Relevant convo between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (My choice of Italics highlights).
Below excerpt from A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887.
——
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
The flaw in the attitude of Sherlock Holmes is that he does not consider the, for the lack of a better term, "compressibility" of knowledge. Then again, Shannon wouldn't do his thing for another half century, so it would not be fair towards Sir Doyle to expect him to have taken this into consideration.
The brain actually does a lot of lossy compression tricks to remember things together, plus I doubt that knowledge about the Solar system takes up any significant amount of space in the brain, since physics works with models. Very "compressible" information, really. But if we look at how much lore people remember about modern pop-culture trivia, like comics or TV series or games, it's a different story. The amount of mental effort and "mind space" that fans dedicate to remembering, say, World of Warcraft lore is mindblowing to me at times.
I think there's a related problem that would have been understandable at the time: if you don't understand how the world works, you are potentially missing out on patterned information which allows one to form more accurate models of the world across domains. The assumption that's made seems to be that different problem domains are all independent, but that's not completely true. That's probably the main reason that mathematics and language are so useful.
> The assumption that's made seems to be that different problem domains are all independent, but that's not completely true. That's probably the main reason that mathematics and language are so useful.
To be fair, the effectiveness of multi-disciplinary research seems to only have been acknowledged in recent decades, even though by and large the biggest breakthroughs have almost always been thanks to people looking outside of the silos of their field. The sciences are really "tribal", and it used to be much worse.
For example, when I started studying in the early 2000s I remember the ML bachelor (then: AI) having recently split off from CompSci and being super-territorial.
I also heard stories of CompSci having split off from mathematics a few decades before that, and during my Interaction Design (IxD) master I learned that it separated from HCI in the nineties (short version: HCI was idolising the methods of the quantitative sciences too much for its own design-oriented good, IxD decided to bring in methods and insights from the qualitative fields).
I wonder if this was better or worse in Doyle's time.
I think a significant portion of my brain (Similar in size to the knowledge from my Bachelor's degree) was dedicated to remembering every quest and map up to WotLK. It's surprising how much I still remember from 7 years ago.
Funny enough, that might also reveal something about how human brains store information: locations on a map sounds suspiciously compatible with the method of loci (aka "memory palace", thanks to a more recent incarnation of Sherlock Holmes)
IIRC there is recent research confirming it is at least partially stored in the same are responsible for muscle memory, which supposedly explains quite a few things.
Came here to say this, which is the first thing I thought of after reading the title of this article.
Incidentally, I first read the Chinese version of "A Study in Scarlet". And I remember vividly (because I read it many times) what Sherlock said was translated as "Even if I had known it I would have tried to forget it". It wasn't until I read your comment did I realize it's actually "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." Funny.
The brain will keep around information that is used automatically. In my experience its a very bad idea to forgo learning something out of the expectation that it won't be used. I did this often, and it was catastrophic for me -- it turns out we're not very good assessors of what we will need.
There's a related corollary to this question though, which is whether systems that require less human memory enable you to remember other things better.
For example, your phone can dial dozens or hundreds of your friend's phones without you remembering their numbers. This means you never need to use their phone numbers and hence don't remember them. A reasonable question you might ask is whether you are now free to spend that brainpower memorizing other, more useful things? Or are you actually less capable of memorizing other things because you are exercising your memory less?
There are other similar examples, for example password managers and even just general Google-able trivia. Is it a good thing or a bad thing for general intelligence that humans need spend less time memorizing these things?
I felt this way for a long time about geospatial directions, but when your phone / gps dies and you have no map, it's kind of a terrifying feeling of helplessness
I skirt around this by instead of depending on turn by turn I study the main route and then only go to turn by turn at the endpoint. That way I gain the knowledge of the macro-infrastructure and main roads - I tend to give directions to out of towners even in cities I’ve been in for a week.
So from what I understand, there is a tradeoff to whether or not you memorize something.
When you have a piece of knowledge memorized, it has the capability to be activated in parallel with other known knowledge. These parallel activations result in a new / novel idea to your neural network. If these activations haven't been had before, they may be a breakthrough in science, technology, or otherwise.
So in one aspect, if you do not memorize, you can not associate and create new things.
Luckily, with phone numbers and locations it might not be important or valuable to have them memorized. But that's hard to say. Many scientific breakthroughs and discoveries were made by people who had cross-discipline knowledge and associated two things that no one thought were valuable together. Potentially, even googleable factoids could potentially contribute to a scientific breakthrough.
It reminds me of a story about Seymour Cray (founder or Cray super computer company). I've read it multiple times from different sources, copying it from first search result now.
He also invented the now-famous algorithm for buying cars: you go to the dealer closest to your house, point to the car closest to the door, and say: "I'll take that one."
The algorithm wastes the least time on unimportant things (like buying cars) to leave you the maximum time for doing important things (like designing supercomputers).
Below excerpt from A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887.
——
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”