hm ... I don't have trouble remembering things in books I've read ... but that reminds me, why do we read the New York Times if it's filled with forgettable, inane rubbish? :) Seriously though, I rarely remember the jibber jabber I've read in rags.
Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
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Re: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
#12As long as you can vaguely remember where you read X thing, you can always go pull the info back up. That's part of the reason I aggressively use social bookmarking services (namely, Diigo).
I also find it's helpful to have a high-level understanding of many things, especially when it relates to technical "stuff". If you have some understanding on how/when to apply an approach or technology, you can always dig up the details when it is pertinent.
Re: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
#13Maybe try reading more memorable books? I remember "Lord Of The Rings" :-) Don't know the books he mentions, but the titles alone sound a bit like "I really should read this to prove that I am an intellectual".
I did get a bit of that vibe
Re: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
#14Same is true for movies. I don't remember most movies I watch. Eg. there was this one movie with Morgan Freeman, he worked at a car shop, smoked cigarettes, and he was diagnosed with cancer, and there was another big name in the movie, and I don't remember much after that. [After looking it up, it was Jack Nicholson and the title is 'Bucket List']. There's probably thousands of movies like this floating around in my head.
Re: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
#15I'd say it depends on what and how one is reading.
It's not the same case when I read a programming book with examples, in contrast to novels. I tend to remember the former better because I'll usually try out most examples from the book.
Re: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
#16Maybe try reading more memorable books? I remember "Lord Of The Rings" :-) Don't know the books he mentions, but the titles alone sound a bit like "I really should read this to prove that I am an intellectual".
Yeah, honestly, the whole thing is just horribly pretentious.
Re: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
#17Same is true for movies. I don't remember most movies I watch. Eg. there was this one movie with Morgan Freeman, he worked at a car shop, smoked cigarettes, and he was diagnosed with cancer, and there was another big name in the movie, and I don't remember much after that. [After looking it up, it was Jack Nicholson and the title is 'Bucket List']. There's probably thousands of movies like this floating around in my…
Oddly, I don't remember movies if asked to recount the exact plot/scenes, but I seem to have an uncanny ability to remember that stuff when watching it for the second time, to the point where I don't enjoy watching movies more than once.
Some people love watching movies multiple times... I wonder if this has anything to do with memory.
Re: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
#18I liken learning to throwing cooked spaghetti against the wall: some sticks, some slides off. The key to being smarter is to make more stuff stick to the walls, whether you can do that by making the knowledge more "sticky" or like what I do, which is to throw even more against the wall. To twist a phrase from Glengarry Glen Ross: "ABL - Always Be Learnin'."
"For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read if one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost."
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/c...
Re: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
#19Same is true for movies. I don't remember most movies I watch. Eg. there was this one movie with Morgan Freeman, he worked at a car shop, smoked cigarettes, and he was diagnosed with cancer, and there was another big name in the movie, and I don't remember much after that. [After looking it up, it was Jack Nicholson and the title is 'Bucket List']. There's probably thousands of movies like this floating around in my…
Oddly, I don't remember movies if asked to recount the exact plot/scenes, but I seem to have an uncanny ability to remember that stuff when watching it for the second time, to the point where I don't enjoy watching movies more than once. Some people love watching movies multiple times... I wonder if this has anything to do with memory.
Same here. If I were to watch that movie again, I'd start remembering and unless it's an action flick, it wouldn't be interesting.
Re: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
#20I'm a little disappointed with the approach this article takes to it's main thesis, which is that the "majority" don't remember what they read. He writes "anecdotal evidence suggests" twice in the only part that justifies his own experience. Is this really the case? (Not that I'm going to get better than anecdotal evidence here.) There's a false dichotomy there too where either you retain everything or nothing.
For me I still remember the plot lines of books I read 20 years ago and why they were formative to my character. Is that really that unusual? Given these were mostly fiction and science fiction books, but the conceptual spaces they opened up for me are so key to who I am now it would be bizarre if I just "forgot" them. Just to cite one instance, the Dune series of books got me thinking about the intersection of politics, economics, the expansion of consciousness, ecology, the point of human existence, and other subjects. Surely other people here have had those same experiences and remember them?