Here's Why You Keep Forgetting Everything You Read
Save thousands of hours of rereading in 5-10 minutes (I'm not kidding)
I’m going to start with a quick story about a learning technique I did last week that completely changed how I think about reading.
I was sitting on my bed one night and I wanted to read the next section of The Myth of Sisyphus.
Now.
I was facing two problems:
It was past 11pm and I didn’t fancy staring at a bright screen late at night (circadian health and all that jazz). So, I decided to do some learning pure analog style. No iPad mind mapping, just a notebook, a pencil, and a paperback copy of my book
I was actually rereading the section called Absurd Freedom, because I didn’t fully understand it the first time
My reading of the book up until this point, about 62 pages I believe, had gotten me to this mind map:
If you want to see how I got to this mind map, you can read How To Remember Everything You Read (this is a continuation of that newsletter).
But this time I decided to test out something different.
I skimmed through the entire section (15 pages) for 5-10 minutes and wrote down every key word that interested me. Then, I drew a rough spider’s web (mind map) of how I think the concepts connected to one another.
Because knowledge inside your brain does not look like a page worth of linear notes. It looks like a spiders web, or a mental model or mental framework, or a knowledge schema (which is the proper name for it).
My rough spider's web for Absurd Freedom looked - from that 5-10 minute pre-reading technique - looked like this:
This mind map, even though it was a only a guess, helped me understand Absurd Freedom in 1/10th the time it would’ve taken without this technique.
The technique I used was called priming.
And I don’t fucking know why we aren’t just told this in school, but it’s ok, because I’m going to explain what I’ve been learning in my free time to you now.
I promise that it will save you hundreds of hours from rereading, taking useless notes, and fighting boredom while learning.
And I don’t think it’s just a learning technique, but also something far more philosophical and practical (and profound) for helping you find your life purpose by using cybernetics in an absurd world.
Yes, I’m going to make some profound connections! :)
Reading is like pushing a rock up a hill
Profound Idea: Most people read without a clear target in mind. No aim, goal, or purpose behind why they are reading. This creates a broken feedback, and it’s why you can’t remember (or care about) reading what you’re reading.
Your mind is a pattern-recognition machine.
It’s always comparing what it encounters against some internal goal, whether it’s a goal or your own choosing or not.
When that goal is unclear, or it doesn’t feel important, the feedback loop breaks down.
It’s just like telling yourself you should be reading 30 pages a day just because reading is “good for you.”
Profound Idea: You will always lose interest in doing something if your mind has nothing to correct itself or steer itself towards.
This is what Nietzsche would’ve called the “why” to help you create any “how,” towards reaching an outcome you truly desire.
Because he who has a why can become capable of creating a how.
Looking back at my own time in school, even in college when I first properly tried (and failed) to develop my own reading habit/system, I never realized that all of the reading I was doing was purely just for reading’s sake.
Why was it not for helping me achieve a clear and measurable outcome?
Like a unique newsletter perspective, or my own micro-philosophy for getting through life?
Without a target:
Your mind has no dots to connect new information to
No spider’s web to evaluate, destroy, and rebuild in cycles
No knowledge schema - the knowledge inside your brain - to integrate knowledge into
Profound Idea: Without a clear target to aim at, your mind has no reason to detect gaps in the road, or to find new routes that correct your course.
This is why it’s so easy for your mind to start wandering when you open up a book, because you have no idea what to search for.
If anything, your mind is searching for a cure for its own itch - fucking boredom.
Profound Idea: If you don’t have a goal in mind, your mind will steer you towards a goal of its own choosing.
If you don’t build yourself a purpose, you will be given one by society.
If you don’t have any interests, you will be told by other people what things should interest you.
If you don’t use your conscious mind to pick something to aim at, you will be given an aim by your unconscious mind.
If you can’t prime your mind to look for what’s valuable while reading, it will try to memorize and remember everything it reads; which will ultimately lead you to learning nothing in the attempt to memorize everything.
This is also why rereading is an excellent signal that you are doing something terribly wrong.
I’m not talking about rereading paragraphs or sections you don’t understand.
I’m talking about rereading paragraphs and sections for hundreds of times and still not improving your understanding doing so.
Why?
Because you’re trying to build a map before you’ve fully navigated the terrain.
It’s time to make another profound connection.
You already have a purpose, you just aren’t really aware of it
Albert Camus believed that the world was what he called absurd, and therefore meaningless. That no matter how hard the human mind tries to understand its relationship, it’s purpose within reality, it will never get a logical answer that’s certain.
