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Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
- carlos 16y agoI had the same problem, and sometimes it's embarrassing to say you read a book but don't remember anything about it. I'm happy I'm not the only one. I loved the one of the sentences in post "You are all what you read". I would also add "We read what we want to be". (now starting to forget the post)
- ascuttlefish 16y agoI am the same way. I read to further my knowledge... sometimes. Other (read: most) times, I read because I enjoy the immersive experience. Taking things from that and putting them in long-term memory isn't really part of the agenda. If it is, I take notes. That helps!
- Tangurena 16y agoI 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'."
- carlos 16y ago> To twist a phrase from Glengarry Glen Ross: "ABL - Always Be Learnin'." Bad memory forces you to always be learning, at least trying to learn a bit more than what it's forgotten.
- absconditus 16y ago"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/chapter3.html http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/c...
- csallen 16y agoI'm not sure about the tablet analogy, but regardless this is great advice. It's not enough to just read something. It helps tremendously to be engaged while reading -- to take notes, and discuss ideas with your friends. Then, after you've finished, come back in a few days, and again in a few weeks to reflect on things. The amount of text and information contained in books (and on blogs, on HN, in emails, etc) is overwhelming, and it's asking too much to try and remember it without reflection or repetition. This reminds me of something my Latin teacher, who was an ancient history buff, used to always claim -- that many Roman citizens could go listen to a speech for an hour, then recite almost the whole thing from memory. Enviable to be sure, but remember that the vast majority was illiterate, and even for those who weren't, chiseling letters into stone tablets was no easy task.
- joshuacc 16y agoI could be mistaken, but didn't they use scrolls and wax tablets for most things?
- eru 16y agoThat's why Plato (or Socrates or so? One of the Greek philosophers) ranted against writing --- it makes people scatterbrained by allowing them to be scatterbrained, instead of having to remember everything.
- Tichy 16y agoMaybe 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".
- klbarry 16y agoI did get a bit of that vibe
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- dinkumthinkum 16y agoYeah, honestly, the whole thing is just horribly pretentious.
- klbarry 16y agoI don't relate at all - I believe I remember the content of every book I've ever read, and the main takeaways of it.
- ascuttlefish 16y agoLucky?
- adambyrtek 16y agoWhat about names? I cannot remember the names of main characters from a book I read last week.
- hanibash 16y agoI have a poor memory, and it's difficult for me to describe books to friends after having read them. But I know for a fact that they shape me. It comes out in the way I behave and the opinions I hold.
- Arun2009 16y agoMy 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. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.” IMO, this quote demonstrates a phenomenon I've long suspected to hold with the books that I read. The essence of a book's or an article's content is captured by a few key ideas and phrases (e.g., 'gestalt of knowledge', 'wraith of memory' in this case), but merely knowing these phrases is not enough. You need to read the entire book to have a sensation of the ideas getting fleshed out. The article on 'metrosexuals', the pamphlet on "the third estate", and the book on 'positioning' are other examples I can think of where this phenomenon plays out. A rich 3-dimensional idea in the author's mind gets transformed into words. The words themselves are just information. You then fight with the words to reconstruct the idea with all its original potency in your mind. It is not necessary for you to recall every little detail of it unless you are an academic or specialist in the field.
- kiba 16y agoI experienced this on my recent college exam on US history. The students have to write an 2-3 page essay and risk losing 40 points out of 100 points on the exams. I had a little outline, not as complete as other students, but when I started writing, details just flow out of me. By the end of the exam(1 hour and 15 minutes), I written 4 pages. Then again, I got a 98 on my world history exam weeks earlier and I barely study. I taken notes over the professor's lecture though. I think I have a knack for history.
- anigbrowl 16y agoThe students have to write an 2-3 page essay and risk losing 40 points out of 100 points on the exams. Don't you mean they can gain up to 40 of 100 total available points? I do hope Academia hasn't adapted 'innocent until proven guilty' to mean 'knowledgeable until proven ignorant.' If that's how your professor presents it, he's doing the class a disservice.
