
A system to help you remember more of what you read - robheaton
https://robertheaton.com/2018/06/25/how-to-read/
======
allworknoplay
I find that simply sitting and thinking while -- and after -- reading
nonfiction (or fiction, if it's got good ideas) burns the facts and ideas in
as well as anything. I don't think most people allow as much time for
reflection and mind-wandering as they ought to; expecting yourself to remember
fact after fact without taking time to really absorb, reflect, and expand on
them doesn't seem realistic.

It's not unlike a memory palace -- rather than just read the fact, think on
it, expand on it and give it context and a place to live in your brain.

~~~
BeetleB
I've tried this and failed - I don't retain much a few months down the road
with this method. And as with false memories, what I _do_ retain is often not
quite right.

My process is not as involved. I take notes in a notebook while reading. Then
I make blog posts out of them. This way I can review/consult any time, any
where.

This really does slow down my process, though. I used to read several books in
the time it now takes to read one. Writing blog posts is time consuming (and
my notes are very rough).

~~~
2020-3030
I like your method because it shares what you learn with others while helping
you repeat and process the material.

And what good is it to plow through book after book if we remember little or
nothing? Quite a few universities also don't give people any time to reflect
between courses so modern schooling and many people's reading habits are
geared more to the initial stimulation of reading and less to memory.

I'm a firm believer in taking notes, reflecting, and explaining the ideas to
others for anything we really want to remember or master.

------
Terretta
Underlining and highlighting have a mechanical failure for recall — they do
not exercise the output circuits even once.

Instead, if you want to remember the thought you were about to highlight or
underline, _write it out long hand_ , and _from short term memory not copying
rote_ , in a note book.

This exercises the full path: reading, comprehension, decision you’ll need to
recall, storage, retrieval, and output from mental storage back into physical
world.

Plus, the notebook then provides a hook for refreshing the information
geography in your storage. Reskim the notes and you refresh the larger
narrative and how it hangs together. Revisit the notebook on a periodically
decreasing interval, you’ll still recall the narrative decades later.

~~~
repsak
Just skimmed the article but underlining only seemed to be one small part of
the method.

Understanding by summarizing into Anki cards and then making sure you remember
it trough spaced repetition (both "output") seemed to be the most important
part.

Distributed learning, practice testing and Interleaved practice all seem to
have some scientific backing.

~~~
QasimK
What is distributed learning? Is it spaced repetition?

~~~
repsak
It just means distributing your learning trough time, so basically the
opposite of cramming.

I guess spaced repetition can be seen as a combination of distributed learning
and practice testing.

I got the terminology from here

[http://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full](http://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full)

Here is a nice summary of the results

[http://journals.sagepub.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/s...](http://journals.sagepub.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/sage/journals/content/psia/2013/psia_14_1/1529100612453266/20160822/images/medium/10.1177_1529100612453266-table4.gif)

------
lucb1e
Relevant:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html)

> What use is it to read [hundreds of books in my life] if I remember so
> little from them? [...]

> 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.

~~~
jseliger
I use this method: [https://jakeseliger.com/2018/06/30/how-i-remember-what-i-
rea...](https://jakeseliger.com/2018/06/30/how-i-remember-what-i-read-and-
connect-it-to-what-else-ive-read)

------
larkeith
While I agree that the author's method likely helps comprehension and
retention, I disagree with his premise that it is necessary for these, or even
particularly time-efficient. His key factor seems to be "Learning comes from
repetition"; though important to he learning process, repetition is neither
the sole, nor even the primary factor. When it comes to retention of concepts,
rather than raw data, comprehension and connecting to other knowledge is
crucial.

In the author's method, these are reinforced with marginal notes (for
comprehension) and a post-reading writeup (to connect concepts). I suspect
this to be significantly inferior to more in-depth note-taking, as a
significant amount of information may be lost in the time between reading
chapter one and finishing the book, whereas complete notes should allow for
immediate relation and processing. A high quality book will be organized to
assist the reader in relating concepts, and waiting until book completion to
prioritize this defeats the purpose of reading a book rather than a collection
of disparate articles.

