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Your powerful 4Runner. Your stylish Camry. Your versatile RAV4. Even your fully electric VZ4X. Your new Toyota car, truck, or SUV is available now. So see your Toyota dealer today. We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Josh Ruchite. I'm your host. Today, we continue our series on how to invest in your children's minds. And I did not intend this series to be as long as it is, but we're in the thick of it, and I know I've got great feedback from many of you that has been very useful.

I think that's very practical, and I'm going to continue and see this through. In short, today, I want to share with you why I believe that it's important that you encourage and require your children to memorize as a way of strengthening their minds. And there are two components to this episode.

First, I want to make a short apologetic for why it's important that your children memorize things, even in a day of omnipresent access to information through digitally and Internet-connected devices. And then part two is I want to share with you why I think it's important that your children take training in how to actually memorize things more effectively.

Why memorize? That's the first question. I think all of us are aware of the fact that it's easier and easier for us to externalize our brain and to have access to information. In a world in which we can ask Google or Siri or whoever the next iteration of an electronic voice is for any specific fact or piece of information that we need to know, it seems less and less relevant and important for us to drill meaningless lists of facts into our heads.

We are all connected to devices that can help us to recall any piece of information we want to recall. And I think it's important to use those systems. I think if you could go back a couple hundred years and introduce something like Evernote to an author, he would have immediately seen the potential of the ability to build a second brain, to build an external repository of notes and thoughts and comments, et cetera.

So I'm not here arguing against using the tools of the day. I'm as grateful as you are for the ever-present access to a search engine, the information of the web, et cetera. We're living in an incredible age. But with every benefit, there's often a counteracting drawback. And one of the drawbacks of our using these tools more and more is quite simply that we are exercising our brains a little bit less.

I am personally persuaded, though I cannot prove it, this is my opinion, and I'm not a neuroscientist, but I am convinced that the brain is best viewed as a muscle, and with more use, the brain becomes stronger. With less use, the brain becomes weaker. And so we should be seeking to exercise the muscle of our brain as much as we can, as much as we are capable of.

And in fact, if you think about many of the shows that I have done in this series, talking about how to help our children to be smarter, a lot of it simply involves exercising the brain in different ways. I first became aware of this a number of years ago when I was interacting with a neighbor of ours.

And this neighbor was an elderly man. He had been very kind to me when I was young. I'd hung out with him a lot when I was a young boy. And he was getting older, and he was starting to show signs of dementia. But he would come down to our house, come down the road to our house, stay at my house where my grandparents were, be a friend, and just basically be a companion.

He was always in, he was there every day. He was the guy who was checking up on the neighborhood. As he got older, he started to experience certain signs of dementia. And along the way, one of the things that he got interested in was doing jigsaw puzzles as well as doing crossword puzzles.

And one of the things that his wife, who was a lot younger than he was, noticed was that as soon as he started engaging in that mental effort of doing crossword puzzles and jigsaw puzzles, his dementia symptoms subsided and stabilized a good bit. He had several more years of a properly functioning brain than he otherwise would have had because he was exercising his brain.

And it really stuck with me as a young boy. There was no study on this. There was no evidence. There was no good academic research. This was just an anecdote from a neighbor. But it seemed obvious to me that this is probably true. And while I haven't always done what I aspired to of strengthening my own brain, I've noticed that if we want our brains to work well, they need to be exercised.

And that exercise comes in different ways. At its core, one of the fundamental forms of exercise is simply memory. Now, I've dabbled around here and there with some of the commentary that various neuroscientists talk about how memories are stored, how they're lodged in the brain, et cetera. I couldn't present an effective teaching on that at the moment.

But I am convinced that the more we exercise our memory, the more effective our memory becomes. And at its core, this is the fundamental reason why we should not neglect memorization in the training of our children. Rather, we should emphasize that they have some ongoing, consistent requirement to memorize.

Let me read a few from a few articles. Let me begin with a New Yorker article published almost a decade ago called "Why We Should Memorize" by Brad Lighthouser. "Much of our daily lives would be dizzyingly unrecognizable to people living a hundred years ago. What we wear and what we eat, how we travel, how we communicate, how we while away our leisure time.

