I have always been terrible at rote memorization. I hated math when math meant "memorizing times tables," but luckily it quickly changed into problem solving in

I have always been terrible at rote memorization. I hated math when math meant "memorizing times tables," but luckily it quickly changed into problem solving instead. Further, it never made sense to me that people would want to memorize "facts" with no context - where's the "knowledge" in that? Even before smartphones and before the web, there was the Internet. I rejoiced! More information than I could store in my personal library available to me - wonderful! It meant that I could still focus on how things fit together and not frustrate myself with memorization. > The point is that we are offloading many tasks away from our brains, and then filling them up with garbage, such as this comment. My point is that certainly a lot of that memorization was garbage too. Garbage out, garbage in? There's also the added social advantage in not being branded an egghead for knowing obscure facts. Now we can just point to them on a phone.