Still, the author is absolutely correct in that active reading is a worthwhile
habit, and you should try to find an optimal method for your learning
tendencies; While for me focusing on repetition and post-read review is
brutally inefficient, everyone learns differently, so it may be perfect for
you.

~~~
knight17
The author mentions writing down a summary after every chapter in the book
itself. The final notes are prepared from each chapter's annotations and
handwritten summaries. If anyone is interested in reading to retain more, try
How to Read a Book [1] by Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler. Reviews and
summaries of the boook [2, 3].

[1] : [https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-
Intelligent/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-
Intelligent/dp/0671212095)

[2] : [https://fourminutebooks.com/how-to-read-a-book-
summary/](https://fourminutebooks.com/how-to-read-a-book-summary/)

[3] :
[http://oxfordtutorials.com/How%20to%20Read%20a%20Book%20Outl...](http://oxfordtutorials.com/How%20to%20Read%20a%20Book%20Outline.htm)

------
PuffinBlue
I have a somewhat similar system but without writing anything in the book,
because I use ebooks, and it's not quite as intensive.

An example is here[0] but basically I keep notes on:

Places

Things

Characters

Plot

Nothing too long and it's all filled in in a few seconds in an Evernote
notebook/note as I read along.

The main reason this is effective for me is that I can very quickly look up a
character/place/plot in one single place in just a few seconds.

Often I don't need to re-read the whole thing, just the 'recent past' bits to
quickly remember where I was in the plot after I put the book down for a week
or two.

It ends up looking like a lot but it's more a consequence of doing a little a
lot of times rather than a large amount of burdensome work.

I'm not sure if it helps long term retention, but it does help short term and
it certainly helps comprehension when I've forgotten some characters
significance or minor but consequential plot point.

[0] [https://www.josharcher.uk/blog/diaspora-greg-egan-book-
revie...](https://www.josharcher.uk/blog/diaspora-greg-egan-book-review/)

~~~
maaaats
Kindle has this as a feature called XRay. Can click a name for instance, and
quickly see relevant info so far.

~~~
PuffinBlue
I don't really want anything to do with connecting the Kindle to the internet.
Mine has never been off airplane mode and books are transferred by USB so xray
isn't very useful to me. Also it means I can't simply scan over the notes to
see catch up.

------
danial
I only record facts that I read in non-fiction (the mark-as-Q method from the
article). I highlight them in Kindle while reading ebooks. I then transfer
them into Anki flashcards after I'm done reading it.

I don't highlight analysis and commentary. I don't highlight how the author
reached a certain conclusion, just the end result.

Some examples of what I am highlighting while reading On Intelligence by Jeff
Hawkins:

"This is the neocortex, a thin sheet of neural tissue that envelops most of
the older parts of the brain."

"the neocortex is about 2 millimeters thick and has six layers,"

"Stretched flat, the human neocortical sheet is roughly the size of a large
dinner napkin. The cortical sheets of other mammals are smaller: the rat’s is
the size of a postage stamp; the monkey’s is about the size of a business-
letter envelope."

I wish there was a good way to transfer these highlights from my Kindle into
Anki flashcards automatically (if someone knows a way to do this, I'm happy to
hear from you). It feels like a chore right now, so I often forget to do it.

~~~
emilga
Just a suggestion:

If you download Kindle Mate (kmate.me), you can import your Kindle highlights
to your PC and export them as a text file. Then you could make a script that
parses this file line by line and saves it as a csv-file. Then use Anki csv-
import.

EDIT: fixed the link.

~~~
danial
Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, kmate.me is PC only and I'm on a mac.

------
laurieg
Here's a slightly silly way to keep your brain switched on while reading:

Set an alarm to go off every few minutes. When the alarm goes off shut the
book and summarise what you read in the past few minutes. Writing it down
helps keep you honest (if you do it in your head its very easy to fool
yourself). After you summarise start reading again.

Forcing yourself to practice recall helps memory. Being interrupted helps
memory too. You don't need any fancy software, just a timer.

