Retaining what you read

In The Atlantic, Julie Beck notes that we are very good at forgetting what we read: "For many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain." This is especially true with minds trained to flicker across the Internet, taking in bites of information but never encoding them properly into long-term memory. Beck's article talks about why this is so; researchers believe that a different type of memory (recognition) is more valuable in the digital age than recall. But as The Kids in the Hall's Citizen Kane sketch reminds us, recall is still important to normal function in our everyday world. We want to learn things and grow, not exist on a hamster wheel of repeated websurfing.

To do this better, we need to learn a little bit about our memory. If you want to retain this learning, I suggest you get out a pencil. A few silly sketches will help you remember all of this!

Input comes into our brains in short-term (also called "working") memory, which lasts just a few minutes and can only be extended via rehearsal, or repeating (the memory fades quickly once repetition ceases). We used to say this memory was about the size of a telephone number — before the advent of digital phones, you could keep a number in your head by repeating it to yourself until you got a pen and paper to write it down. Take your pencil, and draw 7 little boxes in a row — that's about the size of short-term memory. It's very short, so we'll draw a little arrow from these boxes to the right, then draw a little flame. Poof! It's gone.

If we need to keep hold of a thought for very long, it's pushed into intermediate-term memory, but this is still volatile — you get a few hours. Very likely, that's where we tuck those fantastic articles we read online in the morning and then have forgotten by afternoon. Draw yourself a little newspaper and a cup of coffee! It's easy — just use a slant-sided rectangle for the newspaper, with squiggles across it for the words. A rectangle with a handle makes your coffee cup, with a bit of steam rising from it. Now a clock showing 6 am. That's you, reading CNN on your phone along with that first cuppa. Arrow to the right leads to another clock, this one reading noon. And maybe you'll draw a sandwich: it's lunchtime. And how about a little empty cloud? Yep, all those CNN articles are pretty fuzzy by now.

We don't yet know much about what human activities trigger encoding in intermediate-term memory — it takes different brain chemical activities than encoding into long-term memory. But we do know a bit about how to get information into long-term memory. You need to use that information in a meaningful way; that is, you need to take action. That action is called elaborative encoding.

How do you elaboratively encode something so that you'll remember it longer? There are many ways. Here are a few you might use in everyday life:

• Discuss the topic with a friend.
• Draw a picture of your interpretation the topic under discussion. (The examples I've used here aren't perfect, because I've told you what to draw. It's better if you come up with your own pictures.)
• Make some notes about the topic, using your own words to describe or summarize it.
• Take a series of photos that relate to the topic. Post them on Instagram with captions.
• Use the topic at work or in your creative efforts; for example, if you learn a new way to compose e-mail messages that makes them more effective, send a few messages right away using the new method.

It's also a good idea to take a break from studying or learning about the new information, then bring it back again (for example, the day after you learn the e-mail method, send a few more e-mail messages that way). There's a lot of research evidence that breaks help encoding into long-term memory.

You can draw a picture of this if you like: two stick figures talking, then taking a nap, then talking again. Or you can go out and discuss this article with someone — and then someone else tomorrow. And when you read that interesting article tomorrow morning, make a few notes (or even send a few tweets) about what you found interesting about it. Maybe this time you'll remember it long enough to discuss it over a beer (or at dinner with your spouse) later.

By the way, the classic "memory palace" method of remembering long lists of things takes advantage of elaborative encoding to create meaning around something (a shopping list, for example) that doesn't have a lot of intrinsic "story".

Also: if you are a student, these approaches will also help you remember course material and study for tests.

Note: If you're dealing with illness*, or medication that makes remembering more difficult, these methods can still be extremely helpful. Yes, you might have to repeat them several times, and yes, you may still forget things. But you'll remember more than you would otherwise.

By the way:
You can find a scientific article about the different types of memory on ScienceDirect, but it might be behind a paywall. A more accessible description is at Simply Psychology.

* Unfortunately, these methods will not be as helpful with illnesses that impact the brain's ability to build new memories.