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Comment by alankay1 | Hacker News Reader

A start here would be to see if your reading of the AMA resulted in an accurate memory. For example, did I actually claim to have read "20,000+ books"? What did I actually say? No amount of speed is going to help if the recall is so noisy? And, something to ponder, it would have been easy to look to see if what you attributed to me was accurate? Why didn't you? And so forth.

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My mistake, I should have looked! I now recall you saying that your friends have read more than that.

I will practice more thorough accreditation. Thanks for taking the time to point this out!

Here is something for all to ponder. Remember when someone switched the TV channel into the middle of a movie you haven't seen for 20 years. How long did it take for you to recognize the movie? And how often did you have a good sense of what is next? Most people report "a second or so". Think about this: when you saw the movie you were not trying to remember it, you did not know you would be tested 20 years later. One way to think of this is that it is highly likely that memory is not the problem to be dealt with, but that recall is.

Do you take notes while/after reading a book?

I suppose that would increase recall, and you could always re-read your notes to remember the most interesting points.

I don't take notes. (It's worth pondering whether taking notes is really an aid to internal remembering...) In any case, what I was trying to point out was that it could be the case that we actually remember almost everything, but have real difficulties in recalling our memories without cues. (It's also worth pondering just what it is that "autistic savants" might actually be doing ...)

Aren't we reading, in part, for recall of insights (during conversations, brainstorming, or otherwise)?

If we take notes, our eyes are away from the text itself, practicing a simple exercise in recall. In a sense, you are "chunking" the concept.

In addition, the commonplace book become your second brain, an accumulation of cues that will trigger the chunks. A semi-permanent digital repository of knowledge that you can tap into on need-basis.

Whizzing through a book without necessary stops for chunking seems to put to question why we read in the first place.

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