The Importance of Associative Memory in Learning

Some central pieces of advice I gave during this period included that you should avoid memorizing ideas instead seeking to understand them. Now, none of these are exactly false, but they all suffer from some problems. Memorizing is often a necessary step to learning complex ideas; understanding is built out of memory rather than being opposed to it. It's hard to notice analogies unless you already have an abstract mental representation of the deep structure of an idea. As a result, I now typically advocate people make metaphors and analogies and diagrams and images when they are ready.