~~~
elboru
Interesting, where did you learn that interruptions help memory? I would like
to read about it a little more.

~~~
manjunaths
It is called the Zeigarnik effect.

[https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/zeigarnik-effect-
in...](https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/zeigarnik-effect-
interruptions-memory)

------
fishyofsea
My reading changed after adopting a similar system. Reading on a Kindle and
with a new Google doc created for that book, I:

1\. Highlight the passages that are important along the way

2\. After each chapter I try to summarize its important points and any
challenges I have to them.

3\. Over multiple chapters, I have a section at the top "Key Ideas" with the
top 5-10 points over the course of the book.

4\. After the book is done, I edit the doc to include a "My Thoughts" section
and gather all my critical thoughts into one place. This is probably the most
valuable.

Overall, even if I don't remember the details of a book, now I have a
collection of summaries that I can pull up to remind myself about each book if
it comes up again later and I need a refresher.

As a bonus, it's super easy to write a review of the book afterward because
you have all the pieces almost already in place.

------
iandanforth
If this article is your cup of tea you might also be interested in "Learning
How to Learn" a Coursera course by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowsk. It boils
down to a similar system but gives more background, science, and detail.

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
learn/home/we...](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
learn/home/welcome)

------
achow
Inability to recall what you have read maybe is not that all is lost.

Reading changes your brain; in brain connections are continually created while
synapses that are no longer in use degenerates. Or in other words you are a
very different person today just by reading all those books in all those
years, that you don't remember anything of now.

~~~
tinyrick2
Just like what Ralph Waldo Emerson said: "I cannot remember the books I've
read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."

~~~
achow
Beautiful!

------
fantispug
I don't want to remember more of what I read; I want to have access to a
breadth and depth of ideas I can justify with evidence.

Repetition and flashcards will help you remember the content, but it won't
help you understand it. That's only done by actively engaging with the content
and connecting it to and comparing it with other facts and ideas.

The summarising, keeping lists of questions, and writeups will help you
understand the content, and I think is the only valuable part of this process.
Why rote memorise when you have lovely writeups you can refer back to.

I find Luhmann's Zettelkasten method, as described in 'How to Take Smart
Notes' more persuasive. As you read make bibliographic notes in your own words
(on page X it says Y), store these in one place for everything you read. Also
note down key ideas as you read with cross references to the bibliographic
notes, and to other key idea notes that are relevant; store all these notes in
another place. When you're filing a key idea have a look for similar ideas
already noted; is this the same? Supporting? Contradictory? These questions
help engage with the content. Over a lifetime you can amass a treasure chest
of ideas that you can refer back to at your leisure, as Luhmann did.

~~~
coldtea
> _I don 't want to remember more of what I read; I want to have access to a
> breadth and depth of ideas I can justify with evidence._

That's bad, because without remembering you don't have the ability to quickly
know where to look for those ideas and how to evaluate them. Nor do you know
how to justify them with evidence (because that depends on remembering domain
knowledge of evaluating, classifying and using the evidence itself).

Even if we assumed that you kept a working memory of "first principles" of
every knowledge domain you're interested in, and only cared to search and
evaluate ideas on demand, you'd still be at a disadvantage to anybody who
remembered not just first principles but also higher level information about
the knowledge domain -- and thus could skim through tons of BS or bad ideas
and sources of information and quickly pick and evaluate only what's relevant.

