00:10:40.660 | relying on some kind of magical mental osmosis.
00:10:44.760 | Even among students who rely on rote memory,
00:10:47.460 | they generally lack much of a strategy for memorizing,
00:10:50.360 | relying on various degrees of casual
00:10:52.760 | looking over the instructional material
00:10:55.060 | until they think they can remember it.
00:10:57.260 | Experiments show that students routinely overestimate
00:11:00.260 | how much they remember
00:11:01.660 | and underestimate the value of further study.
00:11:04.460 | Moreover, many educators at all levels
00:11:06.560 | have disdain for memorization,
00:11:08.160 | stating that we should focus education
00:11:09.760 | on teaching students to think and solve problems,
00:11:13.060 | as if you can think and solve problems
00:11:15.060 | without knowing anything.
00:11:16.760 | Too many teachers regard memorizing as old-fashioned
00:11:19.660 | and even destructive of enlightenment.
00:11:22.860 | Disdain for memorization
00:11:24.160 | is a relatively new phenomenon in education.
00:11:26.960 | In ancient times, people took great pains and pride
00:11:30.160 | in memorizing huge quantities of information.
00:11:33.260 | The advent of printing greatly reduced the need
00:11:35.560 | to memorize history and cultural mores.
00:11:38.960 | In modern times, we have the internet,
00:11:41.260 | where you can just Google what you need to know.
00:11:43.460 | So who needs to get brain strain trying to remember things?
00:11:47.060 | Now we have a book by Samuel Arbusman,
00:11:49.860 | "The Half-Life of Facts,
00:11:51.360 | Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date",
00:11:53.860 | where he argues that there are no lasting facts.
00:11:57.160 | They all have a half-life,
00:11:58.760 | that is, the number of years it takes
00:12:00.460 | to falsify half of what you think are facts.
00:12:03.260 | He argues that new "facts" are made all the time,
00:12:07.860 | often replacing what we had previously thought were facts.
00:12:11.160 | He argues we should just stop memorizing
00:12:13.360 | and look up whatever current facts we need on the internet.
00:12:16.260 | But if there are no lasting facts,
00:12:18.260 | how are those you find on Google any more valid
00:12:20.760 | than those you memorize and can deploy in real time?
00:12:24.360 | There are some serious errors in Arbusman's position.
00:12:27.760 | One, many facts are immutable.
00:12:30.960 | They don't have a half-life.
00:12:32.960 | Events in history did actually occur.
00:12:35.760 | And while revisionist writers of school history textbooks
00:12:38.360 | may change the reporting of those events,
00:12:40.660 | the facts remain true.
00:12:42.760 | Nixon covered up Watergate.
00:12:44.560 | Obama obfuscated Benghazi.
00:12:46.860 | The fact of DNA as a basis for heredity is not likely to change.
00:12:51.260 | Two, many facts that do change
00:12:53.660 | will not change in a given person's lifetime
00:12:55.860 | and thus will be useful in daily living.
00:12:58.660 | Three, the internet is flooded with error,
00:13:00.660 | propaganda, and unvetted assertions.
00:13:03.260 | Four, you don't always have internet access.
00:13:05.960 | Five, in many situations it is not practical
00:13:08.260 | to look up what you need.
00:13:09.760 | Ever try to read or speak a foreign language
00:13:11.760 | where you have to look up most of the words?
00:13:13.760 | Ever try to use computer software
00:13:15.460 | where you have to repeatedly refer to the instruction manual?
00:13:18.660 | Six, expertise in any field of endeavor
00:13:21.160 | requires a great deal of memorized facts.
00:13:23.960 | And if you want to succeed in life,
00:13:25.560 | it pays to be an expert.
00:13:27.460 | I can easily make a strong case for memorization,
00:13:29.960 | especially for schools.
00:13:31.660 | Here is a list supporting the importance of memorizing.
00:13:34.960 | One, memorized information is always with you,
00:13:38.060 | even when you lack the time or access to sources
00:13:40.460 | where you could look it up.
00:13:41.960 | Two, we think and solve problems
00:13:44.460 | with what is in working memory,
00:13:46.260 | which in turn is memory of currently available information
00:13:49.860 | or recall of previously memorized information.
00:13:53.160 | The process of thinking is like streaming video on the internet.
00:13:57.360 | Information flows in as short frames
00:13:59.660 | onto the virtual scratch pad of working memory,
00:14:02.460 | successively replaced by new chunks of information
00:14:05.260 | from real time or recalled memory.