But surely, our occasional attempts to memorize a poem would feel familiar to them, those inhabitants of a heyday of verse memorization. Little has changed. They too, in committing a poem to memory, underwent a predictable gamut of frustrations. The pursuit of stubbornly elusive phrases, the inner hammering of rote repetition, tantalizing tip of the tongue stammerings, confident forward marches that finish in an abrupt amnesiac's cul-de-sac.

Actually, if the process has altered over the years, perhaps we feel the difficulties of the task more acutely than our ancestors did. As a college professor of writing and literature, I regularly impose memorization assignments, and I'm struck by how burdensome my students typically find them. Give them a full week to memorize any Shakespeare sonnet, "Hey," I tell them, "pick a really famous one.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" And you've already got the first line down, and a number of them will painfully falter. They're not used to memorizing much of anything. In what would have been my prime recitation years, had I been born in an earlier era, junior high and high school, little memorization was required of me.

But in early boyhood, I did a fair amount of it. My mother, who had literary ambitions, paid me a penny a line to memorize poems. The first one I mastered was Tennyson's "The Eagle." He clasps the crag with crooked hands, which brought in a haul of six cents. Opportunistically, I moved on to the longer "Casey at the Bat." It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville Nine that day.

And Byron's "The Destruction of the Sennacherib," whose title I mispronounced for decades, which netted me 52 cents and 24 cents, respectively. Some Longfellow, some Frost. I straggled through Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and enough of his "The Ancient Mariner" to purchase a couple of candy bars. It sounds whimsical and entertaining now, but I suspect some dead serious counsel lay behind my mother's beaming encouragement.

I think she was tacitly saying, "Stick with poetry. That's where the money is." It turned out to be level-headed advice. Today, I pay my bills by talking to my students about poetry and about stories and novels and essays, ultimately about memorable cadences, about the music that occasionally lifts off of words carefully deployed on a page.

The piece goes on by the author wherein he talks about why and the value of memorizing, especially poetry. And his basic argument is simply two points, that poems that you have memorized are a form of larder or pantry, something that's laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude.

You have access to these words. And that when you really want to have access to something at any moment, it needs to be in your memory. In addition, he emphasizes that when you know something by memory, by rote knowledge, you have the chance to know it on a very different level than if you don't know it by rote knowledge.

It's a much deeper form of knowledge. Let me go now to an essay from the website Psychology Today called "Memorization is Not a Dirty Word" by William R. Clem. And in this essay, he talks about the value of memorization. I'm going to pick it up a few paragraphs in.

In my experience with students, both the college students I teach and the secondary students that teachers tell me about, the biggest weakness students have is that they either try to remember school material by rote memorization, or have no strategy at all, relying on some kind of magical mental osmosis.

Even among students who rely on rote memory, they generally lack much of a strategy for memorizing, relying on various degrees of casual looking over the instructional material until they think they can remember it. Experiments show that students routinely overestimate how much they remember and underestimate the value of further study.

Moreover, many educators at all levels have disdain for memorization, stating that we should focus education on teaching students to think and solve problems, as if you can think and solve problems without knowing anything. Too many teachers regard memorizing as old-fashioned and even destructive of enlightenment. Disdain for memorization is a relatively new phenomenon in education.

In ancient times, people took great pains and pride in memorizing huge quantities of information. The advent of printing greatly reduced the need to memorize history and cultural mores. In modern times, we have the internet, where you can just Google what you need to know. So who needs to get brain strain trying to remember things?

Now we have a book by Samuel Arbusman, "The Half-Life of Facts, Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date", where he argues that there are no lasting facts. They all have a half-life, that is, the number of years it takes to falsify half of what you think are facts.

He argues that new "facts" are made all the time, often replacing what we had previously thought were facts. He argues we should just stop memorizing and look up whatever current facts we need on the internet. But if there are no lasting facts, how are those you find on Google any more valid than those you memorize and can deploy in real time?

There are some serious errors in Arbusman's position. One, many facts are immutable. They don't have a half-life. Events in history did actually occur. And while revisionist writers of school history textbooks may change the reporting of those events, the facts remain true. Nixon covered up Watergate. Obama obfuscated Benghazi. The fact of DNA as a basis for heredity is not likely to change.

