But from this discussion, we see the old man may have been on to something! If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.
Yet I bet most folks who have memorized a poem or a passage---out of an affinity for it, not when demanded by a teacher---know the value. Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express.
It's good.
That's also the reason little credence is given to coders who moan about college CS knowledge being useless memorization of stuff that can easily be looked up when needed.
That's not to say that people can't memorize things accurately (there are plenty of kids who memorize Bible and Quran verses verbatim for example that can easily disprove that), but memories are fallible in ways that writing isn't, particularly when it comes to comparing sources for accuracy or historical value.
On the other hand, if the objective is to understand and appreciate the source, even simply for personal edification or enlightenment, then I agree completely: memorization is a wonderful technique for doing so.
I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?
And there's also the Kiwi chap, Nigel Richards, who memorised the whole French Scrabble dictionary in order to win the French world Scrabble championship, without learning any French in the process.
(Whether you call what he did to the French word list 'understanding' is up for debate, I guess. I am fairly sure he went much deeper into understanding the underlying probability distributions of letters in French words than most speakers, but he couldn't read a newspaper.)
True, I am doing this myself. 4 days a week and plan to continue for the next 10 years. Memorized several pages so far with a lot more to go without understanding any of it.
In fact, being a Hafiz or your child being a Hafiz is a point of pride.
This in part goes back to Islamic lore/history.
Another part is that there is the belief that there are rewards associated with, being accompanied by angels iirc.
I think the main issue being described in the article and in the comments is that rote memorization like you described is both much harder and also meaningless. In fact, it is much harder because it is meaningless.
So yes, it can be done, but also: why?
You have access to many orders of magnitude more data, but it is substantially slower to access it.
All considered, I'm glad we did the upgrade.
People get hung up on the dead past rather than the living present. They say God is unchanging and eternal and neglect that he built an ever-changing universe of entropy for us to live in.
Even the "Gospel" means "Good News" or "Glad Tidings". What good news comes from 2,000 year old texts? It's not news at this point, it's history.
The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.
You know, until you put it in this context, it hadn't occurred to me how--from some perspectives--"convenient" that is. :)
We have left one on the moon! https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2019/07/19/the-only-bible-o...
Another fun fact is that there is nowhere in the Bible either in the Old or New Testaments that the God had promised to preserve its content and its veracity, only in the Quran that Muslim consider the Last and Final Testament [1][2][3].
Another reason it's a living miracle by the fact that many thousands of these Hafiz don't even understand Arabic but they can read it, just like you can learn Hangul characters in a few days but never understand Korean at all. It is like trying to memorize War and Peace in its original Russian (and French) in its entirety but your only language is Mandarin and the alphabets are totally differents. Heck, even Tolstoy’s wife Sofia who reportedly personally and manually copied the original manuscript twenty one times did not memorize it [4].
[1] https://quran.com/en/al-maidah/48:
"We have revealed to you [O Prophet] this Book with the truth, as a confirmation of previous Scriptures and a supreme authority on them."
[2] https://quran.com/en/an-nisa/82
"Do they not then reflect on the Quran? Had it been from anyone other than Allah, they would have certainly found in it many inconsistencies"
[3] https://quran.com/en/al-hijr/9:
"It is certainly We Who have revealed the Reminder, and it is certainly We Who will preserve it."
[4] Ten Things You Need to Know About War And Peace:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5lrPL2vWJG6Th9zmh1...
But the Bible does promise that it will be preserved to the letter regardless:
Isaiah 40:8
The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
Matthew 5:18
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
Again, not a critique, just a curiosity.
This is a generalised critique against most commandments of many religions.
(If the deity didn't want me to commit act X, why is act X even physically possible?)
There are quite a few specific and also generalised responses to this critique. Look for eg "Why does God permit evil?", "Why does God allow suffering?" and similar.)
That's addressed in Job.
There's different answers, even amongst the same religion, but even more across religions.
Btw, you might like https://unsongbook.com/
This got me thinking about the people who find value in his style, and I realized that the consistent feature was that they didn't care about understanding the material and, in some cases, were so incapable of doing so that the notion wouldn't occur to them. Not dumb, just not interested. They were simply transactional, and almost always very, very scared of talking in public, and this coach's method allowed them to get through it.
This also helped me realize that I don't particularly suffer from stage fright or public speaking anxiety, which has been a benefit, though it's important to note how insignificant that actually is. A family member has worked on stage with some extremely successful actors, and it's REMARKABLE how many of them have absolutely crushing stage fright. To me, that's more interesting than the line-learning thing: you take a person, someone most people in this thread would have heard of, and imagine them hiding out in a bathroom because their terrified of going onstage, then they get out there and utterly blow the room away. Something about pretending to be someone else unlocks so many actors.
This ties right back to my friction with this public speaking coach, because he was attempting to coach me into playing pretend, though without any empathy or understanding. So this guy is producing two categories of students: people like me who want to understand the material and the audience and simply speak like a better version of ourselves, and people who sound like they're selling you a car they've never driven but doing so competently, checking more "good public speaker" boxes at a superficial level.