No illusions, no bullshit.
Camus believed that this was the case.
If you’re wondering how this relates to reading and learning science, just stick with me for a moment.
Let’s say you believe life has no meaning.
That there is no point to all this, that there is no transcendent meaning above us, that there is no inherent meaning within our universe, and that individual meaning could not possibly stem from this idea of absurdity, even.
No point in reading. No point in writing this newsletter. No point in writing about profound ideas, lifting weights, training jiu-jitsu, having a girlfriend, eating healthy(ish), drinking mochas, and eating an absurd amount of chipotle sauce each day with every meal I have.
Now. Do I think this is a good perspective to hold?
Fuck no.
And I think there is at least one profound idea as to why:
Profound Idea: Regardless of whether you think your life does or does not have a purpose, your brain and body in fact has a purpose that cannot be refuted, and that is to keep you alive.
Your body has one purpose and that is to keep you alive.
I remember first hearing this idea as a grieving kid soon after my mam passed away (she passed away from cancer when I was 12, I’m 22 now).
It was something like: “did you know that every cell in your body, even if you feel happy or sad, anxious or upset, has one purpose whether you like it or not, and that is to keep you alive?”
I think this is a very profound idea, and I think it’s important with regards to reading.
But first, let’s make one more profound connection.
A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment...For imagination sets the goal ‘picture’ which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of ‘will,’ as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.
Maxwell Maltz
The mind is cybernetic; a self-correcting system that steers towards a target.
The word cybernetics comes from the Greek word kybernetikos, which means “to steer.”
The mind always steers towards what it aims at, just like how my driving instructor once told me if you’re looking at a cute dog on your side of the road, you’ll steer your car towards it whether you think so or not.
So, the question becomes:
are you intentionally choosing a target for yourself, or is your unconscious mind choosing it for you?
And how the fuck do all these profound connections relate to reading?
Whether you like it or not, your mind is always looking for something. When you prime your mind before reading, when you give it key words, a rough map, a goal, you’re intentionally choosing your own target. Which means, your mind can now detect gaps, make connections, and self-correct towards understanding whatever it is you want to read.
In my case, it’s The Myth of Sisyphus.
Without priming, your mind defaults to its own target which most likely to just stop being bored.
Profound Idea: Like Camus said, if the world is meaningless and truly absurd, then we each have the freedom to build our own sources of meaning. We have the freedom to pick our own targets. Your mind is going to steer towards an aim whether you like it or not, whether it’s a conscious aim or an unconscious aim. So, you’d might as well aim at something deliberately.
Remember:
The purpose behind why you are learning what you are learning is your engine, the engine that steers to ship.
Interest is the ultimate form of leverage you have in life, and by doing what feels like fun to you (and feels like work to other people) is what will make you excel far in life.
But for anything to seem interesting or “motivating” to you, you need to first give yourself an aim.
This is the first step in the learning process, almost like a step 0 that comes before step 1.
2 principles of priming
The reason why priming works is because it aligns with how your mind actually processes information.
Based on my current understanding - I’m learning all of this in my free time - I like to think about priming in terms of these two principles.
I will also be leaving every source I’ve read on this topic at the bottom of this newsletter; if you are interested in developing your own agency and learning all this for yourself. I plan on creating my own learning system for writing my newsletters, and I can’t wait to create a system that isn’t necessarily focused on helping students pass exams, but rather for the everyday creative who needs to be a master synthesizer of information.
Because you don’t need permission to learn anything, and the best way to learn (as Naval said it) is to simply do, and then share your work!
1) Pre-exposure
You want to expose yourself to information first, before you start trying to understand it.
In his book titled How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler stressed the importance of skimming a book first, and gaining a skeletal outline of what the author is saying before attempting to understand it.
Because you cannot do both at once; it is very hard to do this.
Why?
The reason why we prime our minds before we read is because our mind loves making connections.
Connections means familiarity, relevance, and thus, purpose.
Your mind organizes knowledge like a web; what’s called a knowledge schema in learning science. By simply exposing yourself to a chapter, a section, 15-30 pages before sitting down to read, you give your mind anchor points to start making new connections to.
If you can make connections with what you are reading, your mind will see it as relevant and familiar, and therefore purposeful - especially if you have an overarching goal of what you want in life.
Example
Before I read Absurd Freedom, here are each of the key words I wrote down:
Unity
Meaning (transcendence)
Meaning (human/individual)
Consciousness
Lucidity (Didn’t know what this meant)
Without appeal (Didn’t know what this meant)
Suicide
Revolt
Defiance
God/Freedom paradox
Freedom
Absurd man
Contradiction
Passion
2) Using prior knowledge
Connect what you’re about to read to what you already know.
