Recognition can be just as important as recall, or even more. My current research on a certain new kind of neural networks shows that recall, in fact, equals recognition. It’s just a very finely tuned recognition that let’s you recognize your attempt at remembering and gives you the effect.
Through my life though, I have never had good ‘by heart’ recall. Instead I used the following approach: to learn something, understand how it came to be. That’s basically a very robust method of using only recognition to not just get a simple recall, but to infer that recall.
For example, when remembering a movie/series plot, I start from several key points I do remember, that are defining the movie in question for me (i.e. what parts of it will let me instantly recognize it when I see it). I then imagine the plot, polish it to remove errors, till I get the feeling that it’s exactly the movie I’m trying to remember, like if I watched it. And I get the full plot with details then. Even if I just watched it once and never cared to remember.
Same can be done with almost anything: songs and music, theorems and ideas, practical experience and expertise, even just memories. Literally everything that’s guided by some thought process and/or logic (only thing that I couldn’t learn by that is poems).
And ways to remember stuff by training recall, like those shown in the article, never ever worked for me, without very significant effort. Also, I believe that such process as I described supercharges your thinking and gives you much more capacity to create new things.
So hope this helps someone to get to remember stuff with using only recognition — and maybe someone will too train to do it that way and excel at creative thinking in the process. And maybe people will stop constantly asking for instant recall when verifying expertise, and let the thinking process happen (or googling process to happen).
