How to forget what you read
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ckarchive.com
You know what makes the difference?
Take a walk, or catch a train and think about what you read. Find the main ideas and how the material relates to yourself. Play with it and ask yourself questions about it.
Then next day try to answer them in paper without extra material. And only after that reread the book to check or find unsolved the answers.
Learning is hard. There is nothing as easy learning. The good news is that it can be hand AND fun.
About reading:
Engage in every sentence, ask yourself what the writer is trying to tell you in every sentence, after that translate it to imagination and relate it with yourself and what you already know.
There is shallow reading and deep reading. Deep reading is a must for technical books, but also a joy for fiction. I still remember so vividly the coldness and texture of the walls of the hobbit's first mountain tunnels despite haven't been told about it.
I assume you meant hard and fun, and this is something I believe is the issue in adult life, things are unnecessarily hard when they could and should be hard AND fun
engagement, quality, innovation might rise by a lot if we focused jobs around that
This is the most important step. Read, then take a break. Practice, then take a break. During the break, mull over the ideas and do not rush to the next things. It’s that period of reflection which will bring new ideas.
About engagement, i tried to reread great fiction books or rewatch my favorite movies. When you no longer fascinated by the plot, you can enjoy the process that creates it.
There are no shortcuts to learning and memorizing what you read. You have to really digest it, synthesize your own thoughts on it, and use it. You get out of it what you put into it.
My familiarity with speed-reading is limited because I never deemed it worth, as I think reading should mostly be a slow pleasure, but Anki, like any well-designed spaced repetition routine, algorithm, or application, got me VERY far. I returned to high school as an adult and later attended university, which provided me with a variety of reference points to compare study techniques. Initially, I used conventional methods, but eventually, -- a few months in --, I discovered Anki. Not only did I start ranking among the top students, but I also completed both degrees in less time than typically required; something I never managed to do, no matter how hard I tried.
Recently, I've been experimenting with various study techniques, free from the constraints of formal education that could potentially bias the outcome, and I've observed a significant decline in my performance when I deviated from Anki or spaced repetition in general. Conversely, my performance improves when I reincorporate it. Mind you that I still have to put the required effort, carefully selecting what to memorize, and designing it well. You can't get away from that.
Any time you do all of that you're essentially doing what Anki does but in a less efficient and less automated way. The point of Anki is (a) to make a reasonable decision on your behalf about when to revisit, and (b) to automate the process of retrieving and displaying the information which is being revisited.
I've found non-language topics to be more challenging. Whether or not a card is useful depends largely on how well written it is. You need to find the right wording which captures the essence of the point while remaining simplistic and atomic enough that the card doesn't become tedious to re-visit. I'd argue that the process of crafting the right card is equivalent to digesting it and synthesizing your own thoughts on it. I'd also argue that if you believe Anki positions itself as a "shortcut" then you've probably used it incorrectly. It is indeed true that you get out what you put in, and low-effort Anki cards will most likely end up being abandoned or deleted. Useful cards require effort, the same as any other learning/memorising technique.
But reading is the first step. You never learn only by reading. You have to relate the ideas with your prior knowledge and practice it or apply it somewhere.
You also have to get a nice book. And have to practice reading. Reading is a skill, it's an extension of imagination. You have to practice that, and reading is an awesome way.
My brother, and many others, have the ability to read something from a book and retain that information fairly well and without using some other method of learning or reinforcing it.
It's unfortunately that I didnt realize this until I was done with my schooling but its been really valuable to know this during my career.
When new information is ingested, it "changes you", i.e. is having an effect on your views and thought processes. Sometimes subtle, sometimes profound. So I might not remember what a book was about, and upon re-reading I have this weird experience: it feels familiar, ideas were somehow already processed in my brain, but due to forgetting the content I feel like I already read this in a past life.
I forget the content of most books, articles, movies, etc., and I have to constantly remind myself that not remembering it is not a bad thing, is not a failure, and it was not useless. It's like my brain RAM + cache are large, but short lived, but the permanent storage is small, too abstract and incompatible with the raw data content.