- dinkumthinkum 16y agohm ... 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.
- TGJ 16y agoI think for most people, reading newspapers and articles in general falls into the glancing/skimming type of reading. It's not surprising to not remember something in that case.
- SanjayUttam 16y agoAs 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.
- Maro 16y agoSame 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.
- grandalf 16y agoOddly, 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.
- Maro 16y agoSame 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.
- icegreentea 16y agoIt's the difference between recall and recognition. In general, everyone is better at recognition than recall. The joy in watching movies over and over again, could be: 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.
- jessriedel 16y agoMaybe, but there a one or two movies I like watching so much I can repeat the lines verbatim. So I don't think its just having bad memory which would allow others to watch and enjoy a movie multiple times.
- jimbokun 16y agoI can recite a quite detailed synopsis of most of the movies I have watched, at least the ones I liked.
- Slashed 16y agoI'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.
- mentat 16y agoI'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?
- jordyhoyt 16y agoI have definitely had similar experiences and can remember fiction and non-fiction I read from when I was in jr high school like I'd just read it yesterday (24 now). I can recall the plots and what I took away from each. This article and most of this thread is just bizarre to me.
- Terretta 16y agoYou're not alone. I'm baffled by the premise of a book's memory gone after a month. Even junk fiction, like the 30+ mostly generic Alistair MacLean thrillers I read in high school 25 years ago, are easily recallable. I'm also skeptical at so many comments here agreeing with the article. Perhaps it's a selection bias. I talk books with lots of people and no one has mentioned this phenomenon.
- archangel_one 16y agoI agree, I would never forget a book after only a month. I know that I have an above-average memory but can't imagine that most people would forget them in such a short time. If people did, the literature section of the average pub quiz would be a heck of a lot harder than they are now :)
- melvinram 16y agoKey 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 of mixergy videos. When faced with a decision, instead of thinking "Peter Drucker said to do this", I think "The right approach is probably... " because that is how my brain is now "wired" to think. It's kind of like self-brain-washing or creating marcos for your brain. You are what you read.
- robg 16y agoI think that's spot on. My neuorimaging research has examined how the meaning of words are represented in the brain. Quite literally, words and their relationships to experiences, and each other, shape how we think. Mentalese may not be purely linguistic but the language we use reflects how our minds work. With and through language we rise above experience to penetrate beyond what our senses tell us and build realities independent of sensation. 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.
- mseebach 16y agoIt's almost if like the brain works a little like a neural network :)
- katovatzschyn 16y agoCould this be why incorrect facts may be recollected as true after proved false? Pathway for "false" not "rewritten / erased" but "pre-empted" by possibly "less robust" "true," to say this colloquially?
- jemfinch 16y agoObviously there are at least four people smarter than me here, because I can't for the life of me figure out what in the world you're trying to say.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoThis guy has some defect of memory. I remember plot, character, lines, ideas from books. Not all of it, but all the good bits.
- kiba 16y agoIt is probably not a defect of memory but a difference in the way minds work. What you have done is committed the typical mind fallacy. One example is imagination. Some people can have really vivid imagination, being able to count the strides on a tiger. Others have no ability to do imagery at all. Most are probably in-between. In my case, I can't really impose my imagination over reality as if I am viewing a movie. Let just say they like viewing at reality and imagination every other frame.
- T_S_ 16y agoTwo reasons: Reading is (or can be) a form of entertainment, so it doesn't matter. Recall and recognition are two different things. For example, you can learn to recognize a face and still be terrible at describing it. The same applies to other forms of learning I'm sure. I guess that is what the fuzzy remarks about "reading changes you" and "recalling the gestalt" refer to.
- doffm 16y agoI was happier when reading books. I understand that there might not be a causal effect here, but I believe that having something extended to occupy the mind is beneficial. Blogs, Twitter and online articles don't seem to have the same effect. Time to start reading again, even if I don't remember any of it.
