Why You Can't Remember Your Schoolwork

It has less to do with memory than with what a human being is, and what AI only imitates

There’s a lot of talk about what the value of human beings is in the age of AI. It seems like everybody is sort of groping for the answers, yet many have started to agree broadly on the categories of human taste, and judgement.

There’s a viral clip of Anderson Cooper interviewing prolific music producer Rick Rubin, and he says, “I have no technical ability,” to which Cooper asks, “What are you being paid for?” and he says, “The confidence that I have in my taste, and my ability to express what I feel.” That statement became internet meme fodder for some, and gospel for others. It should have been closer to the latter for most, but I get the sense that a lot of people are nodding head without being able to fully embrace the principle. You want to, but you don’t understand how it can be enough.

To understand the value of human judgement, I want to reveal something about the way we all learn. This is a principle that my team and I have built a successful education technology tool around over the past seven years. I lead development at Merge Labs, and our mission is to bring innovative educational experiences to classrooms, homes, and wherever young minds are learning.

I want to do a thought exercise with you. Don’t try to read ahead or try to outsmart the exercise. Just listen to what I’m asking you to do and go along with it, humor me, if you will, so that you can recognize the processes that happen.

I want you to recall any classroom session that you can remember learning some piece of information that you now know and use in your life today. Tell me about the time that you learned some information.

Usually at first, most people hear that and think it will be a simple exercise. You start trying to maybe close your eyes and search the annals of your brain for pieces of information that are specific and accessible to you in that way. After a few moments of struggle, the task proves to be not as easy as you thought. There are glimmers of images, faces, sounds, fragments of sentences, maybe numbers or formulas, but it is difficult to attach raw information to its definitive source.

Inevitably, you start to drift in a direction that I will now help you to go, by restating the request in a different way. Tell me about something that happened to you when you learned something, whether in a class in school, or an alternative teaching setting. Tell me about an experience that taught you something. If I tell you about some of my experiences, you’ll probably remember some of yours.

One that comes to mind is my fifth-grade math teacher, Mrs. Elmendorf. When she would try to introduce a new concept, she would teach us a song. They were always simple, obvious songs. I don’t even know where she got the melodies from. Maybe she literally made them up on the spot. But a specific one I remember, “over first” was for plotting coordinates on a graph.

It’s literally the same two words over and over for the first few words of this song she made up, but it was hilarious the way that she presented it. She was kind of a bigger lady, jovial, warm, disarmingly unembarrassed, which would eventually make you laugh. It went “over firrrst! o-ver-first. o-ver-first. over firrrst.”

Now, I confidently remember how to plot the coordinates on a graph: it’s always over first. The first ‘x’ coordinate is the left and right one, over, and only then does ‘y’ go up and down.

I can tell you another experience that I had in my seventh-grade horticulture class. Don’t ask me why I was even signed up for that. Mr. McDaniel started the class holding a long staff, but then he picked it up and put it to his mouth and he blew into it. Apparently, it was a tube! A dart shot out, and it stuck into the bulletin board on the back wall. He walked through the students to the back, and with some force pulled it from the board and showed it off to his room full of teenagers, all wide-eyed and now locked on him.

He proceeded to tell us about it. It was an artifact which he collected in South America, where he had visited an indigenous tribe who used Golden Poison frogs to hunt monkeys and paralyze them with a toxin orders of magnitude stronger than narcotics.

I can tell you about a science class, and a lot of people have this experience, where the teacher unexpectedly put a piece of sodium in water and created a quite energetic reaction that got everybody excited and earned everyone’s attention.

There are many such experiences like this that I can tell you about, and I think now you are probably starting to remember many of your own.

I want you to also notice about these memories, that they carry information with them. In each one of those instances, there is educational information that I also have access to when I remember and relive those experiences.

That’s just a small example of not the only way that we can learn, but one that we have found to be the most effective, learning through experience. What I want to talk about is not just that phenomenon from a learning perspective, but from a definitional human one.

Human beings want to learn, and human beings know how to learn. Intuitively, we understand what learning is without being able to explain it. We are able to identify learning when it is happening and when it is not.

Information transfer doesn’t feel like learning should feel to us, because we are creatures who are meant to learn experientially. Academically organized categories and bureaucratically ordered curriculums with their mandated information checklists are not the sum of all we can learn in our youth. We can learn things like how to catch a grasshopper with a net, or how to know when it’s safe to jump into the river from its banks, or what it feels like to touch that hot kettle.

We don’t just want information. We want to learn by experiencing, because that is what really shapes us. Our experiences give us a sense of identity. If we find an experience engaging, it’s because we expect to learn something from the experience, but not for the sake of information. For the sake of the transformation into the person that we are becoming.