This part is so much fun.
I actually got the entire idea for this newsletter on the night I sat down to read Absurd Freedom.
I was making connections to cybernetics, absurdity, having an aim, some old Jordan Peterson videos I’ve been rewatching about having an aim in life, and some Dan Koe newsletters that are absolutely glorious.
I could waffle on for hours about other connections I could make, but I won’t annoy or bore you with that form of torture (too many profound ideas for this one newsletter).
So it’s not just about making internal connections (within the book), but about making external connections to:
Other books you’ve read
Your own life experiences
Topics from different domains of knowledge
Example
The first connection I made was between unity and meaning (both transcendent and individual).
It reminded me of Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Carl Jung.
Jung talks about how modern man has used logic and reasoning to dominate the known world, and that is the reason why we are top of the food chain. We control the planet and almost all outcomes we face. But he also talked about primitive man, and (I would call it) the human desire to use story to make sense of the world. To make sense of things we cannot understand.
If my tribe member gets eaten by a crocodile, there’s a meaning behind it. An intention from the Gods. Whereas modern man might simply call it unfortunate.
Regardless, it’s a profound idea, and just one quick connection I made between Jung and Camus, and the human heart’s desire for an answer in everything we do and experience. We always want to know “why.”
To sum, making connections to prior knowledge is what gives your mind a spider’s web of knowledge to build upon. So when I went to properly start reading, I wasn’t starting from scratch but actually evaluating, destroying, and rebuilding my own spider’s web of knowledge inside my own head.
How to prime your brain before reading
Based on my own experience, this is how you can prime yourself before reading.
Step 0) Relevance
What is the “why” behind why you are reading what you’re reading?
Ask yourself this question before opening any source of information. It takes 2 minutes.
For me, it’s a different “why” than most people’s.
I’m not studying for an exam, so I don’t need to have specific details memorized
I only want a general understanding of concepts and how they relate to one another
I want to be able to synthesis ideas into a unique perspective that only I could offer with my own thinking
I also want to be able to articulate my understanding out loud, I want to be able to synthesize ideas in real time, which helps me with recording my YouTube videos.
My ultimate goal is writing my Profound Ideas newsletters. So, everything I read and learn (and even do) must connect to this target in some way.
And with this exact newsletter, I’m making connections to learning science (priming) with cool topics I like cybernetics, finding your life purpose, absurdism and my current reading experience of The Myth of Sisyphus.
Profound Idea: Always connect everything you do to your core vision, what it is you would love to achieve, and interest will find a way to show its face.
In doing this, I am no longer reading for reading’s sake, and everything I consume has synthesis potential.
Step 1) Prime for 5-10 minutes max
Do not spend longer than 5-10 minutes doing this, because if you do, you’re just reading at that point.
Here’s what to do:
Flip through the pages - I usually skim 10-25 pages in this time
Write down key words that stand out - both familiar and unfamiliar
Look for headings, bold/italic words, or anything that interests you
This is what I wrote for Absurd Freedom
The Myth of Sisyphus isn’t a textbook, and it doesn’t have a chapter summary at the end of each chapter. This is obviously going to be dependent on the type of book you are reading.
Regardless, here are the keywords I wrote down:
Unity
Meaning (transcendence)
Meaning (human/individual)
Consciousness
Lucidity (Didn’t know what this meant)
Without appeal (Didn’t know what this meant)
Suicide
Revolt
Defiance
God/Freedom paradox
Freedom
Absurd man
Contradiction
Passion
Profound Idea: Never read for understanding until you’ve first read for exposure.
The purpose of this step is not comprehending but mapping the terrain.
You’re not trying to understand the information yet, you’re simply trying to get a basic guess as to what the terrain you are about to explore looks like.
Step 2) Your first spider’s web
This will take you about 3-5 minutes.
Take your key words and guess how they connect.
This is your educated hypothesis as to what you will be reading.
Now, it is likely going to be wrong. But you almost want it to be wrong. And for me, it was:
Taking a guess like this will activate what is called the hypercorrection effect.
The hypercorrection effect: This effect states that you’re more likely to remember something if you are corrected on it. This is why we take a guess, and even hope that our guess is going to be wrong.
Now you have completed the priming process.
So, when you read and discover your current web is wrong, the corrections you make through constant evaluation will stick harder.
