Why we need to memorize?
For the love of thinking, creativity and connection — we must remember.
Back in 7th grade, my philosophy was simple: Why do we need to memorize when we can easily Google? The dates of historical events, the birth years of dead people, the precise wordings of legislative acts — all seemed like a useless mental load. I genuinely believed this to be a logical reasoning for loving maths even more and dunking hate on the subjects of social science.
The idea of memorizing anything was stupid to me. If I saw anyone trying to memorize how to solve a math problem, I found that disrespectful to maths. Because maths is a beautiful language of universe that needs to be understood not memorized.
But as is the beauty of life, it makes you live in irony and self created hypocrisy. At one end, I was looking down on history and civics for having this unwritten rule of memorizing dates and events, on the other end, I was happily spending hours memorizing poems, speeches and debate arguments.
I would wake up at 4 AM in the morning to memorize the 10-page “Jhansi Ki Rani” poem. Read the poem out loud, test different rhythms and pitches to see what resonates and comes out beautifully.
Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t against all kinds of memorization, I only rebelled against rote memorization, that is, where you simply look at information again and again repeating it in your head until it sticks. That felt empty and pointless. I was more attuned towards memorization that engaged my whole mind. The kind of memorization that’s about learning things by heart and understanding it so well that you can talk about it and explain it even when you’re sleepy.
There's something undeniably magnetic about someone who can pull insights and quotes from memory at just the right moment. We're drawn to their easy confidence, their intellectual grace. These people don’t just appear smart, they have an elegance of knowledge worn so comfortably that it seems like second nature.
From this perspective, even the stupid history dates are important. A historian needs to remember what years World War I and subsequent economic catastrophe happened to make connections on how they are related to World War II. The reason to memorize something isn’t to recall it in isolation, but to recall it in the context of other things committed to memory.
Sure, you have google at your service. But if you have to pause and search for each piece of information, it fragments your thinking process.
When knowledge lives in your mind, you don’t think about ideas — you think in them. You see connections that would be invisible to you if you had to constantly pause to look things up. You are able to build new understanding based on the foundation of what you already know deeply.
Think of it like a chef who knows the recipes by heart when they are cooking. The chef can mix and match a few ingredients, tweak somethings, improvise on their recipe and make something even more delicious.
While if the chef has to refer the recipe book every 5 minutes. The art of cooking falls flat, the joy lessens a bit and there’s no room for experimentation — they can't risk changes when they don't remember the fundamentals. After all, how can you experiment when you're not sure what each change might do?
You store it, we’ll forget it.
Somewhere along the way, we made a quiet bargain with technology: “You store it, we’ll forget it.”
We document our lives, hoping to create memories. But the irony is, the more faithfully we document, the more we seem to forget. When we snap a picture, our brain literally checks out thinking “Got it, stored, don’t need to remember this.”
Now, because we have access to so much information and ways to record even more information, our brain has adapted and optimized itself to remember retrieval paths instead of retaining information. It has become better at “knowing where to find” rather than “knowing”.
At any concert, a sea of phones rises into the air, each screen capturing the same thing. The music is in your head, you feel the adrenaline rush. But still, somehow you engage less with the experience.
It’s like you are cheating on your partner without cheating on them. Being near but not there for them. They are seen but not heard. Being physically present but emotionally absent in a relationship is a form of betrayal. Just as how capturing moments digitally when you are mentally disconnected is a betrayal to your own experience.
Painters from the Renaissance era used to paint from their reservoir of observed details — the exact way light falls on fabric, the subtle variations in skin tone, the precise arch of an eyebrow in different expressions. The deep, internalized memory of the visual world was crucial for their creative process.
If you decide to paint today, you will have millions of reference images at your fingertips. Even the creative process has also shifted from recalling to referencing.
Before cameras came into existence, people never had a way to capture how the horses’ legs actually move when they run. By observation and memory the horses looked like as if they are flying in the air.
Memory is a compost heap for creativity
Memories need time to decompose, to break down and recombine in unexpected ways. That’s how they become a source for future contemplation.
I memorized the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost about 10 years ago. I still think about it every time I come across diverged roads, a trail in the forest or when I have to make a decision between this or that.
When you memorize a poem or a song, you get moments to reflect more deeply on it, to understand with more depth as time goes by. Knowledge then no longer remains external to you, it becomes a part of you.
In ancient India, “kanthasth” (कंठस्थ) served as humanity's first and most reliable database. It’s a practice where you learn something by heart. When you know something "kanthasth," it's not just stored in your brain – it's lodged in your throat (kanth), ready to be expressed, as natural as breathing. It's knowledge that has become part of your very being.
The Vedas were preserved for thousands of years through kanthasth. Scholars didn't just memorize the words — they memorized the exact pronunciation, the rhythm, and the pitch of each syllable. When these orally transmitted verses were finally written down centuries later, versions from geographically separated communities were virtually identical.
Kanthasth wasn't just used to memorize religious texts. Medical treatises like the Charaka Samhita, mathematical formulas, astronomical calculations, and even entire dictionaries were preserved through the practice of Kanthasth.
When you learn something by heart, you internalize it differently. Think of a speaker who has memorized their speech versus one who reads out from a paper. The memorized version creates more excited energy, liveliness and immersive experience for the audience even if the speaker is nervous or had jitters just before getting on the stage.
The same principle was applied to ancient texts and knowledge systems. Kanthasth allowed for a deeper understanding because the knowledge literally lived within the person.
When palm leaves could decay and stones could erode, the human mind was the most reliable storage device for knowledge. But the story of why we've lost this practice is complex and again ironic. As we developed more reliable external storage systems — from writing to printing to digital storage — we began to trust our internal memory less. The urgent need to remember exactly gave way to the ability to reference quickly.
Now, our ability to reference has become faster than ever with LLMs in the picture. Which is great, but we should still memorize, if one doesn’t want to be an empty hollow shell and build a foundation for higher order thinking and problem solving.
There was a time when knowledge was alive within us. It wasn’t something we reached for, it was something we became.
I think it’s time we optimize ourselves along with LLMs. It’s time we become knowledge.