The interplay of memory and skill is something that interests me a lot, even though I claim no expertise in the field.
Historical evidence implies that it is true that the people who are able to leverage the tools at their disposal (be that actual tools like cell phones or just applying recent scientific breakthroughs) tend to do well in their life.
On the other hand, we have the idea that the mind is a muscle and it works best if we train it hard. In this mindset, we see objects as crutches that are best to be avoided in order to improve the mind as efficiently as possible.
I and people around me tend to focus on the first paradigm, leaving the second one unexplored.
One of the reasons may be that it is still largely philosophical: if you wanted to improve your memory, what would you do? There are books on people that use tricks to remember large digits and other chunks of data (the brother of Jonathan Safran, Joshua Foer, wrote one).
However, most of us believe that this is not the same type of memorization that can enable us to do pattern matching in our memories faster (which is what mathematicians need the most, being able to see parallels to math they've done before).
And even if we had a trick to pattern-match faster, in order to raise it from the level of "it was described in popular literature, but has no scientific basis" like mind maps and such, we would have to conduct very large studies to verify its validity, which is something that is not done at all in this area.
As a side remark, this is the same problem I have with nootropics. What works and what doesn't? For memorization and focus, it seems ADD medicine works somewhat. For Paul Erdös it was amphetamines which boosted his creativity -- is that better for us mathematicians? And what do these drugs do with us in the long term? Almost all evidence is anecdotal, and I'm not willing to risk my health to be a smarter scientist.
> On the other hand, we have the idea that the mind is a muscle and it works best if we train it hard. In this mindset, we see objects as crutches that are best to be avoided in order to improve the mind as efficiently as possible.
Those crutches frees up time to let one work on other muscles; muscles that might not have any known crutches (like practicing reading maps instead of practicing navigating by the stars some centuries ago).
Historical evidence implies that it is true that the people who are able to leverage the tools at their disposal (be that actual tools like cell phones or just applying recent scientific breakthroughs) tend to do well in their life.
On the other hand, we have the idea that the mind is a muscle and it works best if we train it hard. In this mindset, we see objects as crutches that are best to be avoided in order to improve the mind as efficiently as possible.
I and people around me tend to focus on the first paradigm, leaving the second one unexplored.
One of the reasons may be that it is still largely philosophical: if you wanted to improve your memory, what would you do? There are books on people that use tricks to remember large digits and other chunks of data (the brother of Jonathan Safran, Joshua Foer, wrote one).
However, most of us believe that this is not the same type of memorization that can enable us to do pattern matching in our memories faster (which is what mathematicians need the most, being able to see parallels to math they've done before).
And even if we had a trick to pattern-match faster, in order to raise it from the level of "it was described in popular literature, but has no scientific basis" like mind maps and such, we would have to conduct very large studies to verify its validity, which is something that is not done at all in this area.
As a side remark, this is the same problem I have with nootropics. What works and what doesn't? For memorization and focus, it seems ADD medicine works somewhat. For Paul Erdös it was amphetamines which boosted his creativity -- is that better for us mathematicians? And what do these drugs do with us in the long term? Almost all evidence is anecdotal, and I'm not willing to risk my health to be a smarter scientist.