Two, many facts that do change will not change in a given person's lifetime and thus will be useful in daily living. Three, the internet is flooded with error, propaganda, and unvetted assertions. Four, you don't always have internet access. Five, in many situations it is not practical to look up what you need.

Ever try to read or speak a foreign language where you have to look up most of the words? Ever try to use computer software where you have to repeatedly refer to the instruction manual? Six, expertise in any field of endeavor requires a great deal of memorized facts. And if you want to succeed in life, it pays to be an expert.

I can easily make a strong case for memorization, especially for schools. Here is a list supporting the importance of memorizing. One, memorized information is always with you, even when you lack the time or access to sources where you could look it up. Two, we think and solve problems with what is in working memory, which in turn is memory of currently available information or recall of previously memorized information.

The process of thinking is like streaming video on the internet. Information flows in as short frames onto the virtual scratch pad of working memory, successively replaced by new chunks of information from real time or recalled memory. Numerous studies show that the amount of information you can hold in working memory is tightly correlated with IQ and problem solving ability.

Three, memorization provides exercise for the mind. This is the reason schools used to require students to memorize poems, Bible verses, famous speeches, etc. The true advantage of such exercise is that it generates mental industriousness. Any teacher will tell you that many students today are mentally lazy. Memorization also trains the mind to pay attention and focus intensely.

Such skills seems to be lacking in many youngsters, which is most obvious in the growing number of kids diagnosed with ADHD. Next, memorization trains the brain to develop learning and memory schemas that facilitate future learning. Learning schemas develop as you acquire competence in an area. Call it skill A.

Now when you need to learn a new and related skill B, your mind says to itself, "I don't know how to do B, but I do know how to do A." And some of that can be applied to learning B. Memory schemas are memorized frames of reference and association, where having memorized fact A, you have an association handle for memorizing fact B.

Next, if you learn strategies for memorization, as opposed to the rote memory approach of looking information over repeatedly, you accelerate the ease, speed, and reliability of learning new things. The bottom line is the more you know, the more you can know. Regardless of where you stand on the importance of memory, most people believe that learning is a good thing.

But what good is learning if you don't remember it? So there's a couple of overviews from articles talking about the importance of memory. I would simply point out that memory is a form of brain training. Thus, it is useful in and of itself. It's not that it's necessary for things.

It is useful as an exercise. This is the same thing I tell my children about math. I think math teachers often commit a great error in trying to talk to people about the usefulness of math. Clearly, math is useful. But the fundamental reason we learn math is to make us smarter, to build our brains.

It's not because we're going to necessarily be using our algebraic equations the rest of our life. It's to make us smarter and to train our brains. And when we help students and children to memorize things, their ability to memorize things grows. I have an interest in great feats of memory.

I've listened to talks by people who have memorized the New Testament or who've memorized the Koran or other long works. And one of the things that is very obvious is quite simply the more somebody memorizes, the better they become at the skill of memorizing. That which you practice is a skill that grows.

And so it becomes much easier for them to memorize. And this is one reason I believe we should train children to learn to memorize things when they are young. As they figure out how to memorize things, they will become more effective at memorizing things. In a recent episode, not part of this series, I talked about how to go to college fast and cheap.

And one of the things I pointed out is that for people who are academically skilled, you can go to college and you get a degree really quickly and really easily. But where does academic skill come from? I don't think it's something that you're born with or not born with.

I think there's clearly a component where we all begin with a baseline ability, just like we all began with a certain built-in athletic ability, a certain built-in genetic size potential. But I'm convinced we can maximize that ability to the highest degree possible. And if you give me somebody who is born with a lower IQ than another person, but yet that person has years of training and simply practice in developing his skill set, he has hundreds of poems committed to memory, he has hundreds of Bible verses committed to memory, he has dozens of historical speeches committed to memory, he's going to have a much greater capacity for memorizing things.

So then when we come to academic subjects where memorization is necessary as a basic skill set of passing an exam, he's going to be able to do it much more easily than the guy who's never had any practice memorizing things. That leads me then to point number two. It is important for us to teach children how to memorize things more effectively.

