41–50 of 108 posts
I don't relate at all - I believe I remember the content of every book I've ever read, and the main takeaways of it.
What about names? I cannot remember the names of main characters from a book I read last week.
My key take-away from the article was this quote: “There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize.…
Without the context of the rest of the story, getting the child emotionally involved, getting the child to see the short term benefits, the impact of reading about how the kid gets eaten when he finally does see a wolf, tells the truth, and no one believes him is greatly diminished.
Studies have shown that people remember how facts/events/information makes them feel more accurately than the specific facts/events/information, and I think the idea of context is similar. You remember the emotions you felt when you read a story about X action, you remember the context of your emotions, even if you don't remember the specific cause.
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." -- Albert Einstein
Key phrase: "reading creates pathways in the brain, strengthening different mental processes." I've read a boat load of business books and I don't remember a lot of the specifics in the books but because the books often reenforced a lot of the same thoughts from different angles, I've got well formed mental pathways in my head, which help me in all kinds of situations. Same thing happens if you're a regular consumer…
Lawyers are lawyerly because they've trained their brains. That may seem tautological, but it's a gradual, continuous process. Yet, even long after we seem like we're done learning, traces of child-ish thought remain under the surface of everyday abstract concepts.
I'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 m…
This article and most of this thread is just bizarre to me.
Same 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.
There is something in the specifics (fine details that typically splits through the gaps of someones recall/recognition) that brings great joy. Others enjoy looking for things they may have missed. Others wait long enough for the recognition to fade enough in between viewings.
Same 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.
Silly.... If you can't remember what you had for lunch last Monday, why eat?