00:14:08.260 | Numerous studies show that the amount of information
00:14:11.460 | you can hold in working memory
00:14:13.560 | is tightly correlated with IQ and problem solving ability.
00:14:18.660 | Three, memorization provides exercise for the mind.
00:14:21.960 | This is the reason schools used to require students
00:14:24.260 | to memorize poems, Bible verses, famous speeches, etc.
00:14:28.560 | The true advantage of such exercise
00:14:30.560 | is that it generates mental industriousness.
00:14:33.960 | Any teacher will tell you
00:14:35.160 | that many students today are mentally lazy.
00:14:38.860 | Memorization also trains the mind to pay attention
00:14:41.860 | and focus intensely.
00:14:43.860 | Such skills seems to be lacking in many youngsters,
00:14:46.260 | which is most obvious in the growing number
00:14:48.060 | of kids diagnosed with ADHD.
00:14:50.760 | Next, memorization trains the brain to develop learning
00:14:53.860 | and memory schemas that facilitate future learning.
00:14:57.060 | Learning schemas develop as you acquire competence in an area.
00:15:00.560 | Call it skill A.
00:15:02.460 | Now when you need to learn a new and related skill B,
00:15:05.160 | your mind says to itself,
00:15:06.660 | "I don't know how to do B, but I do know how to do A."
00:15:09.060 | And some of that can be applied to learning B.
00:15:11.560 | Memory schemas are memorized frames of reference
00:15:14.860 | and association, where having memorized fact A,
00:15:17.760 | you have an association handle for memorizing fact B.
00:15:21.660 | Next, if you learn strategies for memorization,
00:15:23.960 | as opposed to the rote memory approach
00:15:25.660 | of looking information over repeatedly,
00:15:27.760 | you accelerate the ease, speed,
00:15:29.560 | and reliability of learning new things.
00:15:32.560 | The bottom line is the more you know,
00:15:35.060 | the more you can know.
00:15:37.360 | Regardless of where you stand on the importance of memory,
00:15:39.560 | most people believe that learning is a good thing.
00:15:42.460 | But what good is learning if you don't remember it?
00:15:46.760 | So there's a couple of overviews from articles
00:15:49.860 | talking about the importance of memory.
00:15:51.960 | I would simply point out that memory
00:15:54.560 | is a form of brain training.
00:15:57.560 | Thus, it is useful in and of itself.
00:16:02.460 | It's not that it's necessary for things.
00:16:05.560 | It is useful as an exercise.
00:16:07.560 | This is the same thing I tell my children about math.
00:16:09.960 | I think math teachers often commit a great error
00:16:13.160 | in trying to talk to people about the usefulness of math.
00:16:16.460 | Clearly, math is useful.
00:16:18.160 | But the fundamental reason we learn math
00:16:20.960 | is to make us smarter, to build our brains.
00:16:25.360 | It's not because we're going to necessarily be using
00:16:28.060 | our algebraic equations the rest of our life.
00:16:30.960 | It's to make us smarter and to train our brains.
00:16:33.760 | And when we help students and children to memorize things,
00:16:39.360 | their ability to memorize things grows.
00:16:43.560 | I have an interest in great feats of memory.
00:16:46.560 | I've listened to talks by people who have memorized
00:16:50.160 | the New Testament or who've memorized the Koran
00:16:53.360 | or other long works.
00:16:55.760 | And one of the things that is very obvious
00:16:57.560 | is quite simply the more somebody memorizes,
00:17:00.460 | the better they become at the skill of memorizing.
00:17:03.760 | That which you practice is a skill that grows.
00:17:06.660 | And so it becomes much easier for them to memorize.
00:17:09.660 | And this is one reason I believe we should train children
00:17:12.860 | to learn to memorize things when they are young.
00:17:15.560 | As they figure out how to memorize things,
00:17:18.160 | they will become more effective at memorizing things.
00:17:21.560 | In a recent episode, not part of this series,
00:17:24.860 | I talked about how to go to college fast and cheap.
00:17:27.760 | And one of the things I pointed out is that
00:17:29.360 | for people who are academically skilled,
00:17:31.760 | you can go to college and you get a degree
00:17:33.660 | really quickly and really easily.
00:17:35.660 | But where does academic skill come from?
00:17:38.960 | I don't think it's something that you're born with
00:17:41.460 | or not born with.
