Some kinds of creative insight depend on long-term memory

If a creative leap requires you to notice an unusual connection, coincidence, or contradiction in some stimulus, it’s often not good enough to be able to look up whatever you want. The critical creative insight is often equivalent to realizing that you should look a particular thing up. Often that’s only possible if you already have the constituents of the connection available in long-term memory, and flexibly encoded enough that you can make the leap from whatever stimulus is before you to that past idea.

References

https://twitter.com/sashachapin/status/1281417199568080896

Rote memorization obviously increases creativity and it should be done more for more subject areas by more people more of the time
Given that creativity is largely collage, it really helps to have more material lying around
The idea that having people memorize large amounts of information will stop them from “thinking critically” is insultingly wrong in ten obvious ways

Nielsen, M. (2018). Augmenting Long-term Memory. http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

Something I haven’t yet figured out is how to integrate Anki with note taking for my creative projects. I can’t replace note taking with Anki – it’s too slow, and for many things a poor use of my long-term memory. On the other hand, there are many benefits to using Anki for important items – fluid access to memory is at the foundation of so much creative thought.
Speed of associative thought is, I believe, important in creative work. – John Littlewood
In practice, I find myself instinctively and unsystematically doing some things as notes, others as Anki questions, and still other things as both. Overall, it works okay, but my sense is that it could be a lot better if I applied more systematic thought and experimentation. Part of the problem is that I don’t have a very good system for note taking, period! If I worked more on that, I suspect the whole thing would get a lot better. Still, it works okay.

Klein - Seeing What Others Don’t (2013)