> Is [reading] just a waste of time? Well, no, I don’t think so. Every book makes a mark. Even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory. Just as every single thing that happens to you does and every person you meet.
I once read a short essay by Patrick Süskind (author of "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer"). I am paraphrasing, but in it, he discusses his embarrassment that he cannot remember even major plot details or character names of great works of world literature, although he has read them multiple times and they deeply inspired his own work. He then makes an interesting speculation: if a book really and deeply influences you, then maybe actively remembering facts and insights of the book becomes harder and harder, because the book's ideas have been so deeply ingrained into your brain and thinking that you cannot remember them as facts independent of your own thinking. But this doesn't mean that you have "forgotten" them.
To be perfectly honest, I'd love to be startled by the plot the first time round
I take an issue with this assumption. When I leaf through my past notes, highlights—hell, even stuff I have written myself—I am surprised at many relevant things that I completely forgot about. It's true forgetting is a filter, but one mustn't underestimate the brain's capacity to forget useful stuff too. Maybe it's something you didn't need in a while, and need it now. Maybe it has become more relevant than it was in the past. For eg, I have restarted journaling recently, and this highlight from "On Writing Well", immediately hit me:
> “Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. … Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past.
It's written for a different context, but it made me realize a different way to approach my journaling.
However, I agree wanting to retain everything is needlessly ambitious, and counter-productive. I was once obsessed with making notes about everything I read, but soon, I realized how unenjoyable it was making my reading. The better approach, I found, is to just make highlights. And go over them once in a while (a few months or so). That's enough of a knowledge-retention system for me.
I read with a highlighter pen, just highlighting the places I find interesting, and maybe cornering a few pages once in a while. That costs no more energy than just reading the book, if anything highlighting allows my mind to stay focused on the book.
couple weeks after the book is finished, I'll come back only to the highlighted parts and write some of them down in a a4 page, which I then fold in the book.
That way I have a personal 1 page book summary which I come back to from time to time.
I liked an idea I saw on Youtube from someone saying "for each chapter, I find something actionable I commit to do for a week". A bit on the heavy side, but I like the actionable aspect of it
Did you come up with the idea yourself or were inspired from some place else? Any more ideas you can share?
The summary thing, honestly it's just because I was frustrated to feel like I had forgotten everything about the books I read a few weeks later, so I decided to find a reason to go back to them to try and retain more :).
The only other tip I can think of is to start a book club at your workplace. It's a great way to commit to it a bit more while getting suggestions you wouldn't have had yourself.
In case you didn't already know, you might find the following useful;
1) SQ3R - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R
2) Cornell Note-taking method - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes
I have realized that this depends a lot on what you are "up to" at the moment.
In my experience, I have a really hard time internalizing information about a topic that is far from some topic or work I'm engaged with at the moment.
This means, I think:
1. That you can to some extent influence what you are "up to".
2. That you should probably organize your reading and other learning activities around the seasons of thinking themes in your life [1]
[1] E.g. to me, that often means I'm into quite different themes during work days versus weekends, where I'm often exploring some slightly different topics.
We tend to notice stuff based on our affirmations.
Don't get me wrong, most books are overly stuffed and could stand to be much shorter, but you aren't going to take much from 5 minutes of a summary alone. I'm convinced that it's not really a learning app as much as it is for puffery.
The guy talked about just trying to take away one idea from what you read rather than trying to take a whole bunch of notes you’ll never remember.
Exactly. Spaced repetition is a remarkably effective learning technique, but it can't tell you what to learn.
At some point I think we have to stop listening to external authorities and rely on our own judgement about what to learn, and how to do so, as signalled by feelings of excitement about particular authors and ideas. One of the effects of formal education is to dampen or corrupt that intuition, e.g. by instilling the desire to learn things 'properly' (say in a certain prearranged sequence) or by the desire to only learn prestigious topics in order to impress other people.
If we are engaged meaningfully with reality we will inevitably revisit particular subjects or authors multiple times. This is an organic form of spaced repetition. Forgetting certain things is part of that: we learn to swim during the winter and to skate during the summer.