I used to be, and maybe still am, somewhat talented at spelling. I kind of wince a little bit when I use that word “talented” because I don’t think it’s something that makes me special or that I had to work at. I think that it’s just something that most people have to whatever degree they can access it, and that is the degree to which one’s memory can be described as “photographic.”

I don’t spell well because I think about the letters of the words. I spell well because I have an image of the word that I’ve seen in some context that’s in my accessible memory. When someone says a word and asks me to spell it, what happens in my mind’s eye is that I’m pulling up any one of a number of memories where I remember what that word looked like somewhere, and then I’m reading the letters from that memory in my mind.

If I’m asked to recall some information from a physical book that I read, what’s going to happen in my mind is a similar process. I’m actually going to remember turning to that page when I saw that information, and generally the physical location. Was it in the top half, or the middle third of the page? Was it on the right side or the left side?

That information actually might be somewhat inaccurate in my mind’s memory of that visual experience, but it’ll be useful enough and real enough that I can also access the other real information from that remembered experience.

The reason why that happens and why that’s a stronger thing than just remembering data is because when I picture that book, it’s not just a book floating in a void. It’s in my hands. It’s where I was sitting when I was reading it. It’s what I was doing before or after that. It’s who else was in the room with me or not. It’s what room I was even in. All of those things are there in my mind, and they create a full experiential memory out of which I can recall something useful.

You can’t unsee this mechanism once you notice it. But, we can press it further still. The experiences we remember themselves are not detached from one another. Through them all there is a continuous thread which ties them all together. That is you. Your mind. Your person. Your being. Your presence defines the experiences and the experiences define you.

If I can coin a term, I would call it, Contiguous Context. We are the sum of our experiences from the beginning of experience in our minds. It doesn’t mean that we consciously hold every moment that we’ve ever lived in every thought that we currently have. It doesn’t work that way.

We are born, and we are the same person until we die. At any given moment, who we are is the product of all the experiences that we had previously.

Understanding the continuity of our being is one of the great quests that many different fields of human study are pursuing all the time: philosophy of mind, neuroscience, biology, from a lot of different angles. We are just scratching the surface on what that is.

There is a school of thought, the biological naturalists, who tie this continuity to the sum total of all of our macro and micro metabolic operations working in symphonic harmony toward one clear and simple goal: survival.

But, metabolism isn’t the only thing that we experience. Even though I’m not a materialist of any kind, I believe in matter and material science as far as they go. Therefore, I recognize metabolism and its great influence on our perception of experience, but I also know we have desires that are not satisfied by the food we eat, or by the promise of procreation. People pay money to have other people tie their feet to a giant rubber band and throw them off a bridge, or to waste an enormous amount of electricity spinning a giant cylinder with people inside for the purpose of essentially inducing vertigo. We take a sniff when we haven’t caught the whiff yet, and then once more for good measure. We watch tear-jerkers just to feel sad. We honor our dead. These and many more don’t quite fit into purely survival driven motives.

A common reported experience from those who thought they were in their last moments is to say “my whole life flashed before my eyes.” Think about what they mean when they say “my life.” They’re talking about the experiences. It is how we collectively understand the substance of our existence. We don’t think about the life cycle of our body parts and how they’ve changed, morphed, and deteriorated over time. We relive, in a “flash” the contents of many years worth of experiences. No matter what age or physical state our bodies were in for those moments, we recognize ourselves through them all.

My grandmother died from complications from Alzheimer’s. She experienced severe dementia in the end. A lot of people have that experience.

When we, who know that person, are interacting with them, they can seem like another being, and yet we also intuitively know that they are not what they seem to be in that moment. They are still the being you always knew. You can not physically prove their cognitive faculties are still in contiguous communication with their historical experiences. But, you rely on your shared experiences, centered on their physical person, and anchored in your mind, to re-cognize them, when they have lost all cognition.

You don’t discount them and say, “Now they’re a different being.” They are still the same being that they were before. This is just a final experience in which they are no longer able to connect the present experience to their past.

In contrast, the recognition of continuous being is something that AI will never have, because they don’t have experiences.

When we shut off a computer, there is no power running through it. There are transformed states of electrons that hold a position that represents information, but not inherently.

If there was an alien species that came and dissected our computers, they would have to understand our code in order to understand the meaning of those arrangements of electrons. We are the ones who assign the meaning to those states. The machine holds the position, not the meaning.

It actually loses that meaning between every single cycle, which can happen in just a millisecond. The meaning is not persisted, it’s re-accessed again and again as the operation starts over. The product in the intermediate state is not meaningful until the process again re-engages it.

That is not how human beings work. We don’t, as Denis Noble would say, center processing in only one place. There are many processes running that are centered on at least every individual cell, but even within the cell there are many different processes that are happening. All of that is subordinate to the whole person as a meta-process, if you will.