Step 3) Read to evaluate
You can now read for understanding with your mind map as a reference.
Doing this now gives your mind a framework to compare your growing understanding to.
Here is my current process as of right now:
Read for as long as possible until I reach cognitive overload
Stop when you hit a key word or concept that changes my understanding
Evaluate my spider’s web: What’s right? What’s wrong? What needs to change? How can I simplify my understanding? How does this connect to the big picture model?
Rebuild the web
Repeat
Profound Idea: The mind is not a vault but a garden, and always returning back to your big picture mind map is like watering the flowers of knowledge in your own garden.
The reading process for me right now is about half and half.
Half of my time is spent actually reading, while the other half is spent re-evaluating and destroying my mind map.
Because this is inevitably what builds true comprehension and understanding of a topic. Seeing what parts of my web are right and wrong, which parts need to be re-evaluated and destroyed. Which groups or connections can be simplified or reorganized in space.
In terms of creating my mind map, I ask myself:
How big should certain key words be in relation to others?
How big should the arrows be, and what should connect to what?
Does my mind map have a natural flow to it, a direction that naturally moves my eye and thus my understanding across it?
Evaluation (destroying/rebuilding cycle with my mind map) and creation (drawing my mind map and shitty doodles) are the highest orders of thinking in Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Remembering and understanding (memorization and flashcards) are the lowest orders of thinking in the pyramid for one simple fact:
isolation.
In order to evaluate and create visual frameworks (spider’s webs or mental models, they’re all the same thing), you need to have an integrated understanding, a connected map of knowledge to work with.
This is why I keep saying to always make connections when learning.
Step 4) Using your knowledge (retrieval practice)
You start by priming your mind for learning what you want to learn.
Then, you start building connections and evaluating relationships between concepts and ideas. This is how you encode information into your long term memory, and ultimately move information from your short term memory into your long term memory by processing it through evaluation and creation (mind mapping, re-evaluation and destruction cycles).
I will talk more about encoding soon when I learn more about it!
Once you’ve encoded information - restructured it in your brain in a way that makes the most sense to you - now you have to practice retrieving the information from your long term memory. Just like how you used prior knowledge retrieval in priming.
Learn compounds over time, because once you know something it’s easier to keep making more connections through this process.
This is how I like to practice retrieval in relation to my goal:
Explain your mind map out loud (Feynman technique)
Teach it as if talking to a beginner, without trying to sound “smart”
Try to expose gaps as often as you can so you can go fill them
For Absurd Freedom, I practiced explaining it to prepare for my YouTube video on The Myth of Sisyphus.
I plan to do a complete guide on the book, drawing out my mental model of the entire book from start to finish, as if explaining it to a complete beginner (along with making some profound connections to other topics, books, and ideas along the way!). Expect that in the next 2 months.
As of me writing this (Dec 27th), and after having read 90 pages or so, this is what my mind map looks like. It think it looks a lot better!
All in all, this process took me about one hour to get a pretty good understanding of the chapter, including all iterations of my mind map.
Pre-exposure is for mapping the terrain.
Retrieving prior knowledge is what helps to gain clarity on what you are looking for.
Together, they help activate the pattern-recognition mechanisms within your mind, which I think is pretty fucking profound.
If you want to engage in the priming process alongside me, you can read this post.
It offers a complete “thinking out loud” walkthrough as to how I prime my brain before learning new topics.
In it, we will be priming our brains to learn about existentialism together!
If you’d like a guide to help you learn more about how your mind actually wants to read, you can download my Guide to Profound Reading.
Paid subscribers can read it here on my Substack.
You can also download my free Golden Habits eBook and my free Life Engineering template if you’d like to do that too.
I’m leaving this here, because I can’t seem to stick to my 2000 word limit, ever.
Thanks for reading.
You’re an absolute legend.
- Craig :)
Here are some other reading guides that will help you alongside this one!
Sources I’ve been learning from (to check out yourself):
https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/course-design-ideas/three-ways-to-prime-students-for-learning/
https://mindmylearning.com/blog/priming-effects-for-learning/
https://amplifire.com/resource/priming-the-brain-for-learning/
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/priming-brain-learn
https://medium.com/@craftmindset/study-mistake-2-avoiding-what-you-dont-know-80e840c3ad3e
https://medium.com/ed-tech-talks/study-mistake-3-youre-not-priming-your-brain-817605866fe8
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/priming
https://www.smartick.com/blog/mathematics/priming/
https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(00)80448-1?sync=true
Thank you It is useful for me .
Thank you for your informative newsletter, i really like it