Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Collins-t.html

by mapleoin • 16 years ago

208 102 16 years ago

carlos2• 16 years ago

I 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)

ascuttlefish2• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

I 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'."

carlos2• 16 years 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• 16 years 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/c...

csallen• 16 years ago

I'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.

Tichy4• 16 years ago

Maybe 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".

klbarry3• 16 years ago

I did get a bit of that vibe

dinkumthinkum2• 16 years ago

Yeah, honestly, the whole thing is just horribly pretentious.

klbarry3• 16 years ago

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.

ascuttlefish2• 16 years ago

Lucky?

adambyrtek• 16 years ago

What about names? I cannot remember the names of main characters from a book I read last week.

klbarry3• 16 years ago

I remember no names at all from most books. I don't think of it as important, I guess. I also have no idea what most book characters look like, I generally ignore the author's descriptions in my memory.

Tichy4• 16 years ago

I often can't even remember the names from the previous chapter.

hanibash• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

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. 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.

kiba2• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

The 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.

Kaizyn• 16 years ago

There are some interesting ideas along this same line in this essay/lecture by Douglas Hofstadter:

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h...

zacharycohn• 16 years ago

I agree 100%, and to add on: I think it has to do with the context of those key ideas or phrases. You could simply tell a child that "the Boy Who Cried Wolf is about a boy who kept lying then got eaten by a wolf because no one believed him when he was telling the truth." But largely, the message would be lost.

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.

robg3• 16 years ago

My only worry with this takeaway is that it leads to an assumption that you don't have to fully read to get the gestalt. The active process of reading - each and every effort - builds the associative networks. To me that's what is so pernicious about the most popular platforms of the internet today. Because information is a click away, the immediacy masquerades as depth. Blogs, tweets, comments, and updates just feed the perception of being educated. By contrast, essays and books require a significant effort to digest. The effort is meaningful in building the pathways. That's why education is stressful. We're working to re-orient our heads. Walking up a mountain may just start out as one foot in front of another. 3,000 feet later we really appreciate and understand the height we've climbed.

zeraholladay• 16 years ago

To elaborate on your point, I also think it's awesome that the wraith of forgotten memory forms a rich 3-dimensional idea.

nprincigalli• 16 years ago

I find these "key ideas and phrases" summarized in "key takeaways" or "TL;DR" snippets to be quite handy.

If you've been through the entire piece of work already, it helps you wrap it up. If not, they're good to help you decide whether to dive in or not. Just like when you'd read a long paper's abstract + conclusion sections before committing your time to it.

Summarizing a long text into "key ideas and phrases" can also help the author see the structures and the patterns of his output, which is important for his own development, and critical if you want to generalize, go meta, and bring it onto other areas :)

dinkumthinkum2• 16 years ago

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.

TGJ• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

As 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.

Maro2• 16 years ago

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 head.

grandalf• 16 years ago

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.

Maro2• 16 years ago

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.

icegreentea• 16 years ago

It'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• 16 years ago

Maybe, 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.

jimbokun3• 16 years ago

I can recite a quite detailed synopsis of most of the movies I have watched, at least the ones I liked.

Tichy4• 16 years ago

The content of modern movies is not that deep. There probably was not much more story to the bucket list than the summary you provided.

Slashed• 16 years ago

I'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• 16 years ago

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 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• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

You'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.

melvinram2• 16 years ago

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 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.

robg3• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

It's almost if like the brain works a little like a neural network :)

katovatzschyn• 16 years ago

Could 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• 16 years ago

Obviously 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.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

Yes and I think it's part of the mechanism that makes propaganda and innuendo effective.

nocman• 16 years ago

"creating marcos"? Marco who? :-D

Please tell me you meant "creating macros" -- or is there some secret meaning of "marco" that I'm missing here?

melvinram2• 16 years ago

:D yes, I meant macros

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

This guy has some defect of memory. I remember plot, character, lines, ideas from books. Not all of it, but all the good bits.

kiba2• 16 years ago

It 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_• 16 years ago

Two 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• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

I'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

ivanzhao2• 16 years ago

An 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.

ivanzhao2• 16 years ago

All 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• 16 years ago

Silly.... If you can't remember what you had for lunch last Monday, why eat?

araneae• 16 years ago

Funnily 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• 16 years ago

For 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• 16 years ago

If you read a book a couple more times, you'll remember a lot more.

robryan2• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

This 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.

robryan2• 16 years ago

Another 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• 16 years ago

Because 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• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

I have to agree with that. I wish, I spent more time doing things than reading.

LiveTheDream• 16 years ago

It's not too late.

dbrannan2• 16 years ago

I can't say I agree with Mr. Einstein on this one.

nileshtrivedi• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

What 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/

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.

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.

hugh3• 16 years ago

Well he does say "past a certain age".

On the other hand, Einstein did most of his greatest work by the age of 25, and all of his great work by the age of 35, so perhaps we should be following the example of the younger Einstein rather than the advice of the older Einstein.

levesque• 16 years ago

Why bother reading this article :)

Tichy4• 16 years ago

What article?

mixonic• 16 years ago

Google link to bypass paywall:

http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&....

csomar• 16 years ago

Reading 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• 16 years ago

I asked a similar question on HN, and got some interesting replies, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=664383

robg3• 16 years ago

How 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• 16 years ago

the 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• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

Memory 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.

jimbokun3• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/McInerney-t.h... could make an interesting companion.

jimbokun3• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years 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.

dbrannan2• 16 years ago

My 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• 16 years ago

There 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• 16 years ago

A 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=...), 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-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/0002... . This dramatically increases retention.

zzzmarcus• 16 years ago

Just 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.

astrofinch2• 16 years ago

And you might also be doing a public service: I suspect that reading book reviews may be a good way to get a solid 20-30% of the benefit from the book's factual content in less than a hundredth of the time it takes to read.

Alex3917• 16 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation, just added the book to my cart on Amazon. I've never tried Devonthink, though personally I'm a huge advocate of FreeMind. Here is what notes look like in that program:

http://alexkrupp.com/mindmaps/parenting.html

Is it true that you can improve your schemas even if you don't take notes and can't remember the specifics of the book? Yes. But the fact is that insights are easy, change is hard. And if you're not using FreeMind or something similar to take notes and construct new ideas then you might as well be eating paintchips. That program easily adds another ten points to my IQ.

confusedcitizen• 16 years ago

Why 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• 16 years ago

For 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 ). 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• 16 years ago

When 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)

gwern• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

I only get this on the link: "For free access to this article and more, you must be a registered member of NYTimes.com."

8ren• 16 years ago

My 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.

c00p3r• 16 years ago

Why do exercises if we can't stay in shape?

jollojou• 16 years ago

This 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• 16 years ago

If 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• 16 years ago

Okay, 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• 16 years ago

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain

Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?

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