How to Read and Remember

Here are the  tips for a better memory:

1. Exercise your brain regularly. Your brain is like a muscle. The more you force it to break its limit (and allow it to recover of course), the more effective it becomes. Don’t be a slave to today’s technologies like smart phones and the internet. They are very handy but they make us lazier.
2. Exercise your body regularly. A smart brain cannot live in a weak body. Provide your brain with necessary nutrients and take on more physical activities. Your brain can serve you better then.
3. Make the experience very impressive. Use all of your senses. Pay attention to the details. Be observant. Avoid distracting your mind by multi tasking.
4. Teach it to a 6th grader. Only when we are able to teach someone something, we can confidently claim that we understand it thoroughly. But don’t teach a PhD. Try teaching a 6th grader whose vocabulary is very limited. That presents you to the challenge of simplifying your language while still retaining the essence of the concept. If someone is using jargon and buzzwords, most of the time, they don’t actually know what they’re saying.
5. Repeat the information intermittently.This old trick is obvious. If we want to remember something well, repeat it to ourselves as many times as possible. Say it out loud or silently. But the secret is, don’t cram it in. Repeat it. Take a rest. Repeat it again.
6. Use memory tricks.
1. Break the data you have to remember down to smaller but interconnected chunks. Say a telephone number of 10 digits can be broken into 4–3–3 chunks. For more sophisticated concepts, a mind map would help.
2. Multi-disciplinary thinking. Try to think of as many equivalent concepts / analogies in other disciplines as possible.
3. Use mnemonics. Try acronyms (the military is notorious for their overuse of acronyms). Try associating an idea with an image. Try linking the experience with a smell or a rhythm.

7. 7.  Underline and Take Note
   I used to never underline a book or write on it, I thought it was disrespectful to do so. Today is the opposite, all my books are full of notes and underlinings, I feel it’s disrespectful not to do it. Why? Because you want to learn from the book, not just read it. That’s how you really respect the book.

   Taking notes, writing on the margin and underlining will help you reinforce and remember the information. Don’t feel bad about underlining and writing on the book, great minds in history did it all the time.

   Underlining or highlighting
   The concept is simple, underline or highlight the main ideas and any information you like or find valuable. Underlining forces you to stop and focus on what you are underlining; this extra attention works as a boost for your memory.

   To avoid underlining too much try to do it after you finish the paragraph. If you do it as you read -specially if you don’t know anything about the subject- you will think that everything is important and worth underlining. So finish the idea first, understand what is being said, and then underline what’s important or want to remember.

   Taking Notes
   There are different kinds of notes. Sometimes you transcribe or summarize what you just read, other times you write questions, observations, ideas, and even have discussions with the author. All of these reinforce what you read in different ways.

   Summarizing, for example, helps you understand and encode the information, while observations helps you connect with ideas and knowledge you already have.

   For your general knowledge, when you write notes at the margin of the book they are called “Marginalia”. If you prefer to write them in a notebook where you keep all other notes, observations, ideas, etc this notebook is usually referred as a commonplace book. (More on common place book later in this article)

   I encourage you to make all types of notes, write everything that comes to mind as you read, either on the margin or in your commonplace book. Don’t rely on thinking you will remember your ideas later, you won’t, write them right away.
   I do want to emphasize that you write down what you want to remember.

   As a final note on writing your thoughts, it is important that you do it not just to remember them but also to encourage more thinking. Writing makes you slow down and organize your ideas in a coherent way, this in turn promotes more thinking and connections.

   Another benefit of underlining and taking notes.
   I constantly go back to books and read only my notes and underlinings. The first time you read a book you need examples, stories, and arguments. But once you understand the subject, you can go straight to the information you want, and avoid all the fillers. If you don’t take notes or underline, you would have to read the entire book again.

   Summaries and conceptual maps
   Making summaries leads to a better understating of the subject because it makes you think about what you are reading and forces you to condense the information. The summaries you make also work as quick references to refresh your memory. To get the best results, summarize in your own words, it will help you understand and encode the information at a deeper level.

   Conceptual maps or mind maps help you in a similar way, they force you to create an overview of what you read and to organize and connect main ideas. All this thinking and ruminating on the information helps solidify it in your memory.

   A word on reviewing
   Reviewing is not much of a learning strategy. The value of reviewing is to refresh the information you already know, but it is not an efficient strategy to learn it the first time.

   When you review information (either your notes, summaries, underlinings or the entire book) be aware of the “Fluency illusion”, where we mistake our familiarity with the material with the mastery of the content. In other words, you recognize the information so you assume you already know it.

   To really find out what you know or don’t know you need some kind of self testing, either in the form of explaining the subject in your own words or answering questions about it.

