How to Remember More of What You Read

- When I was a kid,

one of my favorite shows on Nickelodeon was Jimmy Neutron.

And when I watched that show,

one of the inventions that stuck out to me the most was book gum.

_

These were little sticks of gum

that each contained the entire text of a specific book.

And as Jimmy put it,

when you chew it, you know it.

And ever since I saw that episode,

I've always wished that invention actually existed.

How cool would it be to be able

to just chew a stick of gum

and know the text of Moby Dick or your math textbook?

But of course book gum does not exist sadly,

so what I want to do today is talk about what you can do

to remember what you read better.

Because you can read more books,

you can read them faster,

but if you are not intaking the information

and you're not able to recall it and apply it later on,

then what are you really reading for in the first place?

And as I see it,

there are two different categories of books

that we need to cover.

First there are books full of facts and concepts

that you need to simply know.

Things like the mere exposure effect

from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow

or the definition of a caravel,

which you can learn in Daniel Boorstin's history text,

The Discoverers.

The information contained in books like these is

of a more academic nature.

It's less applicable to your life,

you can't use it so easily.

But you still may need to know it,

be it for a test down the road

or simply because you want to.

So first we are going

to quickly cover five specific techniques

that you can use to more effectively remember

the information from basically any book that you're reading.

But these are gonna be especially useful

for these more academic types of books.

After that though, we are going to talk

about the second category of books.

These are the more actionable practical books,

things like Music Theory or The Science of Cooking.

These kind of books are actually trying

to teach you something that you will use

and as you may imagine, the most effective way

to remember the information in these types of books

is a little bit different.

But first let's talk

about those five general reading techniques

and the first one is called pre-reading.

So to effectively pre-read

before you dig into the actual chapter,

first go over the book's table of contents,

skim the chapter, look at the chapter subheadings,

maybe some bullet lists,

and then go to the back of the chapter.

If there's a summary or review questions,

review those as well.

Doing this before reading has the effect

of priming your brain

to more readily pick out the most important information

when you're actually going through the text.

And if you want a really great example

of how priming can affect your brain,

just briefly close your eyes

and think about a specific color.

And do that for a couple of seconds.

Then once you open your eyes again,

you're gonna start noticing that color everywhere

in your environment.

You've primed your brain.

And pre-reading does the exact same thing for words

on a printed page.

Secondly, highlighting can be very effective

but only if you do it right.

See, a lot of people have the tendency

of highlighting way too much when they read

or going through the text and highlighting immediately

instead of trying to read and understand the text first.

So as Walter Pauk points out

in his book How To Study In College,

read the text before you start marking it.

This has the dual effect of making sure

that you're focusing all of your attention

on actually understanding what you're reading

instead of looking for sections to highlight,

but it also prevents you from highlighting too much.

And this is important because the more that you highlight,

the less useful those highlights are.

I mean, imagine if you highlighted every single piece

of text in a book.

You would have essentially just changed the background color

of the paper and gained nothing.

Anyway, other than that one little word of warning

about highlighting, I do have one additional tip

which is that it's good to know

if you are doing your highlighting on a Kindle

or on a digital platform of some sort,

usually your highlights go to a specific area of the app.

For example in the Kindle app,

you can bring up all of your highlights

for a specific book in one convenient place.

Tip number three, take notes after you read.

And notice that I said after you read.

Now you don't have to wait specifically

until you end an entire chapter,

but I think it's good to at least read a section,

try to get into it, and then go over it again

and take notes on the most important details.

Now you might be asking what are the most important details?

How do I know what I'm supposed to take notes on?

And hopefully your pre-reading will give you

a little bit of illumination in this area

because you're gonna start picking out

what's most important.

But in general, some good things to look out for

include key terms which are often bolded or italicized,

main points, and also examples and stories

that highlight those main points.

And these can often be summarized.

You don't have to take notes on them in too much detail.

Now again the length and the specific format

of your notes is gonna be completely up to you

and you're gonna get better at it over time.

But if you want some examples, I can provide a few,

including my own notes

on Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit

which I published on my personal website

and I'll have a link in the description down below.

That brings us to a very related tip,

which is to summarize what you read

after you're done reading it.

And with summaries in particular,

I think it's good to finish an entire chapter

and then go back, try to pick up the main points,

maybe look at your notes, and then write a summary.

Again, you don't want this thing to be too long,

you just want it to be a very distilled version

of what you read that contains the most important

and salient points.

Finally, seek out secondary sources of information

that can complement what you're reading.

This has the dual benefit

of building additional neural connections to the material

that you're forging through the book

but it also keeps your level of interest high

or could potentially boost it

for topics that you're not super interested in.

Because a lot of times,

staring at a piece of dead tree on your desk

isn't the most interesting way

to learn about a topic, right?

And make no mistake about it,

interest is the most important ingredient

to effective learning and long-term recall.

