Personally I think the most important part of reading is picking up the general idea being conveyed, not to be able to precisely recall an idea. Like a support vector machine (SVM), I think your brain mostly retains information about model defying events. Most people won't remember what they had for a meal a month ago, because the event likely had little surprise - but you'll probably remember the meal that gave you food poisoning.
For example, I've read thousands upon thousands of papers, I generally accept that I cannot recall all the information in them. What I can do on the other hand is figure out exactly what I need to search for in order to find information on a topic and the re-learning time is greatly reduced.
This general acceptance of not being able to recall precise information about any given topic mostly came from my time in school as a child, where I realized the teachers were not so much teaching us topics for the real world, but giving us the framework to learn any topic.
I agree that retaining information is most important. I often suffer from forgetting everything I read. Do you have any tips on how to remember what you read?
The importance of reading is as much about how it shapes your understanding as remembering discrete facts. I'm not necessarily great at recall of characters names in novels, or specific dates in history, but I'm quite good at abstracting the high level meaning of something. It means that, whilst I may not win as many general knowledge quizzes, my actual understanding of things I read tends to be ok. This strikes me as much more important.
That said, it would still be nice to have better recall of facts for sure.
The ability to retain information is mostly fueled by your interest towards the topic, and not by your inherent ability to retain in general. This is what neuroscience has figured out. And it confirms very much my own observations during my life time. Inherently uninteresting topics or things I was forced to learn but which never resonated with me were always difficult to impossible to remember. Things I care about, or which interest me greatly, were almost easy to learn. Reading a document about an interesting topic cover to cover is easy. Keep that in mind next time you think you have a hard time learning something.
Why is it important to remember everything that you've read especially in this day and age? 90% of stuff you Google is just to help you get a small task done or learn something that seemed important in the moment. Another 9% might be something you write down in a notebook to look back at later. Very few things are worth actively keeping track of in your mind and those are usually fundamental building blocks of a new mental model.
I think even if you cannot explicitly remember what you read, that's very far from them having no effects on you. (An analogy: you can understand scores of thousands of English words, even if you could only spontaneously use half or less of them.)
Ever since I began switching to electronic reading with the attendant clipping and searchability, I've been surprised how many "things I know" turn out to stem from books or articles I otherwise do not recall at all. If I had tried to estimate what I know just based on what factoids I could specifically remember learning from a specific book, I would grossly underestimate the value of my reading.
even if you can't manage to consciously memorize it bits of information gets stored somewhere in your mind. then let's say a few years later you're thinking about some seemingly unrelated topic and the old memory of that thing you read way back pops up.
you go back to it, reread a bit to refresh your memory and it all somehow clicks.
at least that's been my experience so far so i don't bother with retention too much. perhaps information you ingest simply needs to age a bit to mature and develop.
I'm not sure if I agree. I think there is a fundamental difference in having an understanding (mental model) of a topic, and remembering a piece of information. The information is of course useful when building these mental models and when being used in context of a mental model. I do agree with you though that there is less need to recall specific information, but you still need to know _when_ you should look for some information that you don't currently have.
There's a certain gap between reading and retaining. It may be personal. One may find a newly read knowledge, concepts illumintating and clear at the time of reading them, yet after a short time that clarity vanishes. Like as if it somehow failed to transfer from the short-term memory over to the long-term index of the main library. The only lasting recollection is of experience reading it and feeling illuminated. Happens to me everytime I need to cram something quickly.
I believe minds do need reread, retry in order to retain it as something worth recalling. I guess, some brains prefer not to waste energy on forming the long-lasting synapses on something that was casually encountered.
Knowledge is an interesting subject. When I read, I don't remember the exact order of words. Especially in the age of Google, we have a choice of what to burden our memory with and what to leave to Google. Are names and dates important? What's important is to have models of how things work in your mind. It is through the process of reading that we develop and refine these models.
> That’s not exactly true [...] Instead, the brain actually works to actively distill knowledge that doesn’t need to be memorized verbatim into its essential components
...but that's exactly what OP said, no?
I remember attending an ML presentation where the speaker shared a quote I can't find anymore (speaking of memory and generalization :)), which said something like: "To learn is to forget"
If we memorized everything perfectly, we would not learn anything: instead of remembering the concept of a "chair", you would remember thousands of separate instances of things you've seen that have a certain combination of colors and shapes etc
It's the fact that we forget certain details (small differences between all these chairs) that makes us learn what a "chair" is.
Likewise, if you remembered every single word in a book, you would not understand its meaning; understanding its meaning = being able to "summarize" (compress) this long list of words into something more essential: storyline, characters, feelings, etc.
You need to memorise enough of the topic to know what to look up in a book.
You need to memorise enough of the topic that you can draw relationships between disparate elements.
Having content in your memory means you have the ability to potentially pull it up quicker, or to pull it up in a situation (such as a team meeting) where you don't have access to the book.
If you rely only on what's previously written, foregoing memorisation, you are limited to the relationships that other people have written down.
That assumes that you want to memorize everything that you read. I disagree with the premise. I don't want to memorize everything I read, as a matter of fact, I am happy forgetting most of it.
I'm with you there; you'll need some recall even when reading. You can't learn a new domain when the previously introduced concepts, vocabulary, or equations are inaccessible because you can't remember them.
Our brains are built to forget so anything that's considered unimportant is likely to be forgotten. A perfect example is why we can enjoy the same TV shows many many times, not just once. With video or film, we are saturated with information, there's no way we can capture everything we see and hear and even what's capture is quickly forgotten since it's mostly unimportant. With books, most of us read books at a very comfortable place and pace. Also, we read at relatively fast pace vs our ability to analyze so we understand but don't send the knowledge to our long-term memory. At best we can give a fast summary of what was read, something like a 300 pg book into a few paragraphs- even if we re-read a book. So, in essence, we read for entertainment, not education or recall.
The only way to fight forgetfulness is to slow down and analyze, summarise and recall. Start thinking in terms of book reports. Another possibility is to read many books on the same subject but even then you have to fight the urge to ignore something because you think you know it.
Reading for education and recall is not a given you have to work at it.
I think what you are describing is really how to learn. It's not that you require a test in order to remember material, you just need to implement what you have read in order to reinforce what you have read into memory. Humans remember things a lot better when you have an experience to associate with it.
I struggle with this problem as well. I often feel like the people around e learn more with less effort - perhaps because their brain's RAM has more space. Oh well, I supplement my lack of a large memory with stubbornness.
I find going back and re-reading (often manny times) helps tremendously. The first time through you may only commit 30% of the concepts to long-term memory. The second time through you will pick up a bit more, and the next time even more. As the % of concepts in your long term memory grows, the easier it will be to pick up the ones that are giving you trouble, since your brain has a larger number of memories from the prior readings to make concrete relationships.
It’s even more nonsense when you look at recall over longer periods of time. If you look at forgetting curves (like Ebbinghaus) no matter how well you read a book there’s no way after a month you’ll remember more than say 10%. I don’t think that’s so bad if you take care to take the most valuable abstract concepts and rules from books.
When you learn facts, they are easily accessible for thinking and the connections start forming even unconsciously.
The idea that you can keep the facts in a book and the brain is just like CPU that processes them is wrong. You have to remember if you want to learn complex stuff like physics.
For example, I've read thousands upon thousands of papers, I generally accept that I cannot recall all the information in them. What I can do on the other hand is figure out exactly what I need to search for in order to find information on a topic and the re-learning time is greatly reduced.
This general acceptance of not being able to recall precise information about any given topic mostly came from my time in school as a child, where I realized the teachers were not so much teaching us topics for the real world, but giving us the framework to learn any topic.
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