------
deltron3030
Trying to improve my own knowledge management, and looking into how regular
people who specialize in this area (people who read tons of non-fiction books)
handle this stuff, extract and conserve knowledge, I've stumbled upon methods
like "Zettelkasten". Does anybody here have experience with it?

~~~
azeirah
I've tried maintaining a zettelkasten (zettelkasten?) Using software, but all
available software just seemed overly convoluted and weird.

Another huge problem was that I read everywhere, anywhere and anytime.
Maintaining a zettelkasten required me to be at home, near my desktop.

I've tried many, many, many things, and have written like 5 different note-
taking programs over time, nothing ever really worked for me. Even keeping a
notebook with me at all times wasn't working out well, I always lost my pen,
realized too late that my notebook was full, etc (adhd forgetfulness ;c)

Now I own a remarkable tablet, and while it's not the perfect note-taking
system, at least I I always have the pen with me, it has all my notes, and
it's this weird mix of being simultaneously sort-of analog and digital.

~~~
deltron3030
Interesting, I was eyeing the reamrkable as well, but for drawing. It's
hackable, it runs Linux right? So it might be possible to hack into a portable
Zettelkasten with good UX! :)

~~~
azeirah
Oh yes definitely, it comes with root-access by default (and Vim
preinstalled!). And there are interesting open-source libraries available to
hack in new features:
[https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable](https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable)

------
obscura
To digress from the main point: the suggestion of writing in (physical) books
makes me cringe. Once you do so, they become absolutely worthless to anyone
but you. Trying reading a book that someone else has underlined and/or
annotated - it's highly distracting and annoying.

~~~
mistersquid
I used to be a professor of American Literature. I literally owned thousands
of books in the margins of which I wrote copious notes for research and
teaching.

When I left academia to move cross country, I had a yard sale and at the end
of the day a few hundred books were left over.

A young man who had come by earlier still had some interest in the books and
so I bequeathed them to him.

Then I moved cross country.

Over five years later, I received a FB message from someone who asked if I had
ever taught English in Ohio, and I confirmed that I had.

He replied he wanted to thank me because he was the recipient of those books.
He was a Ph.D. student in Math and he read many of the books he got from me
and said he learned so much about literature and writing that he never would
have as a result of the notes in my margin.

I was humbled that he found my scrawlings worth reading and even more humbled
he was able to learn something from them. I honestly think his intelligence
was the real key driving his learning, but I am beyond grateful that whatever
notes I left in the margins of those books provided enough information to
encourage a self-motivated learner to think deeply about the works he was
reading.

So while some may find annotations distracting and annoying, there are some
that can find those same annotations to be pointers to a fuller understanding
of the material so annotated.

EDIT: Change "and" to "to be" in last sentence.

~~~
obscura
> So while some may find annotations distracting and annoying, there are some
> that can find those same annotations to be pointers to a fuller
> understanding of the material so annotated.

The problem is that there's no guarantee that your marks/annotations will add
value for the next reader. It depends on who you are.

Of course, such value is subjective, so it depends on who the second reader
is.

Because of this, my preference is to have an unmarked book.

Also, the way in which you mark is the book makes a difference. Using the
margins is fine - I can live with that. But when the body text is underlined
en masse or seemingly arbitrarily with pen and by freehand, I think it's
really hard to argue that value has been added.

------
deskglass
Incremental Reading[1] is a related tactic that coverts reading material into
facts preserved via space repetition software.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading)

------
WhATiSCaMeLcaSE
I also find it useful to organize my notes by topic rather than by
book/author/time. Over time, I will build a master reference for topics that
I'm interested in.

OneNote/Evernote is especially helpful when you use handwritten idea maps
(e.g.
[https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvGG5UqSCqXTnjq9_pD_gb7SJPce](https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvGG5UqSCqXTnjq9_pD_gb7SJPce)).
I can't run out of space on my page and I can easily modify the contents if I
find better material down the road.

------
totalperspectiv
If anyone is interested in a deep dive on this topic, I highly recommend 'How
to Read Book' by Adler and Doren. It is a fantastic how to on learning and
understanding new ideas.

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-
Intelligent/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-
Intelligent/dp/0671212095)

~~~
organic_markov
Here's a nice summary of the algorithm:
[https://pastebin.com/wGFMM1pZ](https://pastebin.com/wGFMM1pZ)

------
psergeant
I’ve been doing something very similar to this for about ten years. I did
experiment with using Anki for it, but ended up with a more manual approach
involving wiki software and manually rescheduling when I’d read a chapter
again. Anyway, can highly recommend.

