"Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good." Nietzsche

Being a "thinker", this quote resonates through my body. While it is a very short quote, simple and to the point. It is long enough to ignite thinking.

First, let’s explore just what the terms thinking and memory mean. The American Heritage dictionary states that thinking is to have or formulate in the mind; to ponder, to reason. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience. While both words involve action in the brain, their functions differ.

Memory contains a certain structure. Past events, knowledge gain, and facts learned are all stored in the mind’s database in a static manner. Thinking is free flowing. Its indexes are assigned dynamically. Thus, knowledge connections can weave brilliant new patterns during thinking.

So how can good memories impair thinking? Let’s "think" about this for a moment. "S/he has a sharp mind." What is being implied here is that s/he is able to efficiently retrieve previously stored information. Ask them a question and they can give you the correct answer quickly. The more efficient their database is the more fixed their connections become and the less likely that they will explore alternative paths.

Ah the thinker. The thinker may be just as capable of swiftly retrieving called upon data as the non-thinker. However, for the thinker, their neural paths are not always well-traveled routes. For example, a rose may not "instantly" link to "a flowering plant" in the mind of a thinker. Instead, the journey from rose to flowering plant would contain many side-trips. The word rose may first take the thinker to their grandmother, from there to her famous vegetable soup, next to the smell of her home, the warmth of the sunlight pouring in the back window, to the garden just outside that window, the flowers that grew in that garden, to the stars in the sky,…, and eventually ending up at "a flowering plant". Well, maybe! What a shame it would be to not be able to allow one’s mind to explore uncharted paths. It is from these expeditions that new knowledge, insights, and creativity springs forth.

The "great" minds are the world have all been thinkers - Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, daVinci, Michelangelo, Socrates, Plato, Kant, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein, to name a few. Their legacy is in not what they knew but in what they thought/created.