Do you ever feel like you read a lot but don’t actually remember most of what you read? You’re not alone. Remembering what we read can be a major challenge. But having good reading comprehension and retention skills is incredibly valuable for learning, productivity and overall brain health.
The good news is there are science-backed techniques you can use to dramatically improve how much you remember from the books, articles, reports, websites, and more that you read. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the most effective methods for remembering more of what you read.
Why We Forget Most of What We Read
Before diving into the techniques, it’s helpful to understand why we struggle to remember what we read in the first place. There are a few key reasons:
- Information Overload – We’re bombarded with massive amounts of information on a daily basis from the internet, social media, books, news and more. This floods and overwhelms the brain making it harder to convert information into memories.
- Lack of Focus – It’s easy to gloss over content without paying full attention, especially online with many distractions competing for our focus. Poor focus while reading makes it near impossible to remember.
- No Effort to Remember – Readers often passively consume content without making any effort to remember key points. But memory requires active effortful processing.
- Failure to Understand – If the content is too complex or confusing, it won’t stick in memory because we failed to properly comprehend it.
- No Meaningful Connections – New information is forgotten fast if we don’t meaningfully connect it to existing knowledge and experiences stored in our brain.
Now let’s explore powerful techniques to overcome these issues…
Active Reading
The first key to remembering more of what you read is to shift to active reading, which means actively engaging with the text as you read instead of passively skimming through. Here are active reading tactics:
- Preview – Before diving into the full text, preview headlines, subheadings, images and captions to get a sense of the key ideas and concepts. This primes your brain.
- Annotate and Take Notes – Actively engage with the material by highlighting important passages, underlining key details, making comments in the margins, and taking handwritten notes. This forces you to process the information more deeply.
- Ask Questions – As you read, ask critical thinking questions about the central thesis, logic of arguments, gaps in the evidence, applications of key learnings, and anything else missing from the text. Seeking answers cements comprehension.
- Summarize – Stop frequently while reading to verbally summarize important points or record key details through written bullet point summaries. Summarizing requires you to identify and simplify the core ideas in order to communicate them clearly.
- Reflect – After finishing a section or chapter, pause to reflect on how ideas in the text connect to other concepts you already know or to personal experiences. Making these meaningful connections to existing neural networks helps commit new learnings to memory.
Mnemonic Devices
Mnemonic devices are memory techniques that help us encode and retrieve information. They transform new memories to be sticky, easy-to-access, and hard-to-forget ones. Here are effective mnemonic devices to boost reading retention:
- Acronyms – Turn phrases or lists of words into acronyms which serve as simple memory cues. For example, the colors of the rainbow become Roy G. Biv (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).
- Acrostic – Keep lists in order by making a phrase where the first letter of each word stands for something you need to remember. “My Dear Aunt Sally” stands for the order of operations in math: Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.
- Chunking – Break long strings of information down into small, manageable chunks that are easier to memorize. Remember a 10-digit number by splitting it into an area code, prefix and 4-digit sequence instead of a single long number.
- Rhymes – Link concepts together by making up silly rhymes. Remember biological taxonomy (Kingdom, Phylum, Class…) with this classic rhyme: “Kiddy politicians can’t decide which party they like.”
- Visualizations – Connect dry facts to crazy visual images in your mind’s eye. Envision two opposing political candidates literally mud-wrestling to remember they had a “dirty fight”.
- Method of Loci – Mentally link facts to familiar spatial locations. Learn parts of a speech by visualizing placing each topic in a different room of your home.
Spaced Repetition
One of the most powerful ways to memorize content is to review that information over systematically spaced intervals using flashcard apps, practice tests, or other repetitions.
Revisiting knowledge drops over expanding intervals leverages the spacing effect and boosts retention by over 200% compared to cramming! Use spaced algorithms like those in Anki or Quizlet to optimize scheduling.
Interleaved Practice
Interleaving mixes up the order of practice instead of blocking content by topic. For example, shuffle flashcards or quiz questions so Germany geography appears right before Algebra questions and then French vocabulary.
This technique boosts discrimination between ideas and forces deeper processing, which retains memories over the long haul. Treat interleaving like a workout for your brain!
Memory Palace
The method of loci mentioned above scales up into an incredibly effective memory technique called a Memory Palace. This works by recalling any fact by imagining walking through a very familiar environment (like your home) and visualizing placing key information along that mental map.
Memory champions leverage this technique to remember hundreds of random words, numbers, cards, and more in order! Construct your own mental palace by linking vivid visuals to key facts you want to memorize from reading.
Elaborative Interrogation
Elaborative interrogation means asking “why” questions about key information from the text, then attempting to answer those questions with reasonable explanations.
For example, after learning a new concept, you might ask yourself, “Why is this true? Why does this matter? Why should I care about this?” Answering these complex questions builds neural connections which embed the knowledge for better recall.
Teach and Discuss With Others
After reading something full of new information, try teaching the key concepts to others in discussions or more formal tutoring sessions. This forces you to thoroughly comprehend the subject matter in order to clearly break down and communicate the core ideas.
The back and forth of questions and explanations also clarifies fuzzy thinking and misconceptions. Teaching friends about a topic immediately after reading cements those new facts deeper through social knowledge sharing.
Apply and Take Action
At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding when it comes to remembering what we read. If you can’t apply key learnings to real scenarios, solve related problems, or take meaningful action on those ideas in the physical world, then you likely didn’t understand or properly encode the concepts in your brain.
Use these tips to memorize more from books and accelerate your learning curve across all fields of knowledge! Consistently putting just a few of these science-backed techniques into practice will vastly improve what you remember from reading and even boost grades, job performance, social conversations, and overall intelligence.
The ultimate goal is to shift from passive reading to active deep reading, where you fully engage in a dialogue with the author by asking great questions, connecting concepts to existing memories, and taking purposeful action on those learnings in the real world.
Keep striving to remember more of what you read and unlock the life-changing power of knowledge assimilation and retention!
