Hacker News Reader

If storing information and creating associations between bits of it were 'learning', then databases would be very smart indeed.

No, learning is not 'storing pieces of information in long-term memory and recalling them'. It's not the ability to recall information. At the very least, learning is information+behavior change+understanding+values and attitudes associated with the information. It's much more complex than memorization and recall.

View on HN

Thanks for sharing this and I've been certainly thinking along the same lines.

To add to this, I've known many folks that can accomplish certain tasks almost automatically and creatively. If you asked them to recall exactly what they did to achieve it they couldn't. And this usually isn't action on concrete information either but on intuition alone.

If humans worked primarily on memory we'd have been toast a long time ago. There's too much variation in the natural world to confront it solely on the basis of memory. I'd say we're more experientially oriented as opposed to memory oriented

Reply on news.ycombinator.com