- Your follow up I think is the answer to this, Nielsen does a pretty good job of it. There’s a spectrum of value: At the minimum it saves time, at the maximum, it makes a subject area a first language, and allows you to think in that space more easily (super-chunking?). Even more basically, the value of memorization is dependent on what you memorize, and how long you remember it for. So if you don’t memorize valuable information (chunks that either save you time, or help you move up and down levels of abstraction easily) and don’t use spaced repetition, then probably not much value in memorization.