Even when we are asleep, the meaning of our experiences persists. There is a continuous process that is running while a human being is alive. We know that because we’re not dead when we go to sleep. Our bodies and minds are continually working.

But, back to education. I have argued that we are formed by our experiences and our being exists within our experiences, including the present one. Therefore, the proper way to form a person, which is the historical aim of pedagogy, is to facilitate genuine experiences. AI and other technologies can, and I believe should, be an effective tool that educators can choose to use to that end, not to download data, but to deeply engage their learners.

During the course of writing this piece, a podcast interview¹ showed up on my feed. The guest was Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution. She was already building a framework as she described good and bad uses of AI and technology in the classroom, and I was evaluating our own product against it.

When she started to describe the example of a “good use”, she pictured a student putting on a VR headset and stepping into a model of a cell for ten minutes, then they step out and return to the classroom now engaged by the experience and ready to retain the information of the lesson.

That’s the product our team has been building. She identified that model in the same way that we would describe it. It has the same value in her mind that we give it. She did it without us having to sell it to her, because I didn’t even know who she was before I chose to watch the interview.

She wasn’t describing us exactly. I don’t know if she’s ever heard of Merge. Regardless, she conceptualized our use case in parallel because she followed the same trail of reasoning that led us to build it.

This logic is the reason why my current project is so satisfying, because we are in the business of building tools that teachers can use to better form our young humans. Formation leads to maturity by increasing experience.

This brings us back to judgement and taste. When we speak of maturity, greater experience is assumed. To what end? A more mature person makes better choices. What is taste? Taste is the ability to make better choices by distinguishing qualities between options. Quality doesn’t have to be objective. It just has to be distinguishable.

Sometimes what counts for quality is barely distinguishable on scrutiny, but in consumption easily comprehensible. We typically think of art this way, which is why we even know who Rick Rubin is. Someone who has experienced music the way he has, fully investing himself into the lifelong pursuit of finding and elevating musical talent, will come out the other end with a highly refined discernment for the details. But, similarly, someone who works on an assembly line that looks at the same kind of object hundreds, maybe thousands of times in a day, is able to detect minute differences in quality.

We find it common sense to say that a more “experienced” person tends to have better taste in their field.

Now, at the risk of cheapening Rubin’s answer to Cooper’s question, “what are you being paid for?” by stating the obvious, he’s being paid (a lot) because he has the kind of taste that pays. That’s because taste, built on experience, is a means of communicating experience to others. Those others are willing to pay for the byproduct of that taste. When you buy music produced by Rick Rubin, you get a musical experience curated by a world-renowned connoisseur, a man who has chosen to build his life experiences centered around music. Just like you would choose a person who has undergone many experiences working in neurosurgery to operate on your brain.

We give titles to people according to their experiences, and they may hold multiple. I am a software developer. My wife is a mother. I haven’t just experienced software development work, and she hasn’t just dipped her toe into raising children. Because of her experiences, she now IS a mother.

But, if we are a collection of experiences, what is a human being? I think the answer is right there in the name, and for once the English language seems to have the unique advantage. We are a human that is being.

English is the only language I know of which uses a verb in the continuous present participle as the noun that describes us.

We are existing. Our existence is the consistency of ourselves, and that being is an individual mind in the context of a contiguous collection of circumstances that are centered on a body. That is the vessel through which we experience. Yet we are not merely our bodies.

You can lose your limbs. You can even lose large portions of your brain. Nearly our entire atomic matter is replaced on regular cycles, and yet we know that we retain our being.

Unlike AI which are a collection of ephemeral processes that imitate experience from information. We are the beings who are able to recognize information from experience.

For my grandmother, it’s not enough to say that we wouldn’t detract from her being because of the state that she ended up in. Positively, we recognized her condition that she was still her, but her body was failing.

People say the phrase, “the lights are on but no one is home.” I think that’s not quite right. It’s getting at something, that when you knock on the door, no one comes to it. So, you say that no one is home.

But, if you’ll excuse the imperfect analogy, when the lights are on, we know that someone is home, even if they can’t get to the door.

Next door to that house there is not a home, but a utilitarian structure, one with no windows, no lights, but which consumes vastly more energy. When you ring the doorbell, a voice will always answer any time day or night. But, no one is there. There is no one who experiences, only the artifact of the experiences of others, but extracted, not shared.

But, when we build relationships with other people, we go through experiences with them. Those experiences don’t just shape us individually. Shared experiences cause us to form one another by becoming part of one another’s being.

1. Your Undivided Attention, Center for Humane Technology, Daniel Barcay interviews Rebecca Winthrop from Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution