Reading Information Aloud to Yourself Improves Memory: Study | Hacker News Reader

Reading Information Aloud to Yourself Improves Memory: Study

neurosciencenews.com

143 pointslxm41 comments

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This is not surprising. Methods of learning that require more effort improve memory. These include:

- Reading text that has the font a little fuzzy so it's harder to read.

- Reading text with underscores substituted for obvious letters.

- Asking yourself questions about what you've just read.

- Asking yourself questions about what you're about to read based on headings.

- Finding ways to relate the content to other things you have in your head.

If you're interested in making things stick, I'd suggest the book "Make it Stick" - it's a great read about what things actually help one retain knowledge. It's because I read that book that I'm not surprised by this result.

+ taking notes while reading

Yup. Somewhat counterintuitively, rereading is the least effective retention method.

> - Asking yourself questions about what you're about to read based on headings. > - Finding ways to relate the content to other things you have in your head.

These two things I think is the key for learning any thing, specially programming. What is expected gain out of a programming chapter and how does it relate to what you know already.

Yeah. Making it harder to read slows you down and improves comprehension. Ironically the opposite of the textbook typesetting Industry for the past century.

Its interesting to think about this. During my undergraduate studies, I dual majored in Computer Science and Theater (to offset the pure science of CS). One of the first aspects of performance is obviously "learning your lines". Its seems obvious, but one of the ways actors do this is by simply verbalizing the script. Although it doesn't help with deeper understanding of the literature, it also allowed the speaker to personalize the words and understand the how and why the character was saying what they were saying.

It would be even more interesting to see this expanded. In terms of performance, the next element suggested to improve script memorization suggested to me was to read the script aloud while walking around. Does the walking around aspect build from applying environmental context (actors typically recite lines while moving) or is it engaging physical aspects of the body (learning while "exercises")?

I will add that this effect is broader than just reading aloud. Memory is incredibly tied to place and time - everytime you try to memorise abstract information you are mostly remembering your location and events going on in the background (birds chirping in the trees, dog barking, light streaming through the window, the room temperature, etc, etc).

If you really want to remember abstract information try to vary the background environment as much as possible. Go over the material in as many different locations as possible, with as many different outside cues as possible. Doing this the different environments cancel out leaving only the information you want to remember.

That is really interesting, thanks. If you have any further info about that effect, I'd be interested in reading more.

> The study tested four methods for learning written information, including reading silently, hearing someone else read, listening to a recording of oneself reading, and reading aloud in real time.

I wish they had also tested reading silently "aloud", since it's not clear if it's more the additional effort or actually hearing yourself that makes the difference. Also, if they tested " listening to a recording of oneself reading", wouldn't that have involved the subject to read the text aloud initially? I must just misunderstand the article.

It would be interesting to compare to writing down something as well. My anecdotal observation (and I believe there is some scientific literature to support this as well) from college lectures is that I retained more from writing pieces of the lecture down, even if I never reviewed my handwritten notes afterward.

In addition to being able to memorise things better when reading them out loud, I also agree with your observation. I have the same memories about what I did at university: writing down the parts of the lecture that I needed to learn for a test helped me a lot. It took more time than just reading over the stuff, but it was very effective for me.

I've long suspected there is a good link between thinking and talking in general. I personally find I think better if I go for a walk, and talk to myself. It's never nearly as effective if I only think to myself. Have any other studies shown similar results?

Not a study, but...in Ron Chernow's bio of Alexander Hamilton there are a couple of places where he mentions that AH was notable for talking to himself while walking from place to place. [1] Your comment made me think of it because his tremendous impact and voluminous output made that behavior seem odd. But, perhapse they where related.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=4z5eL5SGjEoC&pg=PT438&lpg=...

It's communication! And the first step in communication is communicating with ourselves.

Step 1: In your head Step 2: Aloud (to yourself or others) Step 3: Written

Ever notice how that thought you have in your head that makes sense suddenly is incomplete/non-sense/wrong when you try to verbalize it? Our minds are great at tricking themselves into believing they understand things.

Writing is the next level. Take something you talk about and try to coherently communicate it on paper. More incompleteness/non-sense/wrongness may be revealed.

For something you are an old hand at, you may not notice much difference between what's in your head, what you can verbalize and/or write. But take something nascent and the contrast will be sharp.

Verbalizing and writing are two tools we have for communicating first with ourselves and then with others.

I never really thought about it, but when I write, I do tend to talk to myself. I also often write out concepts that I have difficulty verbally expressing. Interesting...

Maybe go for the negative? I can't cite them off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure over the years I saw different headlines and titles about studies where it was shown that language has a strong impact on thought. More precisely what I recall is that people who don't learn a language have "development issues"[0]. As this isn't my area of research, I'm quite bad at remembering most about it, other than the anecdotic.