- sp332 16y agoI've posted this quote before, but it seems especially relevant: "Education is what is left after all that has been learnt is forgotten." -- James Bryant Conant
- ivanzhao 16y agoAn analogy would be traveling in the brain jungle, where your conscious mind might not be able to recall the specific routes, your foot nevertheless leave marks in the jungle that make later traveling on the same paths easier or possible.
- ivanzhao 16y agoAll in all, answers to problems like this become very obvious once we separate our so-called conscious mind and the inner subconscious zombie that in fact does most of the mentally/bodily processing. For example: 1. Do you know all your vision can "physically" see at any moment is only about a thumbnail's size at an arm's reach, yet your inner zombie construct a vivid 3D environment. 2. What if I lower your house's keyhole by 2"? You would still reach for the old spot then realize something is wrong. But who's remembering the old location? Not your conscious self (otherwise every moment you type a key you have consciously validate). The memory keeper is your inner zombie.
- richieb 16y agoSilly.... If you can't remember what you had for lunch last Monday, why eat?
- araneae 16y agoFunnily enough, I feel more this way about food than books. I absolutely despise spending money on food because you eat it, and then it's gone! At least books are free via library and I enjoy them more.
- dsplittgerber 16y agoFor non-fiction: Remembering key concepts is a lot easier if you try to apply what you've learned to other articles, books or even the news you read. Try to actively remember what you recently read and how it fits with what you're reading now. Which point does the author make? Does it concur with what you've read before? Active recall and the application of recently acquired knowledge to novel ideas garantuees remembering key concepts for far longer than otherwise. Also, thinking about key concepts in connection with various topics makes your brain rewire the information and you'll remember it more easily ever after.
- aheilbut 16y agoIf you read a book a couple more times, you'll remember a lot more.
- robryan 16y agoI know someone who does that, reads it so fast the first time that I don't think they fully take it in then will go back and reread if it's worth it. Personally I like to go at a pace where I can make all the connections and take what I want from it the first time, then move onto something else.
- starpilot 16y agoThis is essentially the approach of "How to Read a Book," recommended above. Successive re-readings with increasing focus and slower pace build a deeper impression of the books in mind.
- robryan 16y agoAnother point to add to this, I read many articles online every day and given the vague task of recalling these articles and what I took away from them I couldn't. But if I'm discussing a topic or listening to a talk on something everything relevant I've read feels front of mind again and allows me to draw new conclusions from what I've read that I wasn't really able to earlier without them all front on mind. Really handy when, In a lot of topics relating to the kind of topics frequently on hacker news I can have long and insightful conversations with people where I have plenty to contribute myself.
- sabat 16y agoBecause we get the gist of them; we experience books the way we experience life. We learn from both, regardless of whether we memorize specifics and details.
- rubashov 16y ago"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
- huherto 16y agoI have to agree with that. I wish, I spent more time doing things than reading.
- LiveTheDream 16y agoIt's not too late.
- dbrannan 16y agoI can't say I agree with Mr. Einstein on this one.