00:17:42.860 | I think there's clearly a component where we all begin
00:17:47.760 | with a baseline ability, just like we all began
00:17:51.060 | with a certain built-in athletic ability,
00:17:54.060 | a certain built-in genetic size potential.
00:17:56.860 | But I'm convinced we can maximize that ability
00:18:00.760 | to the highest degree possible.
00:18:03.560 | And if you give me somebody who is born
00:18:05.860 | with a lower IQ than another person,
00:18:08.460 | but yet that person has years of training
00:18:11.060 | and simply practice in developing his skill set,
00:18:14.760 | he has hundreds of poems committed to memory,
00:18:18.560 | he has hundreds of Bible verses committed to memory,
00:18:22.060 | he has dozens of historical speeches committed to memory,
00:18:26.560 | he's going to have a much greater capacity
00:18:29.460 | for memorizing things.
00:18:31.160 | So then when we come to academic subjects
00:18:33.060 | where memorization is necessary as a basic skill set
00:18:37.960 | of passing an exam, he's going to be able to do it
00:18:40.860 | much more easily than the guy who's never had
00:18:43.660 | any practice memorizing things.
00:18:46.760 | That leads me then to point number two.
00:18:50.460 | It is important for us to teach children
00:18:53.960 | how to memorize things more effectively.
00:18:57.460 | I was in high school when I stumbled across a copy
00:19:01.460 | of Harry Lorraine's book called "The Memory Book,"
00:19:04.660 | the classic guide to improving your memory
00:19:06.260 | at work, at school, and at play.
00:19:08.160 | And Harry Lorraine was one of these incredible performers
00:19:12.260 | showing off his amazing feats of memory.
00:19:15.660 | And he was really good, and I picked the book up,
00:19:17.760 | and I was amazed at what it contained
00:19:20.860 | in terms of one man's potential,
00:19:22.660 | his ability to show off his memory ability.
00:19:27.160 | And I was also amazed at how useful
00:19:29.760 | some of his techniques were.
00:19:31.360 | And so I went through his memory book,
00:19:32.760 | and while I'm no memory expert,
00:19:34.360 | I haven't practiced all the techniques enough
00:19:37.160 | to be good with them, I am able to use
00:19:40.460 | the memory techniques that are necessary
00:19:44.560 | in order to commit information to mind when necessary.
00:19:48.160 | Probably the best popular access to this would be,
00:19:52.360 | if you remember in the Sherlock Holmes series
00:19:54.660 | with the British guy Cumberbatch,
00:19:56.360 | there was a whole episode devoted to the memory palace
00:20:01.260 | and the idea of having a memory palace,
00:20:02.960 | a place to which you put things, and that's one technique.
00:20:06.460 | And there are a number of other techniques that can be used.
00:20:08.860 | Basically, you can create the ability to memorize
00:20:12.860 | any bit of information that you want to memorize.
00:20:16.960 | And another place that this stood out to me,
00:20:19.560 | in my ninth grade geography class,
00:20:21.760 | we had a teacher who taught us mnemonics
00:20:24.160 | for memorizing the capitals
00:20:27.960 | of various countries around the world.
00:20:30.260 | And while I have forgotten many of the mnemonic devices
00:20:32.660 | through lack of constant use,
00:20:34.960 | what I learned from that, which was most important,
00:20:37.260 | was how to create my own mnemonic devices.
00:20:39.860 | And that simple skill set is something
00:20:42.660 | that can be incredibly valuable to a student
00:20:45.060 | who is seeking to put information away.
00:20:48.460 | And so back to the theme of this podcast series,
00:20:51.560 | I want you to invest in your children when they are young
00:20:54.960 | so that they will be able to go farther
00:20:59.060 | than just waiting around to pay money for college tuition.
00:21:02.160 | And I'm convinced that having your children
00:21:04.760 | memorize things consistently
00:21:06.960 | is something that will enhance their capabilities
00:21:11.760 | to memorize information,
00:21:13.660 | which is something that will be fundamentally useful to them
00:21:16.960 | in passing various academic subjects
00:21:19.960 | and doing well on quizzes, exams, tests, et cetera,
00:21:23.360 | to get great grades.
00:21:24.860 | And if they get great grades,
00:21:26.360 | then they can get paid to go to school,
00:21:28.260 | get paid to go to college,
00:21:29.260 | get paid to go to master's, to get a master's degree,
00:21:31.860 | get paid to get a PhD,
00:21:33.060 | get paid to have a fellowship somewhere
00:21:36.160 | because of their skill of memorizing information.