[0] I'm not sure this is the correct (much less the politically correct) terminology.

I almost never forget things I repeat to other people. So my technique is to bore the hell of out of people whenever I want to fix something in my mind.

I do the same, but generally it is not because I want to remember :)

I use TTS to read aloud almost all scientific papers, articles, ebooks and forum discussions. It helps me a lot. Having the whole web as speech, not just YT videos and movies, is liberating. Setting a higher speed for TTS is a very interesting way to increase focus. Of course I still read simultaneously.

I wish there were more natural voices. As of now, I can only stand Alex from Mac OS, on 1.4x speed. Deepmind's Wavenet promised human-level quality but it's been a year and it's still not deployed. Unix has no OS-level TTS to brag about - a sad situation. TTS can be a cognitive enhancing tool.

One side benefit of TTS+reading is lesser strain on the eyes, because the reader is just following along and relies primarily on hearing. Another benefit would be proofing your own forums posts and emails.

Amazon Polly has a good selection of natural sounding voices.

And I bet talking to yourself helps think through solutions to problems. At least that's what I choose to believe when I find I am talking to myself.

It does! It's called "rubber ducking" when applied to software engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

It does. And I keep forgetting that it does.

It certainly can.

When I need to focus on reading something with distracting things around me, I read it under my breath to myself, or even out loud when I'm at home.

So is a better idea to produce screen casts instead of writing blog?

If the screen cast includes audio narration, no. From the the article: "the study determined that it is the dual action of speaking and hearing oneself that has the most beneficial impact on memory."

The person doing the learning needs to be speaking out loud. Screen casts with narration would be worse in this regard because the viewer wouldn't be able to speak and also listen.

Parent says

> ... to produce screen casts ...

Not "to consume".

Then it is better for the producer, but at the cost of denying the consumer this benefit.

"Repeat after me: ... "

Win / win.

If the idea is to cement your knowledge by passing it on to others, I don't know what would be superior.

In both cases you'd need to synthesize your learning and put it in your own words.

I do similar to the blog approach by writing thoroughly documented and demonstrated answers on Stack Overflow. Sometimes (including yesterday) I need to go back and review my conclusions. Yesterday, I was looking for whether I should change some raise statements or not. Since I concluded that the old statements are deprecated, I went ahead with the change, and it was approved as I submitted it.

I've also taught in the classroom, but since I'm working from what I already know (and encountering things I've forgotten) I don't know that it's actually better. It's just different.

So it doesnt improve memory, just helps to remember this particular thing you pronounced.

I intuitively understood that pronouncing can help remembering, but always avoided that - it reminds of people who move lips while reading to themselves.

But why is this discouraged so much?

My admittedly very limited understanding of memory is that you are right: we each have a base level of memory which we can't improve upon.

There are factors that influence your memory, such as stress and anxiety, injury, distraction, fatigue, and so forth. Those that we can reduce, such as anxiety, will allow your memory to return closer to your baseline. Techniques we use, such as association (anybody else remember "1 lamp post, 2 light switch, 3 stool?") aren't actually improvements to your abilities, because if you had poor ability to recall you would have trouble recalling the initial subject for association.

Verbalizing the information is one technique that I've found is extremely effective. "The red car just drove by me. He didn't indicate when he changed lanes." I used to read my notes out loud, and record them to tape so I could listen to them when I was on the bus, but now I just go to a private space and read the entire text I'm studying out loud. It does get rather difficult with abstractions such as paintings, particularly because I'm unable to form mental pictures, but there are ways I can work within those limitations. Occasionally, people do tend to take the mindset of "Didn't you learn to read without moving your lips?"

Another technique I use is progressive summarizing, which takes quite a while. I would write out sheet after sheet of my notes until I could get it down to a single word or point per topic, and then expand back from that to basically the initial page of my notes again. (This particular technique simply makes use of my wrote learning skills.) It's only really useful for exams where understanding isn't tested.

> progressive summarizing

Haha. I "co-discovered" this technique, including the expansion phase.

What are you learning so intensively?

This is a very interesting study to me. When learning I've always read out books/scripts/articles loud to myself and it actually helped me to remember things easier than by just reading them without speaking the text. So it was not just my imagination it seems.

I can stop feeling like an idiot now

How strong is the effect?

Subjectively, small-to-moderate. Quantitatively, from Figure 1 of the (paywalled) journal article: Correct recognition of words as studied/unstudied was 77% for read aloud, 74% for hearing a recording of oneself reading aloud (from a session 2 w previous), 69% for hearing someone else reading aloud, and 65% for reading silently.

Although assessment was done with a recognition task, previous work in this area has shown a similar effect for recall tasks.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09658211.2017.13...

But it drives your wife crazy.

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