I highly disagree with "no starring mid air" in the focus section. It's something I do a lot, sometimes because I think about something I just read, sometimes because my mind goes travelling for a bit, which is a good side effect of reading (as opposed to infinite scrolling in social media which doesn't let you look up).
there is a good Ted talk about it ("how to get your brain to focus" or something like this) which proves that your mind needs to wander in order to stay healthy and creative.
How to Remember What You Read
71–80 of 97 posts
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#72The 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.
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#73> Because when you’re finally in a situation where you could use its insights, you’ve completely forgotten them. 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…
Absolutely agree. My wife can read and remember everything, but is hard pressed to say how the elements fit into her life. When I read I recall little but compile the experience as if holographically, enlarging my store of metaphors that surface unbidden as needed.
Paul Graham wrote a 2014 essay saying basically this:
http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html
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. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.
The fact that I dug up this quote proves I remember some things I've read :)
FWIW I take 1-3 sentences of notes on articles I read, and few paragraphs of notes on books I read, and put them in my personal wiki. I find this not only helps retention but it helps understanding, by forcing hyperlinks to related work. Hyperlinks model the way your mind works.
I elaborate on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24536687
Funnily enough it cites the same PG essay. It also echoes the article here, which I strongly agree with:
Finishing the book is optional. You should start a lot of books and only finish a few of them
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#74The way to remember what you read is to make sure you understand all the words in the text, the way they apply in context. It's the micro-misunderstandings that lead up to the macro-misunderstanding which manifests as "forgetting". Other commenters also mention applying what's in the book. That is 100% true, when you're reading about how to do something. If you're reading a fact-based book (non-fiction) but not about…
It's easier to remember something if you understand it, which is why rote memorization is inferior, because it takes so many more repetition to get something to stick in your mind.
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#75I've had some success using the Kindle app highlight feature - highlighting key points as I go along, and then later reviewing just my highlights (which can also be exported). You can add notes to the highlights too.
I do this too using my remarkable (reader tablet )and then scripts that export highlights / notes which I then index for as plaintext - it makes this process much more seamless.
Would you mind elaborating — What is your exact process to export highlights and notes from RM2 ?
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#76> Because when you’re finally in a situation where you could use its insights, you’ve completely forgotten them. 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…
This reminds me a plot in "The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber", where the Taichi master asks the student how much he remembered what was shown to him, and keeps doing it until he "remembers nothing", that's when he has fully learned Taichi.
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#77> Fancy apps are not needed Not sure if Anki counts as fancy, but it certainly is orders of magnitude more efficient than taking notes or active reading. See also: Make It Stick [1]. If you're trying to memorize content spaced repetition is unmatched. I've durably memorized entire 300-page programming design books (e.g. Effective Java) in under a month of 30 min/day reading+Anki usage. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/…
I'm also using flashcards and the Anki app to memorise syntax. I got sick of looking up the difference between list.append and list.extend and all kinds of small things. Hope it helps...
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#78Re: How to Remember What You Read
#79Nabokov's solution to this dilemma, reread. The only good reader is, as he said, a re-reader. If we're honest nobody can actually remember more than a dozen books, and if you pick the right ones there's more to learn in any of them than you can learn in years. It's similar to the sentiment that the only way to understand a poem is to be able to recite it from memory, or the fact that some pianists play nothing else b…
Recognition and retrieval are different mental processes. When one re-reads a material, they recognize it. Recognition gives a false impression of “knowing” the material, whereas retrieval is a better measure of knowing. In order to get better at retrieval, one should practice retrieval, for example, by answering questions about the topic.
Well said. A great book that covers this (and suggests ways to practice retrieval) is called Make It Stick. I highly recommend it.
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do this too using my remarkable (reader tablet )and then scripts that export highlights / notes which I then index for as plaintext - it makes this process much more seamless.
Would you mind elaborating — What is your exact process to export highlights and notes from RM2 ?
I use https://github.com/lucasrla/remarks, which OCRs (text recognition) your highlights to extract what exactly was highlighted, and also outputs screenshots of all pages on which I wrote notes.
This way I can go through my annotations sequentially, save highlights / their main ideas, and reformulate my notes into plaintext a bit more clearly.