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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists."
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?
Memory is an essential, invaluable tool to support knowledge. Knowledge isn't an accumulation of facts, and it's important to chain them into coherent ensembles to be able to understand them, therefore training and enhancing intelligence.
I both try to remember everything of significance (NOT factoids, or phone numbers) AND google everything. This is absolutely not contradictory.
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.
Bingo. Don’t read to “memorize”; read so you know where to find the relevant information later. If that information is frequently relevant, you’ll eventually learn it and won’t have to look it up as much.
Great example: when was the last time you had to look up how to append an item to a list in your favorite/most used programming environment? You probably don’t remember when that was, because you use it so often, but, there was a time when you did have to look it up (when you were first learning).
I've always had a terrible memory, both short-term and long-term. But this has been an advantage, in a way: I could never memorize material and bluff my way through. Instead, to remember it, I had to understand it. I think this helps partly because you can always work it out from first principles (and just remembering there's some tricky bit somewhere around here), partly the familiarity required for understanding helps embed it, but mostly that I've distilled it to a very simple model in my mind, that I've related to other systems I already know. The meta-model becomes the more interesting thing.
It's hard work to uncover this model, often requiring chasing up foundations, to see what's really going up. And of course, sometimes you end up with the wrong model (or a limited one). Unfortunately, most subjects don't seem to be taught in terms of understanding - but I've had some rare lecturers and textbooks that are so clear, you can work out what they'll say next, and solve example problems the first time you see them.
I've always thought this understanding-oriented approach is a strong long-term strategy, as I age. Although it means some subjects are too hard for me - like human languages, history, geography, biology, medicine... and enterprise application development (but I'm good at libraries).
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.
(1) That a deeper understanding of something can make it simpler/easier to remember. One way to look at this is that you remember a model of the world. That complexity of that model determines the quantity of information you need to remember. If you can find a simpler model, your mind needs to store less information to cover everything you need to know.
(2) That a concept and its name are different things. You understand the concept of an array-length-giving function, but you don't remember the name attached to it. It could go the other way: you could know there is a function with a certain name but not remember what it does. Or you could know what it does and what it's named. (This seems at least tangentially related to linguistic relativity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity), a.k.a. the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The question is basically to what degree our minds build ideas on words/language and to what degree we form ideas independently of language.)
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.
Memorizing short-term is relatively easier, provided there's sufficient comprehension and, well, ... association memory.
However, to retain some new knowledge, even just concepts, for a longer term and having it ready on-demand for me is very much dependent on how relevant such knowledge is to my present state of "know".
If the new concepts are too detached, even if I do grock them now, the only thing that would stay for long term is some feel of familiarity. Actively refreshing such knowledge is often impractical, as long as it remains not relevant to life. There are always tons of new topics to discover!
So, basically, for me some new knowledge retains long-term when it's made relevant in life or directly extends some already relevant knowledge.
No shame in forgetting, just know where to find it again or whom to ask. It's not futile however, as in encountering new concepts, sometimes an extension from known concepts grows naturally, kind of further forming the worldview. Good terminology helps a lot in connecting and retaining the dots.
I think knowing the names of things is useful and gets unfairly maligned. It gives your mind a set of symbols with which it can make connections, which is how understanding forms. Rote memorisation of names is a precursor to understanding.
I’ve spent a lot of time in front of the computer since before I started school. I’ll say, I’m bad at memorizing lists of facts. But I’m great at remembering things once I understand them with context. So, memorize the 50 states and capitals, hopeless exercise. But teach me about a state and it’s capital city, and I’ll never forget it. I wonder if this is naturally how I am or whether constant internet use from a young age makes me mind dismiss the need to memorize bare facts that can always be looked up, and that don’t actually enhance understanding of anything by themselves. See Feynman on knowing what something is vs. just knowing it’s name.
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