From Memory

This week I had a very humbling experience. I realized I no longer knew how to do multiplication and division by hand.

About a month ago I started studying for a big certification in the strength and conditioning world. Part of this exam is about understanding variables in strength training and how you can manipulate them for different training effects. How much force do you need to apply to move an object? How does changing the mass of that object change how much force you need to apply? How does changing the speed with which you move the object change the amount of power you are generating? And more broadly, how do these variables affect which bioenergy system is used to create energy for these actions? How can you use diet and nutrition to fuel that energy system for better performance? These are all questions I should be able to answer on the certifying exam. And they are questions I will have to answer without using a calculator.

Though the skills of multiplying and dividing numbers by hand came back relatively quickly after a YouTube lesson, I was struck by how such a basic mathematic process I had done hundreds or thousands of times in my life could be wiped out by a decade of relying on a calculator. The older I get the more I realize the truth of the adage: what we don’t use, we lose. Perhaps it’s not lost permanently from the brain but certainly from easy use. It makes me wonder how many other skills or activities I did with ease as a child or teenager have atrophied with disuse.

But I was also surprised how much joy I derived from relearning this skill. Way more than I ever did while learning it in school. Maybe that’s the point though. We forget things in order to relearn or re-experience them later in a more meaningful way.