- nileshtrivedi 16y ago"The constant streaming in of the thoughts of others must confine and suppress our own, and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought. Therefore, ceaseless reading and study directly injures the mine." - Schopenhauer
- tokenadult 16y agoWhat is the source of that Einstein quotation? (I have already done the obvious Google search, and I see a lot of claimed Einstein quotations in those words, but none with citations.) I ask, because although there is a whole book of Einstein quotations that has gone through several editions, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691120749/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691120749/ there are many Einstein quotations floating around the Internet that Einstein never said. Einstein is on record as describing himself as an avid reader when he was a teen studying physics: . . . I worked most of the time in the physical laboratory [at the Polytechnic Institute of Zürich], fascinated by the direct contact with experience. The balance of the time I used in the main in order to study at home the works of Kirchoff, Helmholtz, Hertz, etc. . . . In [physics], however, I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things which clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential. The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that one had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect [upon me] that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. In justice I must add, moreover, that in Switzerland we had to suffer far less under such coercion, which smothers every truly scientific impulse, than is the case in many another locality. There were altogether only two examinations; aside from these, one could just about do as one pleased. This was especially the case if one had a friend, as did I, who attended the lectures regularly and who worked over their content conscientiously. This gave one freedom in the choice of pursuits until a few months before the examination, a freedom which I enjoyed to a great extent and have gladly taken into the bargain the bad conscience connected with it as by far the lesser evil. It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly. "Autobiographical Notes," in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Paul Schilpp, ed. (1951), pp. 17-19 © 1951 by the Library of Living Philosophers, Inc. I know that citation is correct because I grew up with that book on the family bookshelf (as my late father studied the philosophy of science during his undergraduate education, just when the book was published). Reading can be good, Einstein thought, and maybe we should check the source of the quotation attributed to Einstein that discourages reading, to see exactly in what context it was said by Einstein, if it was said by him at all.
- levesque 16y agoWhy bother reading this article :)
- Tichy 16y agoWhat article?
- mixonic 16y agoGoogle link to bypass paywall: http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=reading+creates+pathways+in+the+brain,+strengthening+different+mental+processes http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&....
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- csomar 16y agoReading is good, but you shouldn't read a lot. You need to control yourself. Reading is addictive, but not-Reading is addictive too. I have been working with JavaScript lately and I found that as my code grows in size, I needed better patterns and methods. I read a book (OOP JavaScript). It was amazing. I liked it, read it again. I found out two other books and carried on reading. After a while, I found myself addicted to reading. I always find myself telling "There should be a better approach, let's sharpen more our skills". But sharpening doesn't seem to have an end, actually it doesn't. Bottom of the line, balance between reading and work. But never stop learning.
- jodrellblank 16y agoI asked a similar question on HN, and got some interesting replies, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=664383 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=664383
- robg 16y agoHow much effort do you put in to reading Hacker News? If it feels easy, then you likely aren't doing much to change your brain. Unless maybe you put in a bit of effort for years on end...there may be hope for some of us.
- lowdown 16y agothe book "How to Read a Book" describes the technique in his conclusion in excellent detail. It is essentially about owning the information you are consuming. Personally I think this applies to non-fiction works only. At least in my personal reading. My brain doesn't need to store the details of fictional works. It seems like it actively discards "entertainment" items in favor of knowledge I need to pay the mortgage and feed the kids. I am much more deliberate with that information.
- midnightmonster 16y agoI do remember much of what I read. I also have (what I take to be) an unusual quirk in that I'm very risk averse in reading--often I would rather reread a book I know I enjoy (and have gotten insight from) than risk an unknown. At first I thought that my retention might come from the rereading, but I'm not sure that's the case, since I have plenty of examples of remembering things after reading them once. In fact I think the rereading is caused by the retention: if what you read sticks in your head, a negative experience or a waste of time is that much more costly.
- mattlanger 16y agoMemory and recall are not matters of direct lookup; our brains are not key-value stores. We usually don't request a memory by timestamp, but rather, memories more often than not make themselves known to us--absent any request or intervention on our part--after being triggered by other associated sense perceptions (consider the memories invoked by the smell of leaves on an early fall day, the sound of a song you haven't heard in a decade). Anecdotally, at least, I very rarely (if ever) recall the details of a text by attempting to actively recall some specific fact, date, historical accident, or the like, but this by no means suggests that I have no memory of something I've read because it is so often the case that details I'd completely forgotten about return at the most unexpected times, triggered by the most unexpected stimuli.
- jimbokun 16y ago"Anecdotally, at least, I very rarely (if ever) recall the details of a text by attempting to actively recall some specific fact, date, historical accident, or the like, but this by no means suggests that I have no memory of something I've read because it is so often the case that details I'd completely forgotten about return at the most unexpected times, triggered by the most unexpected stimuli." Ideas from books I've read often jump into my head when it is relevant to the conversation at hand.
