Have you ever sat down to read a book, learned a lesson, but then forgot most of the content that was loaded into your head? So why is that, and how to fix it?
This is covered in something called ” The Forgetting curve” , discovered by a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus. This concept refers to the hypothesis that the decline in memory storage capacity is related to the time variable. The slope of this curve is steepest on the first day after we’ve just loaded something into our brains, which means that if you don’t review what you’ve learned, you’ll forget most of what you’ve learned. In the days that follow, this forgetfulness continues until a moment in our minds there is only a little bit of information about it.
According to Jared Horvath from the University of Melbourne, in the internet age, the way we store information and consume it has changed a lot . We tend to remember more superficially because we rely on the internet. Once we know how to find that information and how to access it, it’s easier to know what we need, so there’s no more trying to memorize it.
External memory will cause us to gradually lose the habit of remembering and understanding correctly.
We see the internet as a memory that can be accessed at any time, when we need something, the first thing we do is pick up a phone or laptop and Google it immediately. It’s more effective than having to store it in your head and try to recall it when you need to solve something. And because we know that “we have a very good external memory “ , we gradually lose the habit of remembering and understanding exactly what we have learned or read.
Many studies show that, Even this happened before the internet when we tend to access more information online, the rate of information retrieval to our brains will be lower. Appearing, then entertainment means emerged and served us with the same purpose.
A study from Horvath found that people who watch the entire series once will forget much more quickly than those who watch one episode a week. This is similar to reading. The average American will read about 100,000 words (in 2009), but they don’t really “read” all these 100,000 words. Reading, especially when reading online, is only meant to gather information, and most of this information is rarely converted into memory, unless it is really interesting.
In fact, information is not knowledge, it does not stay much in memory and memory. We are not really learning through reading, we are fooling ourselves.
So in a nutshell, how do we retain what we’ve read, seen, or heard? The most important thing is to take the time to “digest” that amount of information and dig into it. Memory is greatly strengthened when we try to remember something.
If you are learning a complicated topic, a difficult formula, think about it constantly, review it.
Usually when we read, information flows into our heads and we feel that we are doing very well in our studies, right? But it really doesn’t save much, unless we really focus on each word to remember. We can hear and see , which is what we do most of the time, but we are not noticing and listening.
So if we are learning a complex subject, a difficult formula, let’s constantly think about it, review it . The more we remember it, the more firmly it is stuck in memory. Try to remember what you learn without reading the material. Somewhere we forget, we look back, and repeat the same thing after a few hours. When reading what needs to be noted, take notes, this will make us remember more deeply. To make this note-taking more effective, don’t write down the points that we need to remember, instead take notes in the form of questions.
Similarly when reading a book, remind yourself of the main ideas mentioned in the previous chapters so that the brain is recalled and strengthens the ability to remember. When you finish reading a chapter, ask yourself what you learned during the last reading. However, we should not try to memorize every detail and overdo it, that will increase the pressure and feel that learning and reading becomes boring. We only need to remember the main points.