Like, imagine if someone learning to program put a huge amount of their effort into using flashcards to memorize the functions in their preferred language's standard library. I think most people would agree that this person is wasting their time because IDE tooling and Internet searches make it really easy to look up that information on an as-needed basis. So the real effort should be put into learning skills like domain modeling or how to read and debug code.
I think that the same principle might apply to most subjects. Even in language learning, one of the places where SRS is most popular. Academics seem to be pretty skeptical of using any sort of flashcarding to learn vocabulary. In part because the empirical evidence doesn't actually seem to support it, and in part on theoretical grounds. The contemporary model for how the brain models language is fundamentally connectionist. Definitions and lemmas aren't something we naturally memorize as a list of facts and then plug into a grammar, which is why native speakers often have difficulty reciting conjugation tables or defining words.
I think that formal education's tendency toward representing subjects as lists of factoids is fundamentally another manifestation of the McNamara Fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy). As long as educators have a mandate to (ostensibly) objectively quantify students' progress with grades and scores, they will have a need to represent the subject manner in a manner that permits easy quantification. And they will have to do so regardless of whether it actually makes sense to do so for whatever subject they're teaching.
While learning Thai -- which is a difficult language already -- I continually struggled with word definitions that should have been easy. How hard is it to remember the words for the various parts of your head and body? With just word definitions, apparently, it's really, really hard.
But then I supplemented this with other tools. One teaches a few words, then throw those words into full phrases in little quizlets. You pick out the written phrase which you think matches the spoken phrase. It always includes one or some of the words you've learned. It puts the words in context, cementing the definition, teaching you grammar, and "foreshadowing" new words. It's skyrocketed my retention and comprehension.
Pictures also help. Children's books with audio narrating are huge.
I guess my point is, Anki with word definitions alone is definitely garbage, or less than ideal at best. Which is why most language learning resources stress that it alone isn't enough - and most learning resources who push Anki (or SRS in general) don't say "do only this." It's part of a balanced breakfast, so to speak. Incorporate it into your workflow, but don't make it the workflow.
So, the flashcard group was just using flashcards as a supplement to extensive reading.
Well, at the end of the treatment period, both groups had the same vocabulary retention. But a couple months later they tested again, and the "no flashcards" group had better retention of the target vocabulary. And not by a small amount, either.
It's not terribly hard to find examples of second language acquisition researchers expressing skepticism about flashcarding, though. I don't necessarily find all of it universally convincing (if I did, I wouldn't have 99 reviews left to do today in my 中文 deck), but I do have to admit that a lot of the evidence people claim in support of using spaced repetition systems for language learning has the look of pseudoscience. It largely consists of taking some very limited, tightly focused lab studies, and massively over-extrapolating from them.
But I wouldn't want to over-extrapolate from the studies that claim flashcarding doesn't help, either. The protocols often focus on a very minimalist implementation of flashcarding that's easy to study. Or the protocol is really designed to test some theory about how memory works and not some theory about study strategy. (This second example describes basically all of Ebbinghaus's work, by the way.) One could easily argue, for example, that using a flashcarding application to rote memorize a pre-made deck of words and phrases that somebody else chose is a fundamentally different practice from sentence mining your input materials.
What does this refer to? Generally I've referenced the Improving Students’ Learning review by Dunlosky et. al. [0] to see what is supported by the literature. The two techniques listed there as having 'high' utility -- Practice testing and Distributed practice -- are most easily accessible through usage of SRS-based flashcards.
[0] https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovi...
If I have no real life problem to solve and only read the book because I like the topic or want to learn from it for my future I only remember the broad concepts. But nevertheless, at least you know what's in that book and if you encounter a problem in the future you can revisit the book again.
I weirdly wish the article entertained the answer of “yes!”
Instead of doing that it barely backs the knowledge-obsessed away from the cliff in an attempt to convince them to just don’t take quite so many notes, maybe step back and stop pretending like you’re crunching for an exam and absorb the information you’re reading.
But I would actually take this a step further for a lot of people and say that, depending on what you’re reading and why you’re reading, it might be quite literally a waste of time, especially if you’re reading not for enjoyment but because you feel pressure to gain knowledge and constantly upskill.
There’s a concept of the movie buff being cursed to watch worse and worse movies over time. They start with the best must-watch movies and it’s all downhill from there. They get done watching something like (wildly random examples) Amelie, Spirited Away, or the original Star Wars trilogy and hunt for something that scratches the same itch, only to find out that they just watched the best/only example of that particular concept done well.
In the same way, something I notice about frequent readers is that they’re reading utter trash, and probably for a similar reason. Luckily for them, there are far more books than movies, but I think there’s merit to this concept.
Obviously, there’s a ton of value in reading especially during grade school as it helps you gain valuable language and writing skills, but I think my advice on top of what this article says is that you don’t have to read shit if you don’t want to. Life isn’t really only about knowledge-based enlightenment, that’s just one feature of life among many.
At the other end of the scale, I read fiction purely for enjoyment. Attempting to make any notes at all or to memorise what I'm reading would make the process unnecessarily tedious and defeat the purpose of it, while gaining me very little value.
In between these are non-fictional / narrative books which contain useful insights or information which I don't necessarily need for my work but aren't strictly only for entertainment purposes. Examples of this might include biographies or personal development / self help books. With these I'm not interested in exhaustively memorising everything, but neither do I want to completely forget the most valuable points. Here, a hybrid approach works best; perhaps some highlighting and more selective note-taking, with a few key points turned into Anki cards if I feel that I want to retain the information long term.
The problem with the article is that it proposes a single method ("a much more relaxed approach to knowledge consumption") no matter the context, whereas I would argue that you should adapt the method to each book depending on what your goal is in reading it.
Most people who read almost constantly do read a decent amount of books that are less good than the others. Though they will often read more good books than you too. When I used to read books constantly, I could read faster and retain more. I could also write better. Now I read rarely because I only care to read the most useful things, it takes me way longer to read, I am less focused and retain less and my writing is somewhat worse. So I do think it's worth reading often for those benefits. Reading is so unenjoyable to me now I don't do it frequently. But it's not like I'm doing more useful and enjoyable things with my time either. Life isn't only about knowledge-based enlightenment, I agree, but it is usually about wasting a certain amount of time, whether you like it or not. So you might as well waste it well. In this case, waste it by reading lighter material so that your brain is always primed to read the good stuff efficiently.
At least, that's my new years resolution.
I thought I was bright as a child, not studying, but as I got older I realized this was not the case (albeit still holding out some hope). At first, in this endeavor, I was discouraged spending so long, but then, oddly enough, I found myself proud of the fact I spent so much time trying to understand the content. Reading and re-reading until I understood what was going on -- and then the next day, I would forget some of it, so I would read it again (this time spending less time (woohoo!)), until I could now not only recite the content but understand it.
To be perfectly honest, I'd love to be startled by the plot the first time round :-/
Perhaps the true (meta)rational perspective is to actually understand how to embrace the larger complexity of human experience (including sensibility/creativity/play...). Maybe the real willpower is to stop obsessing over this limited viewpoint (and the fears it produces) all the time.
previously, i devoured, and loved, difficult conversations by the same authors and found quite a lot of things that resonated with me personally and professionally. some of these i've continued to use and integrate into my daily job as an assistant principal with staff, students, and parents, with great effect
the long and short of it is that i gleaned quite a lot from simply reading through one book while stalling out on the second in an attempt to get everything out of it that i can. it is clear to me that simply reading through the first one was not only an experience enjoyable for it's own sake but also helpful in my day to day
i'd say this hits on a few things that have come about to me recently
- embracing finitude, ala four thousand weeks by oliver burke, that we can't and won't be able to learn or know everything while simultaneously embracing the fact that it is okay to simply do something for the sake of enjoyment, feeling awe, etc.
- people tend to change in fits and spurts and massive changes are relatively uncommon in a short time span. think of oneself as a growing plant as opposed to a suddenly exploding fire
- i've long felt that we think and understand the world around us in metaphors. read this in 'metaphors with live by' in college and since then the connections have tended to be endless. i'd say i am moving towards a different metaphor for people, not sure exactly how i'd word it, but it is moving away from humans as a machine or time is money and more towards humans a plant needing care and cultivation and..i don't have one for time yet