- crystalis 16y agohttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/McInerney-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/McInerney-t.h... could make an interesting companion.
- jimbokun 16y agoI can't relate. Snippets of books I read years ago often pop into my head at various times. On the other hand, I'm often stumped to remember where I put down my notebook five minutes ago.
- dean 16y ago"I totally believe that you are a different person for having read that book," Wolf replied. "It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it." "It’s there," Wolf said. "You are the sum of it all." Although I intuitively believe these statements are true, they seem vague and unconvincing as an explanation for the phenomenon. Wolf is essentially saying: "It's all in there, trust me." It may not have been the intent of the article writer to get into the specifics of the neuroscience involved, but I was hoping for a little more of an explanation than this.
- dbrannan 16y agoMy oldest boy (he is ten) just finished reading his first novel, which for him was quite an accomplishment. What my wife and I noticed after he finished the book was his writing skills improved significantly.
- pbw 16y agoThere is an easy analogy with food or exercise. The experience of eating a single meal or exercising a single day is forgotten, even while permanent changes to the body slowly accumulate. Some people in this thread cite books they vividly remember from childhood. I suspect this is a result of the huge impact on a younger brain. In contrast a mature avid reader might have read 1000 books and an additional one is just not going to re-wire things as much even if the experience of reading it is richly rewarding.
- jseliger 16y agoA lot of the comments here about memory, recall, and learning are dealt with in Daniel T. Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/047059196X?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=047059196X http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/047059196X?ie=UTF8&tag=...), which describes a lot of things, including how we move from a state of no knowledge to shallow knowledge to deep knowledge in particular problem domains. People with no knowledge and who have some introduced tend not to retain that knowledge well; people who have shallow knowledge tend not to connect that knowledge to other knowledge; and people who have deep knowledge can fit new information into existing schemas, webs, or ideas much more effectively than those who can't. It's not an easy process, moving from one state to another, and it's also not a binary one. Willingham's focus is on how teachers can do this more effectively, but he also describes how people in general can or should. I'm guessing that we can't remember books because many books give us relatively shallow knowledge and because most books have too many details for us to remember the finer points of them. But this probably changes over time: when I used to read fiction as a teenager or just after I started college, I mostly remember whether I liked the book or not. Now I'm in grad school for English and tend to remember the plots, how characters express themselves, the main conflicts in the novel and what those main conflicts signal, etc. So in reading Emma again this week, I realized that many of Austen's characters are actually judging themselves when they judge others, because their views of what is "right" or "proper" is mostly about preferences (and I actually wrote a post on the subject: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/29/jane-austen-emma-and-what-characters-are-doing http://jseliger.com/2010/09/29/jane-austen-emma-and-what-cha...). Now I'm likely to remember when Emma admits she's wrong and so forth. Granted, I've read the novel before, but that happens with other novels too. Finally, I now often write blog posts about books or take notes on them using Devonthink Pro as described by Steven Berlin Johnson: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... . This dramatically increases retention.
- zzzmarcus 16y agoJust to emphasize jseliger's last point, taking notes, specifically, writing reviews on books has helped me retain what I read more than I could have possibly imagined. While I'm reading I try to keep myself in a frame of mind of a book reviewer. What will I want my audience to know about this book? What do I agree with or disagree with? What are the highlights? I sometimes take notes while I'm reading, but more often I just try to maintain that mindset. When I'm done I write a quick 3 to 7 paragraph review and post it on GoodReads. Knowing that my review will be public forces me to take an objective look at my thoughts on the book, are they intelligible, consistent, relevant? Writing the review also makes my conversation about the book more interesting and confident. And the more I talk about a book, the better I retain the information in it, so it's a double benefit. I've also found that reading the review a couple years later will quickly bring back more of the book than I get by just flipping through the pages or wracking my brain to remember what I read. Writing a review on a book doesn't take long, maybe 20 minutes per book, it helps my writing skills and helps me read less passively. It's also pretty fun.
