When learning something new it is best to create a logical pathway to this information that you are storing in your

brain. Consider this metaphor: you are taken to a facility in a large remote island with no knowledge of getting to said facility. All you know is you are at the facility. A couple of weeks later you are transported from that facility to another. Later, you are told to go back to the first facility. It would be rather difficult to find a facility on a large island without knowing where to start. Memorization is like this; you only become aware of the destination, or the material. Then, once you are relocated, forgotten the material, there is no way of reaching the location again because you don't know how to get there. However, if you had a map or some sense of direction you could retrace those steps and get to the destination. This is the local pathway to reaching where you want to be. Imagine your brain similar to this. If you memorize something then it is stored in a place in your brain. It is there, but it is not connected to anything. It becomes like a floating folder of information. As your brain gets distracted the folder gets pushed around by other ideas and it becomes lost, sometimes even destroyed, because it has no real connection or significance. However, you can tie down this information by connecting it, that is, building a pathway that logically makes sense and will always lead you to that information stored in your brain. The advantage of this is even if you forget the information you can trust your brain to follow this pathway, through common logic, and eventually lead you back to the information you are trying to remember. This is why, in a sense, understanding why and how something is, rather than memorizing, is more favorable because by engaging in this activity, you promote the construction of such pathway. This idea was promoted by the decimal-to-binary problem. Say, at one point, you knew the binary representation of the integers 1 through 15. Years later you want to rewrite these integers in binary notation. If you memorized the binary representation of these integers, then it is mostly likely you won't remember these patterns. However, if you understood the process of converting decimal to binary and vise versa and why this process works/why we do this process, then you could simply follow the guidelines of conversion, that you should be familiar with, to lead you to the correct binary representation of the integers. I stand by this idea because it happened to me.