00:21:39.260 | And so it sounds deceptively simple.
00:21:42.060 | Require your children to memorize things.
00:21:44.360 | And yet it is a fundamentally valuable skill
00:21:49.060 | with a massive payoff
00:21:50.060 | because as you require your young children
00:21:52.260 | to memorize things,
00:21:53.960 | then you enhance their ability
00:21:56.060 | to memorize things in the long run.
00:21:58.260 | And that enhanced ability then gets translated
00:22:00.960 | into higher levels of academic ability.
00:22:03.560 | It doesn't cost you any money
00:22:05.160 | to require your children to memorize things.
00:22:07.660 | It simply costs you time and attention.
00:22:11.160 | It is something that you can do that is fun.
00:22:13.260 | You can do it together.
00:22:14.560 | And so where I mainly use this
00:22:16.660 | is simply at the breakfast table.
00:22:19.060 | We memorize different things.
00:22:20.460 | We memorize Bible verses.
00:22:21.760 | We memorize poems.
00:22:23.560 | We memorize catechism questions.
00:22:26.960 | And it just becomes something interesting that we do.
00:22:28.960 | And it's something that we all do together.
00:22:31.160 | And I'm not too worried about matching any specific number.
00:22:37.760 | That's not like you have to have a certain number
00:22:39.360 | of lines of poetry memorized.
00:22:40.960 | What matters is that you consistently exercise the skill
00:22:43.860 | from a young age.
00:22:45.260 | And of course there are many other bits of information
00:22:47.460 | that are important to memorize.
00:22:48.960 | It's important to memorize your math facts.
00:22:50.860 | It's important to memorize many of the basic facts
00:22:54.260 | of academic skill.
00:22:55.960 | And this will pay off in spades.
00:22:57.760 | And then when appropriate,
00:22:59.660 | I'm not sure the exact age
00:23:01.060 | at which this transition should happen,
00:23:02.660 | but when appropriate,
00:23:03.960 | you should require your students
00:23:05.260 | to memorize things on their own
00:23:07.060 | and you should teach them the memory techniques
00:23:09.760 | that the memory masters use to memorize information.
00:23:13.260 | These techniques are best viewed as a bridge.
00:23:17.160 | A bridge to help you recall something
00:23:19.660 | a sufficient number of times
00:23:21.160 | until it becomes part of your long-term memory
00:23:23.860 | and the bridge is no longer necessary.
00:23:26.460 | I don't need a mnemonic to know
00:23:28.960 | that Belgrade is the capital of Serbia.
00:23:32.760 | I'd simply know it.
00:23:34.260 | But there was a day and age,
00:23:36.060 | there was a day and time
00:23:36.960 | in which I'd never heard the name Belgrade
00:23:38.660 | and I needed the mnemonic
00:23:40.260 | to actually connect the two together.
00:23:43.760 | And so you're doing the same thing.
00:23:44.960 | You teach techniques
00:23:46.560 | and teach your children
00:23:48.060 | all the memory techniques that are available
00:23:50.960 | and have them practice it
00:23:52.060 | with various bits of information
00:23:53.760 | so that if and when they need to use those techniques,
00:23:56.460 | they are equipped with the basic skills.
00:23:59.260 | Grab yourself a memory book.
00:24:01.360 | I'm not an expert in that space.
00:24:03.260 | There are a few YouTube channels that I check out
00:24:05.560 | and that I watch
00:24:06.160 | because I'm interested in the subject.
00:24:07.260 | There are some, I have several books
00:24:09.160 | that I've read on it,
00:24:10.760 | but I don't have a specific recommendation
00:24:12.860 | at the moment for the book that you should use.
00:24:14.960 | But these are the two things.
00:24:15.960 | Number one, require your children to memorize
00:24:18.360 | so that their brains become more skilled
00:24:21.060 | at memorizing information
00:24:22.760 | because that's a skill they can employ
00:24:24.760 | later in their academics
00:24:26.260 | when they need to memorize large quantities of information
00:24:29.360 | and teach them at a middle age
00:24:32.960 | the specific techniques of memory
00:24:34.960 | and have them practice those techniques
00:24:36.660 | repetitively until they become very skilled
00:24:39.760 | at employing them.
00:24:41.160 | That's it for today's podcast.
00:24:42.260 | Thank you so much for listening.
00:24:43.160 | I'll be back with you soon.
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