- confusedcitizen 16y agoWhy must everything end up being a utilitarian pursuit? I don't think it is surprising to many that the brain is plastic enough to absorb certain details subconsciously, but isn't it enough that the book engages us during the time we read it. Ideally, we would like all books to have a long lasting impression on us, but that question is on a slightly different note than the question being posed in the article.
- ludwigvan 16y agoFor the brave enough who wants to get better at reading, I can recommend (see Disclaimer below) Mortimer Adlers' "How to Read a Book" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book ). In the book, he talks about how to read a book properly (in summary, as suggested in the article, read TOC first, take notes, become active etc.) and the books one should read from the Western culture. Britannica sells the compilation with the title "Great Books of the Western World". (I am not in US, so excuse me if this is just common knowledge there, and many houses in US are filled with this collection.) Disclaimer: Unfortunately, although I liked the book, I have been unable to apply the methods he suggested, due basically to "leaning".
- weel 16y agoWhen I saw the title I thought it was about Bayard's "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read." (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1596914696 http://www.amazon.com/dp/1596914696)
- gwern 16y ago> "A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours you spend on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions." --William Johnson Cory
- albertzeyer 16y agoI only get this on the link: "For free access to this article and more, you must be a registered member of NYTimes.com."
- 8ren 16y agoMy reading has achieved unprecedented levels of unverifiable productivity I have a terrible memory for arbitrary facts, but great for things I understand (thus, I seek the reasons behind the facts.) Then I could then work it out from first principles, so I didn't need to remember it - a kind of data compression. But it's also true that understanding things is exciting and engaging for me, and therefore memorable. And in practice, I don't consciously work things out from first principles anyway; I just know them. They have become part of me, not as facts, but as part of the way I think.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- c00p3r 16y agoWhy do exercises if we can't stay in shape?
- jollojou 16y agoThis phenomenon of not remembering what I just read is familiar to me from the moments where I'm about to take an exam after a course. I usually go through the course material two or three times before taking the exam. Just before taking my place in the exam room, I test my self: "what were the five key points in chapter 3". Oh I can't recall them, I'm in trouble! Fortunately the exams (at least in my university) did not focus on the student's ability to remember exact sentences or enumerate the "five bullets on chapter X". Like in real life, most of the exams required me to remember ideas and their implications, not exact phrases. To sum, its not essential to be able to recall and speak out some random facts from a book. Its more important to comprehend what ideas were present in the book and what consequences those ideas might have on X or Y. Us humans are not computers but beings capable of creative thought.
- scotty79 16y agoIf the book contains no ideas next month I hardly can remember about what it was. If author of the book actually bothered to put some ideas in then I remember those ideas and usually the book in which I encountered them for many years. vide Iain M. Banks "Use of weapons", Orson Scott Cars "Ender's Game", Vernor Vinge "Fire upon the deep" or Henry Kuttner novels, Terry Pratchett "Nation" If you don't remember the books you've read then change the books you are reading to some that have actual content not just crafty words.
- grammaton 16y agoOkay, I'm just going to go ahead and say it then... “Perjury” , “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”, “Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine”. Anyone else notice how ponderously "literary" these books are? Is that how the author's choices run? Because frankly, they all sound really, really boring. Perhaps it's a case of the author picking things to read because they think they "should" be reading them, instead of reading what they actually want or would enjoy reading. I know, I know, YMMV, but it seems to me like a lot of this is rationalizing the author's choice of "weighty" material. I notice all the comments on here by people who are baffled by the idea of forgetting what one reads cite books that are more mainstream, less "important" and "literary", and more accessible - and probably enjoyable. tl;dr the author may be forgetting what he reads because he picks boring reading material
- known 16y ago"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain