Memory and Learning III

Before I would let the learner learn an 11th plant, s/he must learn a lot about the 10 s/he has selected. Let's take an example of a plant to see what I mean. Suppose that one of the plants that arrested a person is the Bird of Paradise, or the Strelitzia reginae. The first thing the person might do is to look it up online--with the Wikipedia article. Though s/he had seen the Strelitzia reginae, and thus wanted to learn about it, s/he also would learn that there were four other species of the Strelitzia, and that the tallest one (nicolai) grew to the height of 10 meters. S/he would be informed that the leaves were similar to those of a banana plant, but with some signficant differences. Thus, even as knowledge was getting firmer, other "lures" were put out there. But it would not yet be the time to go to that new knowledge (i.e., looking up the banana plant). We are still trying to internalize knowledge of the Strelitzia reginae.

After learning some of the characteristics of the genus, one might turn to the name itself. Why is it called Strelitzia reginae? First, when we go to the entry under Strelitzia in the online Century Dictionary, we see "Aiton 1789." A little checking yields the knowledge that this Aiton was William Aiton (1731-1793), a Scottish botanist, whose claim to fame was to publish the 1789 Hortus Kewensis, a catalogue of the plants at Kew Gardens, London. His son, William Townsend Aiton (1766-1849) was responsible for the second edition, 1810-13. The Kew Garden Botanical Garden contained most species of plants in England, and the publication of this book was a milestone in the history of botanical gardens--and their publication. So, see what we have learned even before we have learned anything about Streletzia? But we have to make sure we aren't going down the rabbit hole of studying the Hortus, even though Aiton's work is online and would probably be a worthwhile read. Indeed, I made the "mistake" of looking at it for a second, and already, in the preface, where it refers to the "younger Linnaeus" and the Linneaus who made a trip to England in 1781-82 (no doubt to catalogue all the plants he could get his hands on), I saw that I could drop deeply into the history of Linnaeus' great work, and learn so much about history and plants and who knows how much more.

But I restrained myself because actually, what I was intending to do, was to discover why the Strelitzia is so called. The Century Dictionary goes on to say, "named after Queen Charlotte, wife of George III (boo, hiss), of England, and descended from the German house of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Bingo. We don't know at this point if the flower was discovered when she was queen; so we pause and realize that there is more to learn...big time. Well, I decided to check one other place to see what I could learn. The entry under Strelitzia in the OED lists its first usage as 1789, in the aformentioned Hortus Kewensis! Here is the quotation: "Strelitzia...Canna-leav'd Strelitzia. Nat. of the Cape of Good Hope. Intro. 1773, by Sir Joseph Banks, Bart." Now this opens some fascinating worlds, because it connects us to the leading British botanist of the day, Banks (1743-1820; the Bart means "Baronet"), who was also the chief advisor to George III on the creation of Kew Gardens and was a world-explorer and gatherer of plants from all over the world. In fact, all those species of flowers that our learner will some day recognize as "Banksia" are named after him.

What We Have Learned So Far

Thus, our eager learner would have discovered many of these things about the Strelitzia and would have, we hoped, been overjoyed to see the various ways that a simple identification of a flower could lead to tremendous riches of knowledge. Our learner would realize right away that s/he needs a system of learning and storing information or else all the beautiful things s/he was learning about only one plant would be lost. So, perhaps s/he decides to learn about four other interesting facts about the Strelitzia reginae (of the queen). But, guess what? There is no way in the world that the person would ever forget what a Strelitzia was or looked like.

The key, however, in learning, is not simply to do this one project, and learn several things about the Strelitzia and perhaps even to take an hour to dig deeper into history or the history of horticulture, but also to return to the other nine items and do the same thing with them. It would be rare, however, if each of the other nine would yield as deep and useful information about the world as our little journey did about Strelitzia. But the method has to be repeated, because this is the way that real knowledge begins to lodge deeply in the mind. With each new plant or flower the method for finding knowledge is refined; sometimes the Latin name tells you little, and you spend more time appreciating the plant than you do the history. Other times the names will be equally suggestive. Most important, however, is the learning and then recording of information about this flower, the Bird of Paradise, so that this knowledge can be at your fingertips.

What you will discover, if you haven't already done so, is that this method will begin to affect the way you look at all knowledge. You will no longer be satisfied with just the New York Times take on an issue; if you want to study the issue, you will learn to go much deeper, and you will learn that knowledge is your best friend in the world.

The next essay shows how I put this into practice in my own learning.

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