I was in high school when I stumbled across a copy of Harry Lorraine's book called "The Memory Book," the classic guide to improving your memory at work, at school, and at play. And Harry Lorraine was one of these incredible performers showing off his amazing feats of memory. And he was really good, and I picked the book up, and I was amazed at what it contained in terms of one man's potential, his ability to show off his memory ability.

And I was also amazed at how useful some of his techniques were. And so I went through his memory book, and while I'm no memory expert, I haven't practiced all the techniques enough to be good with them, I am able to use the memory techniques that are necessary in order to commit information to mind when necessary.

Probably the best popular access to this would be, if you remember in the Sherlock Holmes series with the British guy Cumberbatch, there was a whole episode devoted to the memory palace and the idea of having a memory palace, a place to which you put things, and that's one technique.

And there are a number of other techniques that can be used. Basically, you can create the ability to memorize any bit of information that you want to memorize. And another place that this stood out to me, in my ninth grade geography class, we had a teacher who taught us mnemonics for memorizing the capitals of various countries around the world.

And while I have forgotten many of the mnemonic devices through lack of constant use, what I learned from that, which was most important, was how to create my own mnemonic devices. And that simple skill set is something that can be incredibly valuable to a student who is seeking to put information away.

And so back to the theme of this podcast series, I want you to invest in your children when they are young so that they will be able to go farther than just waiting around to pay money for college tuition. And I'm convinced that having your children memorize things consistently is something that will enhance their capabilities to memorize information, which is something that will be fundamentally useful to them in passing various academic subjects and doing well on quizzes, exams, tests, et cetera, to get great grades.

And if they get great grades, then they can get paid to go to school, get paid to go to college, get paid to go to master's, to get a master's degree, get paid to get a PhD, get paid to have a fellowship somewhere because of their skill of memorizing information.

And so it sounds deceptively simple. Require your children to memorize things. And yet it is a fundamentally valuable skill with a massive payoff because as you require your young children to memorize things, then you enhance their ability to memorize things in the long run. And that enhanced ability then gets translated into higher levels of academic ability.

It doesn't cost you any money to require your children to memorize things. It simply costs you time and attention. It is something that you can do that is fun. You can do it together. And so where I mainly use this is simply at the breakfast table. We memorize different things.

We memorize Bible verses. We memorize poems. We memorize catechism questions. And it just becomes something interesting that we do. And it's something that we all do together. And I'm not too worried about matching any specific number. That's not like you have to have a certain number of lines of poetry memorized.

What matters is that you consistently exercise the skill from a young age. And of course there are many other bits of information that are important to memorize. It's important to memorize your math facts. It's important to memorize many of the basic facts of academic skill. And this will pay off in spades.

And then when appropriate, I'm not sure the exact age at which this transition should happen, but when appropriate, you should require your students to memorize things on their own and you should teach them the memory techniques that the memory masters use to memorize information. These techniques are best viewed as a bridge.

A bridge to help you recall something a sufficient number of times until it becomes part of your long-term memory and the bridge is no longer necessary. I don't need a mnemonic to know that Belgrade is the capital of Serbia. I'd simply know it. But there was a day and age, there was a day and time in which I'd never heard the name Belgrade and I needed the mnemonic to actually connect the two together.

And so you're doing the same thing. You teach techniques and teach your children all the memory techniques that are available and have them practice it with various bits of information so that if and when they need to use those techniques, they are equipped with the basic skills. Grab yourself a memory book.

I'm not an expert in that space. There are a few YouTube channels that I check out and that I watch because I'm interested in the subject. There are some, I have several books that I've read on it, but I don't have a specific recommendation at the moment for the book that you should use.

But these are the two things. Number one, require your children to memorize so that their brains become more skilled at memorizing information because that's a skill they can employ later in their academics when they need to memorize large quantities of information and teach them at a middle age the specific techniques of memory and have them practice those techniques repetitively until they become very skilled at employing them.

That's it for today's podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back with you soon. The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new. Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp cocktail, or your first Cajun risotto, Ralph's has all the freshest ingredients to embrace your traditions.

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So see your Toyota dealer today. We make it easy. Toyota. Let's go places.