It's Not Your Fault!

"Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read…and the movies and TV shows we watch":

Pamela Paul's memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. "I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object," says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. "I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don't remember — and it's terrible — is everything else."

For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin. "While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution," she says. "Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution."

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It's true that people often shove more into their brains than they can possibly hold. Last year, Horvath and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne found that those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week. Right after finishing the show, the binge-watchers scored the highest on a quiz about it, but after 140 days, they scored lower than the weekly viewers. They also reported enjoying the show less than did people who watched it once a day, or weekly.

[. . .]

The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say — you're just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. "You're never actually reaccessing it," he says.

Sana says that often when we read, there's a false "feeling of fluency." The information is flowing in, we're understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. "But it actually doesn't stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember."