amen ... oftentimes a cache look-up is way faster than re-computation, and by developing your associative memory, you're effectively "increasing the size of your cache" over time, which is never a bad thing. some of the smartest people i know have incredible memories and are able to pull together memories from seemingly disparate times, places, and subjects to generate insights that are simply impossible to come up with by stubbornly deriving from first principles
Aye. That is what I do these days. But my long term retention rate for math formulae is nearly zero.
I just came home from a math exam. During the exam, I could recall almost every formula I had crammed last night. By tonight, I'll forget nearly half of them. In two weeks, I'll only remember 10% of the stuff I learned, and that too merely because some of those formulae were strikingly obvious or wonderfully symmetrical.
