Regarding the distinction you make between improving deliberate information recall and improving spontaneous/sublime association: John Crowley's fantasy novel Little, Big has a character who uses a memory palace (aka. the method of loci) not just to commit facts to memory, but also to do detective work in the sense of joining the dots together. The palace is a place for reflection and discovery. At one point her attention is drawn to a room of the palace by a cowbell ringing in it, so the palace formalizes and increases awareness of the process of recognizing the relevance of a memory. Another character uses his palace (by physically walking around the real analogue of the imagined place) to perfectly preserve emotionally significant experiential memories.
This is a fictional portrayal which verges on astral projection sometimes. I have no idea to what extent it's grounded in reality, or even to what extent the author thought it was, and I haven't tried to emulate it. I've read somewhere that the method of loci was developed by ancient rhetors to memorize speeches, which sounds more like what you were complaining about.
I agree with lagrangian that rote memorization doesn't preclude forming associations. Organizing information in preparation for rote memorization can require decisions about what associations to make: if you want to memorize the periodic table, do you memorize periods or groups at a time, or mappings between atomic numbers and elements, or mappings from a given element to its immediate neighbours? In making this decision you are effectively selecting triggers of relevance and the information that should float into your mind in response to them.
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Regarding the distinction you make between improving deliberate information recall and improving spontaneous/sublime association: John Crowley's fantasy novel Little, Big has a character who uses a memory palace (aka. the method of loci) not just to commit facts to memory, but also to do detective work in the sense of joining the dots together. The palace is a place for reflection and discovery. At one point her attention is drawn to a room of the palace by a cowbell ringing in it, so the palace formalizes and increases awareness of the process of recognizing the relevance of a memory. Another character uses his palace (by physically walking around the real analogue of the imagined place) to perfectly preserve emotionally significant experiential memories.
This is a fictional portrayal which verges on astral projection sometimes. I have no idea to what extent it's grounded in reality, or even to what extent the author thought it was, and I haven't tried to emulate it. I've read somewhere that the method of loci was developed by ancient rhetors to memorize speeches, which sounds more like what you were complaining about.
I agree with lagrangian that rote memorization doesn't preclude forming associations. Organizing information in preparation for rote memorization can require decisions about what associations to make: if you want to memorize the periodic table, do you memorize periods or groups at a time, or mappings between atomic numbers and elements, or mappings from a given element to its immediate neighbours? In making this decision you are effectively selecting triggers of relevance and the information that should float into your mind in response to them.
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