As the author Frances Lockwood put it over 100 years ago,

"In the long run the secret of study resides

"in our ability to bathe our thought, our task,

"our lesson in the stream of interest."

So if you can and you have time to do it,

find other sources of information

that can boost the level of interest you have in the topic.

Now this could be other books

but it could also be a podcast episode or a museum tour

or maybe even a video game.

The reason that I still remember what a caravel is

is because I was actually using them in Civilization V

as I read about them in The Discoverers.

Just want to pause for a second

to point out that I played over a hundred turns

of Civ V last night to get B-roll

for the stupid caravel section

and it turns out the Portuguese civilization

doesn't even get caravels

because they get a better unit automatically.

(sighs) But you get the point.

Alright, with my future self's editing complaints

out of the way, it is now time to move on

to that more practical category of books,

books that are actually trying to teach you something

that you will use in the future.

So as you probably could have guessed,

the most effective way to recall the information

in these kinds of books is to mix reading with doing.

Mix the academic study with practical application.

I mean, that's kind of the point

of these kinds of books anyway, right?

Now what I want to do with this section of the video is

just give you a few practical examples

of how I'm putting this concept into action.

And let's start with Brian Boone's book on music theory.

One thing you learn about early on in this book

is the interval patterns

that define different types of scales.

For example there's a specific interval pattern

for minor scales and that differs

from the one for major scales.

Now I could have just read about this.

After all, it is a music theory after all

and the interval patterns aren't too difficult

to grasp and understand.

But to understand them better, after I read about them,

I went and wrote an interval pattern down

on a piece of paper at my piano

and then I spent some time picking random notes

and building scales from those notes

using the interval pattern.

(piano music)

Doing this helped me to build a more concrete understanding

of how these patterns worked.

It was more solid than if I had just read

and tried to memorize them.

And to further solidify that mindset,

I also spent some time improving

within the scales that I had built.

(piano music)

Now regardless of what you think of this piece,

it's obviously more fun to play

than just going up and down scales.

And again this goes back to that quote about interest.

If you can bind what you're learning

to something that you're more interested in

like playing fun music,

you're gonna understand it and remember

and recall it a lot more effectively.

For another example,

let's talk about The Code Book by Simon Singh.

This book traces the entire history of cryptography,

starting from very simple Caesar ciphers and scytales,

going all the way up to theoretical quantum cryptography.

Now while remembering the historical details

in this book would mostly entail using the techniques

we've already talked about,

the actual methods of cryptanalysis,

like frequency analysis,

are much better understood through practice.

And wouldn't you know it,

in the back of The Code Book,

there is an entire code-breaking challenge.

So while I was reading The Code Book,

I also spent some time trying

to work through those problems.

And interestingly as I worked through them

and gained more practical experience in cryptanalysis,

my interest level rose

and I was able to remember the details more.

Like that's the only reason I can remember

what a scytale is.

Fun little side note,

that knowledge of what a scytale was actually helped me

to beat an escape room recently.

So if you want to get better at beating escape rooms,

you may want to read The Code Book.

Alright, so we have covered a lot of information

in this video but I do want to leave you with one final tip.

After you're finished reading a chapter or a section,

go for a walk, take a break, hit the gym.

Take a little bit of time to refrain

from intaking more information

because in this modern world,

we have access to so much of it.

There are so many different sources

and if we're not careful,

we can find ourselves spending literally all

of our waking hours intaking information.

But if you want to be able to use that information,

if you be able to recall it,

you can't constantly be intaking new things.

You have to give what you've already read,

what you've already taken in,

time to kind of marinate, time to set itself up

and actually integrate itself

into your existing banks of knowledge.

So use these techniques to start learning more effectively

but at the same time always keep in mind the words

of the great Gabe Newell.

- These things, they take time.

- Now earlier in the video,

we talked about how exploring topics in different mediums

can help you to more effectively remember what you've read.

And a very easy way to do that is

to go out and find a documentary

on the same topic you're reading about.

CuriosityStream has over 2,400 documentaries

from some of the world's best filmmakers,

covering science, technology, history, and more.

So whether you're reading about the history

of the Apollo space program or the reign of Louie XIV,

you'll be able to find something there

that can further expand your knowledge and interest.

And if you're looking for a place to start,

I'm gonna recommend the Deep Ocean series, which is narrated

by the always excellent David Attenborough.

Or you can dig into original series

featuring Stephen Hawking, Sigourney Weaver,

and Derek Muller, and you can do it from anywhere.

I still find CuriosityStream on Roku, smart TVs,

iOS, Android, Chromecast, and of course on the web.

You can get unlimited access to everything

on CuriosityStream for just $2.99 per month.

And if you'd like to try it out for free first,

you can go over to curiositystream.com/thomas

and use the promo code Thomas at checkout

to get a completely free 31 day trial.

Huge thanks goes out to CuriosityStream as always

for sponsoring this video

and also supporting my channel

and thank you guys so much for watching as well.

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and I will see you in the next one (mouth pops).