I'm not sure we really know how much of learning is memorization. As we memorize more stuff, we find patterns to compress it and memorize more efficiently.
But the magic is in the “find patterns” stuff as memorization is just data storage. If you think of the machine learning algorithms as assigning items a point in a space, then it does uncover neighbors, sometimes ones we might not expect, and that’s interesting for sure.
But I’m not sure it’s analogous to what people do when they uncover patterns.
