We are what we can recall
Memory has been considered “the poor sister” of our cognitive abilities, which is totally wrong. There is no Knowledge, no Intelligence, and no Creativity if it is not based on the foundation that builds our Memory.
La Rochefoucauld said: “Everyone complains about his memory, but no one about his intelligence”. It is a great mistake to ignore to what extent both go hand in hand, both when we talk about People and when we talk about Organizations. In this article, I will try to summarize some basic ideas about human Memory and Intelligence from the many lines of research on these topics that have exploded in recent years.
“Everyone complains about his memory, but no one about his intelligence”. François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Companies and Organizations also have Memory and Intelligence, embodied in a whole series of technical elements, together with their human fabric. Digital Transformation consists of changing and significantly expanding the scope and abilities of that collective Intelligence that every Organization manages to create. That will only be possible if we have a clear idea of what Memory and Intelligence mean for a Company, and how humans build both. But that will come in another article. Now it is time to ponder a little on our mind and its capabilities.
Brain metaphors
Antonio Damasio, one of the leading figures in neuroscience, published in 2010 a book entitled “Self comes to Mind”. Apart from the enormous interest of what he recounts in it, we must thank Dr. Damasio for summarizing in his title what has been for centuries a constant in our conception of ourselves: that our intellectual capacities are the key to what distinguishes us as humans.
As a natural consequence, one of the mysteries that most interest the average person is to learn how our brain works. And to try to explain it, we have always used metaphors, seeking at all times that which would arouse the greatest admiration. It is not surprising that throughout History the brain has been described, successively, as
- An automatic mechanism with various levers and hydraulic actuators (Descartes, 17th century).
- An enchanted loom (Charles Sherrington, early 20th century)
- A telephone switchboard (John Searle, 1950s, 20th century)
- A computer (from the ’60s of the 20th century)
This last metaphor has proved to be quite persistent, giving rise to the so-called “Computational Theory of Mind”. According to this model, the brain would be a sort of control center, isolated from the world, which receives information about this world through the senses, interprets it according to some models of representation and action, and generates responses accordingly.
This model assumes that the brain’s essential mission is processing information, which is introduced from the outside thanks to mechanisms specialized in translating external stimuli into internal representations, understandable to our brain and manipulable by it.
Neuroscience has abandoned this reductionist and limited view of the brain as a mere information processor, but it is still very popular. Sometimes metaphors are too powerful to disappear from the collective imagination.
Memory, the basis for interpreting our world
From the moment we are born, we start accumulating knowledge and experiences about our environment. This learning provides us with references to approach each new move, and above all, to survive. For a hunter-gatherer to be able to remember that an area can be flooded, or where there are berries (and when) to eat can be of the utmost importance. Remembering the relationships of kinship and friendship within a group of people is essential for social interaction. Reminding how to swim, build a shelter, or plant a crop is vital.
If we define intelligence as the set of skills that allow us to adapt to the environment, dominate it, and survive in it, memory is an essential component. Memory builds a network of knowledge that enables us to judge each new situation we face and to decide our actions. Every time we encounter a new challenge, we try to place it within the framework of our knowledge. And once mastered, it comes to swell our understanding of the world.
If we define intelligence as the set of skills that allow us to adapt to our environment, to master it, and to survive in it, memory is is an essential component.
As our world became more sophisticated, the knowledge needed to survive in it also evolved. That is why we now identify memory with abstract knowledge, rather than with knowledge related to basic needs, such as those I mentioned above.
Memory is not a mere storehouse of bits, as we might naively think if we go by the computational model of the mind. Our brain does not just pile up data. Our memory always stores information within a context, linking it to previous knowledge so that it grows with new elements.
Memory is not mere storage of bits. Our memory always stores information within a context, linking it with previous knowledge so that it grows with new elements.
We should never disdain Memory as a minor skill. On the contrary, it is the basis of our intelligence. By placing any new element in the framework of previous Knowledge, and relating it to it, we are exercising the full power of our cognitive faculties, and building the knowledge structure with which we will analyze the future. We are building, in short, the basis of our intelligence.
