This is a really important distinction, or at least it's an important distinction for me. Remembering as he is talking about it is what I do well, memorising I'm terrible at. So long as I understand the context of what I'm learning things stick in my brain very easily, if I don't have the context, I find it almost impossible to learn things.
I had a student a couple of years ago who asked to borrow a rock for her Native Religions class. Nothing fancy. Just ... a rock. I was curious enough to attend the class. The student explained that in many native traditions, the more ancient things are, the more wisdom they were felt to possess, and the rock symbolized this. (Now for years I had been hearing unkind comparisons of students to boxes of rocks, and though I never for a moment suspected these remarks were true, still, this incident made me wonder....)
The instructor (an Oneida Indian) went on to discuss the tradition of the Vision Quest, a process of meditating for spiritual guidance. A student asked if, once the guidance or insight had been gained, the seeker would write it down. The instructor answered "That would make sense in your culture, but" -- and here she put out a tremendously powerful piece of wisdom -- "we are taught to remember."
Not memorize, remember. Do you see the difference? Memorizing is storing information as disconnected fragments. Remembering is integrating information into the rest of your life.