Trying to retain more of the information I read
February 3, 2025 11:28 AM   Subscribe

I love reading and learning, but every now and then I'm struck by how little of what I read is actually retained. Are there ways to better retain the information or do I just accept that I'll retain the broad strokes/themes while inevitably losing the facts and figures?

I read a lot of big old chunky books about all kinds of things, history, science, the arts, what have you. I love reading for the sake of reading, but I also love learning about new things, and every now and then I get dispirited at the thought of how little I actually retain from what I read. Out of, say, a 600 page book on a topic, how much information do I really remember a day after reading, a month, a year? A minuscule fraction at best. The general themes will stay with me (and even those may quickly start to fade when I move to another book or topic) but the vast majority of the information-- the facts, the stories, the data and figures-- there's just no way I can hold onto it. Usually I don't mind, but sometimes it seriously bothers me that so much of what I'm trying to learn is destined to slip away from my memory-- almost like, why do I bother reading 600 pages of which I retain a small percentage instead of just reading a summary of the main conclusions (which would be nowhere near as fun but would give me the information I'm actually going to retain)?

Any of y'all felt this? Are there strategies for retaining more of the tidbits and factoids or is it unrealistic to expect that, in the long-term, a reader can hold onto these things? Am I screwing up my love of reading by thinking of it in terms of the practical knowledge I get vs simply the joy of the process?
posted by Method Man to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (15 answers total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
I am waiting to get a book from the library called "How to Read a Book," by by Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler.

It is intended for adults, to help understand and retain more of the books we read.
posted by NotLost at 11:40 AM on February 3 [2 favorites]


Personally, I think (outside of enjoyment, of course), the main benefits of reading are the vast subconscious changes you experience, not consciously memorized information.

But if you really want to memorize information, you need spaced repetition of some kind; humans don’t really naturally tend to remember most things that they’ve only seen once. After all, if you only saw it once, it’s probably not too important, right? Just the same, if you read a book through once, you’re unlikely to memorize much of its contents.

There are many ways to get this sort of spaced repetition, but fundamentally it boils down to “process the information you want to learn on a regular basis”.
posted by etealuear_crushue at 11:49 AM on February 3 [6 favorites]


Test yourself. At the end of each section/chapter/book, pause and try to summarize what you read, ideally in a written form. If you want to get really ambitious, after each chapter, write down a few questions, and then try to answer them a few days after reading, and again a few weeks later.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:06 PM on February 3 [5 favorites]


I take a lot of notes, usually on Post-it's - also on a sheet of glass over the page so I can highlight lines and photo them, and then type everything up so I get a ~1 page summary. I usually end up with enough for it to be useful. This is mainly for text books I use in my work, but also some novels. If it's my own book I leave the Post-its in place.

If it's technical I usually only read the chapters that are relevant to me - usually by reading the bibliography and index first to see where to focus.
posted by unearthed at 2:07 PM on February 3 [2 favorites]


why do I bother reading 600 pages of which I retain a small percentage instead of just reading a summary of the main conclusions

Well, one answer is that if you read the full 600 pages you're more likely to remember the summary than if you just read the summary. And you'll probably be able to remember the gist of the range of information present. Part of the value of reading is just knowing where information is located should you want to go back to it later.

That said, I have found (as someone who had to "read" 100s of books in one year for the Comps phase of my PhD program), that you retain more when you read in thematic spurts. If you read a book about the history of computers, then a book about Van Gough, then a book about plants, etc. you are less likely to retain information rather than if you pick a topic that interests you, and read 5-10 books in a row on that topic. This works because even if the books focus on different aspects of the topic, they will no doubt overlap (and often cite each other!) and so it helps you repeat the knowledge you learned earlier. This is basically the idea stated above of "spaced repetition."
posted by coffeecat at 2:39 PM on February 3 [4 favorites]


I definitely feel your pain, but I had kind of a strange experience when I was in junior high.

I was trying to read a book in the Science Study Series about particle accelerators, and though I understood what I read, it was slow going and I didn't retain much of what I'd read from session to session.

Then one day I was home sick with a fever of 102-103 ⁰F and I laid down on the couch with that book and read it from cover to cover in about two hours. I had extremely good retention for years, including ability to visualize some of the many diagrams. I still remember it pretty well after more than 50 years.

I've often wondered whether there was any way to replicate that effect without being so ill — as well as whether doing something like that with a high fever was invoking an excitotoxic effect in my brain — but I've never really gotten anywhere.