Let’s look at an Example
I recently read a book entitled “The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines”. I must confess that I tried it twice before, and didn’t make it past page 30, but this time I got hold of it. It has everything one could want: algebra, physics, biology, biochemistry, thermodynamics, information theory, and of course, computational theory. Let me use it as an example of what I am trying to describe, with the help of some drawings.
The first thing to understand is that my memory has stored some relevant data from what I have read but in no way stores the textual relationship of the words in the book, as a computer does. While the computer piles up bits that it does not understand, we human beings assemble new insights in the framework of our knowledge, in a qualitative way. The Memory only stores what it can put in context, and by storing it, it enriches and modifies its structure.
While the computer stacks bits that it does not understand, we humans link new insights into the fabric of our knowledge, in a qualitative way. In doing so, our Memory enriches and modifies its structure.
I have tried to reflect this in the following images.
The first thing to understand is that Our Memory does not pile up data, as in a bookcase. It has not placed this new book carefully among those of its “family” as I have done in my world of paper and written words.
Instead, my memory has placed the book´s contents within the framework of other knowledge and books I had read before. In doing so, it has been able to draw on the relationships with those earlier books to understand it, and at the same time, it has added a new branch to the trees. We have little idea how our memory is organized in the brain, but I want to imagine it this way:
Unfortunately, humans see only three dimensions, and paper condemns us to use only two but it is clear that the interrelationships between these branches and leaves of different trees are much more numerous and tangled. More generally, we could paint the forest of my memory on these subjects like this:
And amid this forest, any new knowledge or experience is analyzed and framed for understanding.
I have chosen a handful of “trees” for the example. Although it is clear that our memory comprises many different trees, for different types of skills: we recognize pieces of music by listening to a few bars, we remember how to ride a bicycle, how to chop some vegetables for lunch, the smell of the stew in our house, the song of a bird that we only hear in summer…
There are many types of intelligence: emotional intelligence, motor intelligence, mathematical intelligence, linguistic intelligence. All of them are founded on the memory of events, concepts, or associated experiences.
That is why each person has a particular way of understanding the world. That framework of memorized knowledge with which we analyze each event in our lives, with which we approach each challenge, is a consequence of what we have learned. And learning is an active process: we only acquire what we are interested in because we focus our brain’s effort on creating a knowledge structure in our memory for it.
Each person has a particular way of understanding the world. What we have learned creates the framework of memorized knowledge with which we analyze each event in our life.
There is nothing so engaging as listening to a person passionate about something, anything. He will tell us things that almost nobody sees. My husband and my son are both enthusiastic about Formula 1. Their memory stores races, drivers, championships, circuits, countless technical details about engines, suspensions, tires… I don’t know. When they watch a Race they can immediately distinguish a strategic mistake, predict when each car will pit, or what effect a safety car will have on the result. I simply watch cars go around a circuit. Somehow, every time they see a new race, they insert it in their particular forest of memory, which gives them references to appreciate all the details, and at the same time, become enriched with a new example.
Memory, the basis for devising solutions
What is Creativity? We usually identify Creativity with Art, or with Science. With the ability to construct something new, whether it is a formula, a new procedure, a piece of music, or a painting. But Creativity is at the same time something much more mundane and widespread: it is the ability to come up with solutions to the problems we encounter. Possibly unspectacular, but they constitute our daily lives. Working in an industry that in 25 years has deployed 4 different generations of mobile networks, believe me, you have to solve new problems every day.
In “The Paradox of Wisdom” Elkhonon Goldberg explains how critical is creativity in all kinds of activities and how it is significant in older people. Let’s not fool ourselves. In terms of intellectual effort, our brain is at its best between the ages of 20 and 30. Then our ability to concentrate and reason begins to lose its agility. Nevertheless, many scientists, artists, and engineers give their best beyond these years. In general, humans in any field are at our best at older ages. It is what Goldberg calls the Wisdom Paradox.
In general, humans in any field are at our best at older ages. It is what Goldberg calls the paradox of Wisdom.
