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The Complete Guide to Remembering What You Read
If you forget what you read, improve your retention by understanding how memory works and changing these specific reading habits.
Table Of ContentsIntroduction
How Memories Are Created
1. Previewing
2. Reading
3. Note-Taking
4. Condensing
5. Remembering
If you read a lot, but quickly forget most of the information you so eagerly soak up, this is for you. In 2016, writing about what I learned from 365 different books or their summaries taught me one, big lesson:
Nowadays, facts are available at the click of a button. A vast knowledge of facts might make you fun to talk to, but...
Being book-smart just for the sake of being book-smart is a vanity metric for your ego.
Don’t learn solely for the sake of learning. Be a practitioner. Use the information you consume. Ironically, learning things right when you need them will also help you remember them better.
Why? To find out, let’s look at…
How Memories Are Created
There are two types of memories:
- Memories you make a conscious effort to form.
- Memories you form unconsciously through experience.
The first type of memory is stored in your hippocampus. It’s what happens when your new neighbor John introduces himself to you and you go: “John, John, John, John, John…” in your head, over and over again, to not forget it.
The second type is stored in your neocortex. When you went to Disneyland with your grandparents for the first time, got ice-cream, it fell on the floor, and the nice lady behind the counter gave you a new scoop, this experience ends up there.
Memories stored in the neocortex are much stronger, because each part of your memory is stored in a different section. For example, the taste of the ice-cream is stored in the synapses of the taste…
