Preliminaries 11
and there are plenty of cues in the text to trigger recall of the particular pattern that “compresses
and encodes” the actual string. You don’t have to remembertenrandom things at all – only two
and a half – odd ascending digits followed by the opposite (of both). Patterns rock!
This example has obvious connections to lecture and class time, and isone reason retention from
lecture is so lousy. Formoststudents, lecture in any nontrivial college-level course is a long-running
litany of stuff they don’t know yet. Since it is all new to them, it might aswell be random digits
as far as their cognitive abilities are concerned, at least at first. Sure, there is pattern there, but
you have todiscoverthe pattern, which requirestimeand a certain amount ofmeditationon all of
the information. Basically, you have to have a chance for the pattern to jump out of the stream of
information and punch the switch of the damn light bulb we all carry around inside our heads, the
one that is endlessly portrayed in cartoons. That light bulb experience isreal– it actually exists,
in more than just a metaphorical sense – and if you study long enough and hard enough to obtain
a sudden, epiphinaic realization in any topic you are studying, however trivial or complex (like the
pattern exposed above) it is quite likely to be accompanied by a purelymental flash of “light”.
You’ll know it when it happens to you, in other words, and it feelsgreat.
Unfortunately, the instructor doesn’t usually give students achanceto experience this in lecture.
No sooner is one seemingly random factoid laid out on the table than along comes a new, apparently
disconnected one that pushes it out of place long before we can either memorize it the hard way or
make sense out of it so we can remember it with a lot less work. This isn’treally anybody’s fault,
of course; the light bulb is quite unlikely to go off in lecturejustfrom lecture no matterwhatyou
or the lecturer do – it is something that happens to the prepared mind at the end of a process, not
something that just fires away every time you hear a new idea.
The humble and unsurprising conclusion I want you to draw from this silly little mini-experiment
is thatthings are easier to learn when they make sense!Aloteasier. In fact, things that don’t make
sense to you are never “learned” – they are at best memorized. Information can almost always
becompressedwhen you discover the patterns that run through it, especially when the patterns
all fit together into the marvelously complex and beautiful and mysterious process we call “deep
understanding” of some subject.
There is one more example I like to use to illustrate how important this information compression
is to memory and intelligence. I play chess, badly. That is, I know the legal moves of the game,
and have no idea at all how to use them effectively to improve my position and eventually win. Ten
moves into a typical chess game I can’t recall how I got myself into the mess I’m typically in, and
at the end of the game I probably can’t rememberanyof what went on except that I got trounced,
again.
A chessmaster, on the other hand, can play umpty games at once, blindfolded, against pitiful
fools like myself and when they’ve finished winning them all they can go back and recontructeach
onemove by move, criticizing each move as they go. Often they can remember the games in their
entirety days or even years later.
This isn’t just because they aresmarter–theymight be completely unable to derive the Lorentz
group from first principles, and I can, and this doesn’t automaticallymake me smarter than them
either. It is because chess makessenseto them – they’ve achieved a deep understanding of the game,
as it were – and they’ve built a complex meta-structure memory in their brains into which they can
poke chess moves so that they can be retrieved extremely efficiently. This gives them theattendant
capability of searching vast portions of the game tree at a glance, where I have to tediously work
through each branch, one step at a time, usually omitting some reallyimportant possibility because
I don’t realize that that particular knight on the far side of the board can affect things on this side
where we are both moving pieces.
This sort of “deep” (synthetic) understanding of physics is very much the goal ofthiscourse (the
one in the textbook you are reading, since I use this intro in many textbooks), and to achieve it you