The key to this paradox lies in Creativity. In essence, we base our ability to generate new ideas and solutions on detecting relationships between concepts that no one had previously thought could exist. As we grow older, we have a wealth of models to analyze new problems, and an extraordinary ability to recognize patterns. From this, we can quickly detect details that go unnoticed by those without such mental models.
In essence, we base our ability to generate new ideas and solutions on detecting relationships between concepts that no one had previously thought could exist.
Creativity is based on Memory.
When we face a new problem, it is like when we have to fix something at home. Imagine that the switch on a lamp breaks, as happened recently in my house. I took the lamp, the toolbox, and from the box, I picked out some screwdrivers, some cutting pliers, and a spare switch we had in storage. I put it all on top of a table and set it up.
It doesn’t sound very creative, nor very spectacular. But let’s use a new metaphor now. The table becomes a sample “working memory”, to which we bring virtually all the tools we have every time we have to face a problem. We go to the toolbox, which is our memory, and we retrieve everything that may be related to the problem at hand. The richer our memory is, and the greater our ability to identify relationships between what we are dealing with and other problems we have solved in the past, the more likely we are to succeed. We’ve all done the “I don’t have a hammer, but this wrench is heavy, I can use it to hammer in this nail” thing. Don’t try a big nail, of course.
What I mean is that the screwdriver sitting on the shelves of the DIY superstore, rather than in my house, is useless to me. The fact that the store is a ten-minute walk away serves many to say “I’ll go and buy a screwdriver when I need one”, and not have one at home. But the truth is that when you have to fix the lamp what ends up happening is that you don’t have a screwdriver, and you don’t go to buy one. The lamp remains unfixed.
In the same way, the knowledge we don’t want to memorize “because it’s all on the internet” are tools we don’t have, data that are not part of our collection of patterns with which to analyze the world, concepts that we will never be able to use to build something new.
The knowledge we don’t want to memorize “because it’s all on the internet” are tools we don’t have, concepts we will never be able to use to build something new.
An open search on the internet sometimes gives us answers. But only about what we are seeking. And we won’t look for what we don’t know exists. If you have found what you needed with a simple internet search, your problem was trivial.
Let’s go back to the Formula 1 example. I can read several blogger posts about Formula 1 and watch a handful of videos. And with that, I can watch a race and understand something. But I will never be able to understand the infinite nuances discovered every minute by those who have spent hundreds of hours learning about the subject. I won’t be able to conclude how what I see in the race resembles what happened when another driver was racing on that same circuit, and the rain started, for example.
The specialist’s in-depth knowledge derives from a lot of implicit details, which are in our memory, but of which we are not even aware. That toolbox is ready to help us with new problems.
The specialist’s in-depth knowledge derives from a lot of implicit details, which are in our memory, but of which we are not even aware.
Memory, the basis of social skills
I have already mentioned in passing that, man being a social animal, maintaining a clear outline of the relationships between people in a group is a fundamental skill, not to mention the ability to recognize them. But we need many more ingredients to get along in Society where our memory plays a significant role.
One of the most fun things about getting together with friends is the time spent talking about soccer. Usually, about games which they saw many years ago, sometimes when they were together. I don’t remember anything, of course. I’ve never been passionate about soccer, and attention and motivation are a critical part of memorization.
Whenever my friends recall a spectacular goal they saw 30 years ago, or my friend Jose Manuel narrates Magic Johnson’s first game from memory, we joke about how many neurons men use on irrelevant things. But in my inner self, I am amazed at how our memory creates an incredible structure in which so many things fit.
Let’s not disdain sports knowledge. Intelligence is the power to adapt to the world: such knowledge makes for good times and facilitates long and exciting conversations. For the social nature of man’s survival, such things are essential.
In short, we need our memory for everything we do. Memory is the ultimate device of our intelligence. The attribute thanks to which we adjust to the Reality and adapt this same Reality to our needs. It is paramount to exercise and develop it. Whether it is a mathematical formula, the location of an important river, or that impossible-to-miss penalty, let us not make the mistake of undermining its importance.
Who we are, the way we see the Universe, the way we respond to our world, are defined by our Memories and Knowledge and the richness of the structure we have created by storing them.
