What’s the point of reading all these books and blog posts if you’re just going to forget most of it in a few hours?
I’ve been sitting in a cafe for two hours, reading countless blog posts on Medium and have come to the realization that I can only recall two or three of the numerous ideas and lessons I’ve read about.
Memory is fickle. I try to read as many books as I possibly can, yet I can barely tell you the main idea/plot of the books I’ve finished. Many students in college also have the same problem as me.
They spend an entire semester going over various subjects and investing hours upon hours into learning the material, only to find themselves forgetting the material a few hours after finishing their final exams.
Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, discovered the forgetting curve — a concept that hypothesizes the decline of memory retention in time.
The forgetting curve is the steepest during the first day, so if you don’t review what you’ve recently learned, you’re more likely to forget most of the material and your memory of it will continue to decline in the following days, ultimately leaving you with only a sliver of information.
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read on The Atlantic talks about how the rise of frequent Internet usage has affected our memory in a detrimental way.
Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says that the way people now consume information and entertainment has changed what type of memory we value — and it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you saw six months ago.
In the internet age, recall memory — the ability to spontaneously call information up in your mind — has become less necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.
We treat the Internet as a hard drive for our memories. We know that if we ever need a piece of information, we can open up our laptop and search for it immediately.
Just-in-time learning is becoming increasingly popular because it is more efficient to search for information that you need immediately rather than storing information that might be useful in the future. Deep knowledge is no longer valued — shallow, quick and practical pieces of information are more effective in getting the job done.
Because we know that we have an externalized memory, we put less effort in memorizing and fully understanding concepts and ideas that we learn.
Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it. But even before the internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves. You don’t need to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.