Fittingly, I can’t now remember who told me that they had forgotten something important about their job and were having to relearn it. They had first studied a subject at college, but when some time later they needed to demonstrate it at work, they realised that in the interim they had forgotten it entirely, so they were having to learn it all over again.
I paraphrase, but they basically said: “What exactly was the point of learning it the first time?”
Interesting. ‘Knowledge is memory’, the saying goes. Or is it ‘memory is intelligence’? I can never quite remember. But whichever it is, the idea is that the more things you remember, the smarter you will be. I tell myself that when I’m reading the newspaper or some obscure technical literature, I’m not prevaricating but learning – expanding my mind.
But am I? And if so, for what? The idea sounds noble, but considering that we can’t remember everything and don’t get to choose which bits we do and don’t (bar moments of great elation or peril), what this person (colleague, family member or whoever) surmised was that, for the most part, we might as well not bother. We can do all the reading, listening and absorbing we like, but the reality is that most of it won’t stick.
Studies estimate – although I dare say rough guesses are as accurate as they get – that we remember only 10% of what we read and 20% of what we hear, albeit 90% of what we do.
I’m a bit suspicious of that ‘doing’ percentage. It sounds like a lot. I grant you that I remember getting bitten by a dog when I was eight and plenty of the accompanying trauma afterwards, but that wasn’t 90% of things I did that year, and the rest seems to have passed me by entirely.
One thing I do remember from the 1980s was a kids’ TV show called Why Don’t You?, whose title lyrics suggested its viewers “turn off your TV set” (which today would expand to include laptop, tablet, phone, e-reader and more) and “go and do something more interesting instead”. Ironically, I don’t remember it being a particularly interesting programme. In short, it gave viewers the opportunity to watch oth
