12 Preliminaries
mustnotmemorize things as if they are random factoids, you must work to abstract the beautiful
intertwining of patterns that compress all of those apparently random factoids into things that you
can easily remember offhand, that you can easily reconstruct fromthe pattern even if you forget
the details, and that you can search through at a glance. But the process I describe can be applied
to learning pretty much anything, as patterns and structure exist in abundance inallsubjects of
interest. There are even sensible rules that govern or describe the anti-pattern ofpure randomness!
There’s one more important thing you can learn from thinking over the digit experiment.Some
of you reading this very likely didn’t do what I asked, you didn’t play along with the game. Perhaps
it was too much of a bother – you didn’t want to waste awhole minutelearning something by
actuallydoingit, just wanted to read the damn chapter and get it over with so youcould do, well,
whatever the hell else it is you were planning to do today that’s more important to you than physics
or learning in other courses.
If you’re one of these people, you probably don’t rememberanyof the digit string at this point
from actually seeing it – you never eventriedto memorize it. A very few of you may actually be so
terribly jaded that you don’t even remember the little mnemonicformulaI gave above for the digit
string (although frankly, people that arethatdisengaged are probably not about to do things like
actually read a textbook in the first place, so possibly not). After all, either way the string is pretty
damn meaningless, pattern or not.
Pattern and meaning aren’t exactly the same thing. There are all sorts of patterns one can find
in random number strings, they just aren’t “real” (where we could wax poetic at this point about
information entropy and randomness and monkeys typing Shakespeare or seeing fluffy white sheep
in the clouds if this were a different course). So why bother wasting brain energy on even theeasy
way to remember this string when doing so is utterly unimportant to you in the grand scheme of all
things?
From this we can learn thesecondhumble and unsurprising conclusion I want you to draw from
this one elementary thought experiment. Things are easier to learn when you care about learning
them!In fact, they are damn near impossible to learn if you reallydon’tcare about learning them.
Let’s put the two observations together and plot them as a graph,just for fun (and because
graphs help one learn for reasons we will explore just a bit in a minute). If you care about learning
what you are studying, and the information you are trying to learn makes sense (if only for a moment,
perhaps during lecture), the chances of your learning it are quite good. This alone isn’tenoughto
guarantee that you’ll learn it, but it they are basically both necessary conditions, and one of them
is directly connected to degree of engagement.
On the other hand, if you care but the information you want to learnmakes no sense, or if it
makes sense but you hate the subject, the instructor, your school, your life and just don’t care, your
chances of learning it aren’t so good, probably a bit better in the first case than in the second as
if you care you have achanceof finding someone or some way that will help you make sense of
whatever it is you wish to learn, where the person who doesn’t cares, well, they don’t care. Why
should they remember it?
If you don’t give a rat’s ass about the materialandit makes no sense to you, go home. Leave
school. Do something else. You basically have almost no chance of learning the material unless you
are gifted with a transcendent intelligence (wasted on a dilettante who lives in a state of perpetual
ennui) and are miraculously gifted with the ability learn things effortlessly even when they make no
sense to you and you don’t really care about them. All the learning tricks and study patterns in the
world won’t help a student who doesn’t try, doesn’t care, and for whom the material never makes
sense.
If we worked at it, we could probably find other “logistic” controlling parameters to associate
with learning – things that increase your probability of learning monotonically as they vary. Some of