I'm guessing the great actors and public speakers do both: love the material AND love the act of becoming a person you want to listen to.
FWIW, I mostly coach juniors at work who will brilliantly describe their current project to me at their desk but then fall apart in the conference room in front of peers and seniors. Mostly it's because they're trying to recite some prepared speech that doesn't sound like they normally talk (often desperately trying to impress the room). So I tell them their mastery of the material will impress the room and you sound plenty fine when explaining it to me at your desk. I don't have a full semester of instruction time to make them develop a style -- I have one hour the day before the meeting. So it doesn't produce great political orators. But it does help produce people who can walk through some deep technical work in front of their bosses.
>AND love the act of becoming a person you want to listen to.
And love that character too. That takes some self discovery, experimentation, and practice. Which is why I referred to it as a great effort.
Addendum: To give some credibility to my method, I often point out to them that they sound their best when speaking during data reviews. These are sessions where, following some kind of test, engineers gather to review sensor outputs. You have no time to prep a speech -- these are quickly assembled within hours of a test and are very much often just a loose collection of screenshots and quick annotations and the engineer in question usually spends that time copy pasting screenshots or driving back from a test site.
But once it's their turn to talk about some really obscure looking line graph, they will deliver some great, great public speaking. Why? They've spent the last 6 hours staring at this graph and know deeply how to interpret it.
By the way, this has given me reason to believe that Investment Banking decks largely are just to force junior associates to undergo the above process.
This is my experience as well, and ironically mirrors my time as a manager. I want to understand and empathize with people, and there are managers and orgs who absolutely don't want that, and want the "people who sound like they're selling you a car"
And as the other comments mention, actors very often do alter the lines. Behind the scenes footage and interviews with actors reveal this often happens because they think the screenwriter/director got it wrong in that particular moment -- that their character wouldn't respond like that.
The Han Solo example is a good one. Hours of takes saying "I love you too" and then Harrison Ford has a flash of clarity and realizes Han would NEVER respond like that. Calls for a quick take, "becomes Han Solo", says "I know" and the rest is history.
It's very rare that a conversation scene mirrors the dialogue exactly 1 to 1. Obviously there will be certain lines where the director wants exact delivery but actors very often deliver a slightly different line than as written.
If anything this frequency increases the higher level of profile / skill the actor has.
There are countless examples where a director is asked about scenes and defers the credit to the actors for improvising something particularly well or coming up with a better line to convey the same point - they are the ones, after all, in charge of personifying the character that was written. They may feel a different delivery suits the character better.
It's rare they say all lines exactly as in the script. In fact often the script gets updated with ideas that came up during shooting including improvised lines.
The biggest problem are writer/directors who cannot deal with improvising actors. Like a Haneke, who would turn around in his grave if an actor goes against his sacred script. That's why they have 25 shots per scene, and 3-6 months per shoot.
Sometimes a line just isn't working and an actor or the director or the writer or a grip will come up with something that works and that's what you hear about. Those are exceptions and not the rule.
The director has the final say. Often others higher up have the final say. If he wants you to say the line as written, you will say the line as written.
In general it's more common that some lines will change and be improvised by the actors, than not.
It's even practical, some lines come off as stiff when the actors tell them verbatim, others just can't be replicated in a longer emotionally charged scene (where the flow and the emotions carry the performance), and so on.
>Often others higher up have the final say. If he wants you to say the line as written, you will say the line as written.
DUH!
For a long time, I felt annoyed at the fact that my mom (who teaches language) would rightfully find more and more problems with the way I wrote. I felt as if I was losing some of my younger qualities (I was always considered a pretty good writer).
Now, though, I have realized that it's exactly as you described: I accidentally started writing as I talk — and that has morphed the writing into this sort of weird stream of consciousness thing with its own rules, ebbs 'n' ibbs. Most people who know me like what I write because they feel as if I'm talking with them via text. My personality is there. And as someone managing both bits and people, personality and the associated gift of energy is perhaps the best thing I can give my team.
I try to counteract this perceived reduction in quality by practicing my other passion: writing poetry :)
It will also be easier to improvise and fit the tone if you forget what you were supposed to say.
Aside from the above, which are about memory, it's also good for making it natural: you'll sound more authentic/natural speaking as you normally do, than trying some fancy speech, and it will also be easier to add off the cuff remarks that also fit the tone, like an idea that occured in the moment, or to respond to something that happens just before/while speaking.
play different personalities.
As a frequent public speaker and coach of others in public speaking, the top priority is to just deeply understand the material. The second priority is to create the habit write like you publicly speak (i.e develop a style).
You put these together, and you have no choice but to explain it the way you’d have written it anyways. This enforces resilience against interruptions and allows for improvisation.
But this is hard. It requires two great efforts: to deeply understand the material, and to craft a speaking/writing habit that makes for powerful, public speaking.
It doesn’t surprise me then, that actors do the same.