But I do think my experience points to something kind of important, namely that reading and retaining information are more dependent on physiological conditions than we're inclined to believe, and that there are likely to be regimens of exercise, nutrition, and environmental context that optimize them that we haven't figured out yet.
posted by jamjam at 3:04 PM on February 3 [3 favorites]


I read 200-300 books every year, mostly non fiction, for my own pleasure. I do not retain books very well, especially fiction, from which I usually carry away a sense that I liked a book or not, but almost no details about plot or characterization.

To answer one of your questions, a good reason to read a 600-page book you won't retain much of is that it's pleasurable to read it. If reading the book is not in and of itself pleasurable, I don't usually bother with it. There's probably another, better, book on the subject I might go looking for.

In general, I accept that I have a terrible memory for facts. This is true in all aspects of my life. I am a Walt Whitman scholar, and it took me years to be able to remember that the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855. I knew all kinds of stuff about Whitman and his poetry, but spent a lot of time looking that up. The internet is my friend in this way, as knowing a fact exists, or knowing, even, more than that, that I read an interesting book one time that said something really interesting about mollusks, is often enough to find it. I am grateful for the external memory.

When I'm not engaged in reading for a project, but just for my own pleasure, I don't try too hard to hold on to a lot of details. If I want to know a book, and if I enjoyed it, I often read it a second or even third time. I'm a fast and voracious reader, and I enjoy re-reading, so this is an effective strategy for me.

I don't write in books, but I do mark them up in my own way. A print book, I slap tape flags on any spot that especially strikes me. A good book may end up looking like a porcupine. When reading an ebook, I highlight passages; the Kindle allows me to export everything I highlighted after reading the book, in a single document, and these make good notes.

To retain anything, I have to review these marked bits. Flip through the tape flags, read through the highlights. I recently read a description of someone else's research project, and they said that they waited a few weeks before reviewing what they'd marked; by that time, they felt able to separate the wheat from the chaff, to see what was just the "aha! nice point!" of the moment, and what is going to be more useful and meaningful. They pull those more useful bits out of all the notes they took when reading, and save them.

If I'm reading an electronic document I can't easily highlight and export text from, I take screen shots, and review them later the same way I review tape flags and highlights.

I also like to talk about what I've read, and I do a lot of that. My friends are used to listening to me talk at length about a book I'd read; one of my best friends used to mention books to me in the expectation that I would read the book and tell her about it, or write about it, and then she wouldn't have to read it. I will read just about anything anyone mentions in my presence, so this was a very effective method.

I used to blog, and write there about the books I was reading. Friends are also used to getting long emails from me about what I'm reading. It doesn't matter whether anybody reads it, though some people did. It's more of a way for me to integrate the information that's gotten me excited, and it functions as an aide memoire as well.

When I'm reading for a writing project, as I am now, I use these same strategies but get more systematic about it. If I expect to need to access specific notes to use in a project, I write them down on index cards, the old-fashioned way. I've tried various electronic methods of keeping these kinds of notes, but none have worked as well for me, so I accept I'm going to have to make cards I can look at and shuffle around. I don't currently own a printer but plan to get one soon; the person whose process I read about prints things and pastes them onto index cards, adding the traditional subject line etc by by hand, and this would be a time saver. Writing things down in any way, whether writing about the book in general, or making a note in a notebook, or putting it on an index card, enhances memory. If I'm going to need to retrieve a specific piece of information or quote, however, it has to be isolated on a card for me to be able to effectively do that.

It requires putting time into a book beyond just reading it, and for the most part I only do the talk about it/write about it/review flags/make formal notes part when I inspired to by the energy the book wakes up in me, or by the necessity when I'm reading for a writing project. Otherwise I've gotten quite comfortable letting things go, either unmarked or marked in that informal as-you-go way.
posted by Well I never at 3:18 PM on February 3 [2 favorites]


For people who read with the intent of using that information later, such as academics writing papers analyzing writing style, or the various personal histories told of the US Civil War, or even those who digest enormous amounts of information for background to scientific papers simply don't try to retain all that information. They take notes, they create bibliographies, they write summaries of where they found the information for retrieval later.

Reading for self-education would likely benefit from similar habits. But you also have to ask yourself why you think you need to retain all the facts and specifics of the books you've read. If you're reading for the pleasure of being exposed to a field that you didn't know much about before, being able to recite all the specifics about it would be an interesting party trick, but would it inform the rest of your life significantly. I think you would be going down a path that might destroy your enjoyment of reading in broad categories.

I miss the days when I could read a physical book and be able to not only recall the gist of what I'd read but where in the book it was discussed. Reading mostly ebooks these days I simply don't have that kinesthetic sense of where information came from. It's harder to pin down a specific idea that I found inspiring to worth looking at further. Unless I'm diligent about taking notes it's often gone and I have to do extensive re-reading to discover it again. Of course, I'm also now significantly older than I was back when I could recall that information, so there's that too.
posted by drossdragon at 3:45 PM on February 3 [1 favorite]


Nothing wrong with not explicitly retaining a lot. You still get a lot of knowledge out of it and I bet you'd answer multiple choice questions right, or bring up interesting points in conversation that you thought you had forgotten!

But if you want to reinforce things up top a bit, you might just create a document or note for each book, and whenever you stop reading, write down just one or two sentences in it about what you just read, simple and straightforward, even just an interesting quote:

"It seems Greek drama was actually really popular with common folks, who often knew plays like Oedipus by heart. But there was also a lot of improvisation in oral storytelling, which is an interesting contrast." (I just made this up)

Whenever you pick up the book again, you can just cast your eye over it and be like, ah yes that's right. We started way back with that guy, and he was like this. Now two centuries later it's more like this. Anyway, page 175...

I ought to do this myself for the books I have trouble remembering. I do note down obscure words I don't know and their context at least, for collecting and looking up later.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 5:03 PM on February 3 [1 favorite]


I read mostly fiction but feel the same way, like I do not retain and can not speak intelligently about the books I have read. Then I came across this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, which made me feel better:

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."
posted by lyssabee at 5:27 PM on February 3 [1 favorite]


I read a lot. Some fiction, some nonfiction. While there’s a lot I don’t retain, I have started to remember a lot more than I used to, including specific facts and details.

What I’ve found is that the more I share with others about the books I’ve read, the more likely I am to retain it. In fact this is often the only information I retain. I’m currently in three different social groups that often talk about books—one is a classic “read this book” book club, but we usually talk about other books we’ve read at the end. One is a book club specifically without an assigned book, just a space to get together and talk about what we’ve been reading or books we’ve enjoyed in the past. The third is unrelated to books but has a lot of readers in it, so if we run out of things to talk about around our main topic we often catch up on what we’re reading. So in a given month this may give me three repetitions of discussing the book I’ve read.

I also will share snippets of what I’m reading with my partner, which may be about facts or themes or interesting prose or thoughts I’m having as I read. I invariably remember more about the things I shared with my partner than the things I kept to myself. In part this is because the act of verbalizing uses multiple senses which improves the encoding of memory. But socially communicated information also activates different parts of the brain and is generally more easily retained as well. So even when I share a snippet over text, this helps me remember it more. I sometimes share these snippets with friends as well, if I think they would find it interesting or relevant.

I don’t know how feasible this would be for you, but sharing what you’re reading and incorporating a social aspect could be one way to retain more information, both because of the repetition and because of the ways social communication affects memory encoding.
posted by brook horse at 6:47 PM on February 3 [1 favorite]


If you want to retain information, there is lots of evidence for the spaced repetition technique. When you read an awesome tidbit that you wanted to keep, you would copy it into an app, and then it will hound you over and over until it is stuck up there.
posted by bitslayer at 5:31 AM on February 4


Active recall (after reading, try to remember what you learned and write it down) and explaining to others (real people, a rubber ducky, a potted plant) as another form of that.
posted by meijusa at 6:43 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]


I journal about it. Doesn’t even have to be long but writing a page or two out by hand about a thing I just read has an obvious sticky affect on my memory of that thing.
posted by throwitawayurthegarbageman at 10:28 AM on February 4


Recall.

Read a chapter, put the book down, and try to recall as much of the chapter as you can. Then pick the book back up again and see how much you remembered and how much you missed and if you got anything wrong.

Whenever you are exposed to some new material you'd like to remember, as soon as you have finished encountering it, stop and spend some time thinking about it in a structured fashion. Ask yourself the standard who, what, why, when, where questions. As yourself what was the most important fact. Ask how what you were reading about relates to other things you know.

This is how you move the material actually into your short term memory. Doing it again, perhaps relating chapter two to chapter one, is how you move the material in chapter one into your longer term memory.

When trying to recall things, start by recalling how they began, and then how they ended before trying to put the middle part into place.

Nothing beats recreating stuff for putting it into your memory. Taking notes while you are reading or rereading the notes is essentially passive and automatic. It doesn't work a fraction as well as sitting on the subway and trying to recreate as much of the material as you can, during your commute.

Teaching material really makes it stick.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:42 PM on February 4


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