   Commonplace book
   Closely related to marginalia, underlining, and summarizing is keeping a commonplace book. This is a type of journal or notebook where you write down ideas, quotes, and concepts you find valuable.

   A commonplace book becomes a collection of all the wisdom you come across. There are variations on how to keep one, it can go from just writing down anything you find worthy of remembering without any order, to a complex system with many categories and cross references.

   Practice Testing
   A great way to use marginalia to remember what you read is by creating quiz like questions as you are reading. Let’s imagine that you are reading a book on Napoleon. As you read, write questions next to the paragraphs where you learned something you would like to remember.

   For example, if you just learned about a specific battle, write next to the paragraph “when did this battle took place and how it unfolded?” Once you finish the book, go through your questions trying to answer them by memory. If you can’t remember, don’t worry, the answer is in the paragraph next to the question. Keep quizzing yourself every other day until the material is solid in your memory. This strategy basically creates instant Flash Cards.

   Why should you do this? 
   Practice testing is one of the best learning strategies out there. It surpasses summarizing, underlining, reviewing, and route learning (repetition). The effort we put into trying to recall the right answers during practice testing makes a big impact in strengthening our memories.

   Here’s John Dunlosky on the article “Strengthening the Student toolbox: Study strategies to Boost Learning” Featured on “American Educator”:

   “Taking practice tests can substantially boost student learning…The use of practice tests can improve student learning in both direct and indirect ways. When students correctly retrieve an answer from memory, the correct retrieval can have a direct effect on memory. When a student fails to retrieve a correct answer during a practice test, that failure signals that the answer need to be re-studied; in this way, practice test can help students make better decisions about what need further practice and what does not.”

   He then adds, “Most important is to make frequent use of testing and retrieval practice to verify what you really do know versus what you think you know.”

   Mnemonics
   Mnemonics are memory techniques to make memorizing easier and more efficient. It’s beyond the scope of this post to discuss the techniques, but we’ll cover them in depth in future articles. In the meantime I encourage you to pick up a book on the subject; reading about Memory and mnemonics is fascinating and well worth your time. Here’s a link to a good book to start: Moonwalking with Einstein

   Talking about the book or teaching what you learned
   This idea is similar to summarizing and making conceptual maps, but instead of writing you’ll be talking. Next time you are socializing talk about the book or the subject, try to explain to other people what you learned. You will find that is difficult the first time, but you will get better as you force yourself to do it. This type of recall will help you strengthen and organize the knowledge you got from the book.

   Read in Clusters
   Read more than one book on a subject. There are several benefits for doing this:

   1. You’ll get a better understanding of the subject. Your mind will be thinking about it for longer and you’ll have more information to build your knowledge. Also, as you internalize the principles, you’ll start seeing deeper layers and nuances of what you are reading.

   2. You’ll remember more. With better understanding also comes better encoding. It’s easier for us to remember what we understand deeply. We are also being exposed to the information for a longer time, and as ideas repeat themselves they become reinforced in our memory.

   3. You’ll be exposed to different perspectives from several authors. Reading this way gives you better understanding of the subject because it makes the books complement of each other instead of being stand alone. Also, reading from different authors in a subject will help you avoid the “only source bias” where we think what we read is right even though we haven’t read other sources.

   If you are going to follow this strategy make sure to not let much time pass by between books, ideally read them back to back. The information should be fresh in your mind so you don’t waste time reviewing and relearning the material.

   Reading in clusters will also improve your reading speed. Since you already have knowledge of what you are reading, you won’t have to spend time trying to understand it again.

   The Information will also start to overlap, you can then speed up on the parts you already know and focus on the information that is new and important which will give you the deeper understanding we are looking for.

   Make knowledge personal
   We learn faster and remember better when the knowledge is personal and actionable. Try to relate what you are learning to something you already know and visualize specific scenarios where you can apply the new knowledge. Think how it relates or benefits your life and when you can use it. If you are reading a book on body language, for example, think about how you could apply the ideas to your next presentation at work and how it would benefit you.

   Taking action/Using the information
   The best way to remember what you read is to use it or incorporate it into your life in some way. Besides being the best strategy to remember what you read, it’s also the ultimate goal of reading (non fiction that is). Using the information -which can also mean being able to talk about the subject or having a better understanding of it- is why you wanted to learn the ideas from the book in the first place.

   Read, Read, Read.
   The more you know the easier it is to learn more and remember what you learn. Why? Knowledge is not linear in our minds, it is a web, we make connections between subjects and memories. The more things you can connect new knowledge to the easier it is to understand and remember it.

   We’ve covered many strategies to remember what you read. It might seem overwhelming so implement the ones you like the most, let them become second nature, and then work on another one. My goal is to show you different things you can do to remember what you read, but I don’t want to turn reading into a dreadful activity for you. Above all, I want you to read and learn more, so implement the