Memorizing Sports Facts Can Prepare a Brain for Life
August 13th 2008 23:57
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From: The Wall Street Journal
Dr. Pauling taught first-year chemistry at Cal Tech for many years. All of his exams were closed book, and the students complained bitterly. Why should they have to memorize Boltzmann's constant when they could easily look it up when they needed it? I paraphrase Mr. Pauling's response: I was always amazed at the lack of insight this showed. It's what you have in your memory bank -- what you can recall instantly -- that's important. If you have to look it up, it's worthless for creative thinking.
He proceeded to give an example. In the mid-1930s, he was riding a train from London to Oxford. To pass the time, he came across an article in the journal, Nature, arguing that proteins were amorphous globs whose 3D structure could never be deduced. He instantly saw the fallacy in the argument -- because of one isolated stray fact in his memory bank -- the key chemical bond in the protein backbone did not freely rotate, as was argued. Linus knew from his college days that the peptide bond had to be rigid and coplanar.
He began doodling, and by the time he reached Oxford, he had discovered the alpha helix. A year later, his discovery was published in Nature. In 1954, Linus won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. The discovery lies at the core of many of the great advances in medicine and pharmacology that have occurred since.
Mr. Freeman, encourage your kid's appetite for memorizing, whatever form it takes. I'm with Linus -- that skill is a gift that lies at the core of intelligence and creativity.
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