Einstein and books
When one of Albert Einstein’s colleagues asked the eminent physicist for his telephone number one day, he reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. “You don’t remember your own number?” the man asked, understandably startled. “No,” Einstein replied with a shrug. “Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?”
Though this story is likely apocryphal, Einstein did claim never to memorize anything which could be looked up in less than two minutes.1
So…why the fuck is rote learning so prevalant in a googling society?
1http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=12510
January 30th, 2007 at 2:49 am
Well, maybe because with some things, we just don’t have two minutes… like in medicine… It’d be sad to lose a patient because the doctor had to take a few minutes to Google how to save his life… LoL…Just a thought… =)
February 6th, 2007 at 3:18 am
Einstein wouldn’t bother to remember phone numbers because/so he always kept the phone directory nearby. Logic.
While us? we carry around a ‘hi-tech hand gadget’ with built in calendar, phone book and even Google and yet we still remind ourselves not to forget to carry the damn thing around and look up the information inside
and sooner or later, man will come up with the one that attached to our head. What are we?
LAZY
So better use your brain to memorize certain things as you will most likely to carry it all the time and that is why rote learning could be important and totally useful.