------
mad44
Very similar to how I read [http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-
read-research...](http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-read-
research-paper.html)

------
SloopJon
Can anyone recommend software to help generate quizzes, preferably with a
spaced repetition component? So, instead of a single card that associates
"agua" with "water", a set of cards like "____ es mojada" or "vaso de ____
fría". It might have a multiple choice interface where the order of the
choices varies, and maybe the wrong choices vary as well.

~~~
rjeli
Anki calls this _cloze deletion_ :
[https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#cloze](https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#cloze)

------
projectramo
I remembered enormous amounts of what I learned in college and grad school. My
friends are often shocked (or claim to be) at how much I can recall years
later.

Now, I did take notes and we did write papers but I think the key to it is
really: I explained it to other people. Either in class or socially (probably
some people considered it boring but it was a nerdy school and it wasn’t
uncommon.)

------
internetman55
My question: if great none of the essayists, thinkers, writers, etc. have used
and endorsed such a method, why am I going to care enough about the method to
even read such instructions? If they have, why isnt this explained in the
introduction?

------
nottorp
Isn't this article 10 years too late?

Today people need youtube tutorials to show them how to edit a 10 line
configuration file. A (video) tutorial explaining to them how much time they
lose watching videos instead of reading would be more appropriate.

~~~
michaelcampbell
"prefer" != "need"

Most of that is what they are used to.

------
kuwze
This reminds me of this 15-minute break period[0] that was recently featured
on HN.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16364423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16364423)

------
erfzsven
it's unnecessary to remember the whole book just for explaining it to someone
what you've read. that isn't worth another 4 hours.

for a non-professional book, it's the idea behind the story or the art of
writing or both, that values. if you can't explain what you've read, i think
it's most likely you haven't catch the main idea of the story rather than the
story itself.

------
DelightOne
Compared to doing nothing anything is better if you want to remember more.
Dunno if this one is better than others.

~~~
confounded
Can you recommend any of the others?

I’m aghast at how little I remember about the books I read! I’m very
interested to see other approaches.

~~~
karimdag
I only read on a kindle, so obviously the marginalia system is out of
question. Here’s what I do: I highlight the passage, write a note where I
summarize it _with my own words_. That’s all. But I also have a (physical)
notebook where I write using the Feynman technique. On top of it all, I read
at least 1 hour a day where I’m fully focused (or at least at 80% capacity)
and you know what ? _Good shit sticks_ : I trust my brain to capture what it
deems valuable. If I forget something I don’t sweat it, it’s more likely that
I don’t need it.

~~~
ozim
I agree and also if I read similar concept in other book, even if I did not
"remember it", I feel often dots connecting somehow in my brain and "ahh I
just read that in other book". So it is more like gathering concepts than
explicitly remembering that concept so I can quote it back when woke up past
midnight.

If someone wants to quote book from his head go for Anki and drill, most of
books I just want to internalize concepts.

------
slics
The challenge this days with remembering anything is the fact that we no
longer train our mind to remember or store anything. We are slowly learning
how not to remember anything. The convenience tools such as Alexa or Google
will one day make us even forget our own home address. Convenience is the Evil
of Everything. (yep just made that up on the fly).

~~~
bachbach
David Krakauer of Santa Fe Institute has expanded on the same concept with
some great Youtube videos.

Everybody I meet today has some memory loss, the younger the worse it gets.

In the future there may be "Mind Gyms" for exercising our mental processes to
keep them fit.

------
referata
Interesting..

------
bachbach
Like the orly shorthand. I've used less polite versions for years in the
margins.

