Why do we often forget so quickly what we have learned and read?

Have you ever read a book, learned a lesson, but then forgot most of the content loaded in the beginning? So why so, and how to overcome?

This is referred to in something called " The Forgetting curve" , discovered by a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus. This concept talks about the hypothesis of a decrease in memory storage capacity with time variables. The slope of this curve is the steepest on the first day after we have loaded something into the brain, so that if you don't review what you've learned, you'll forget most of what you've just learned and In the days that followed, this oblivion continued until we had little information left on our mind.

According to Jared Horvath from the University of Melbourne, in the internet age, the way we store information and receive it has changed a lot . We tend to remember more superficially because we depend on the internet. Once we know the ways to find that information and how to access it, we easily know what we need, so there's no more trying to remember it.

External memory will cause us to gradually lose the habit of remembering and understanding correctly.

We view the internet as a memory that can be accessed anytime, when something is needed, the first thing is to hold the phone or laptop and Google it immediately. It is more effective than having to keep in mind and trying to recall when it needs to solve something. And because we know that "we own an external memory too well" , we will gradually lose the habit of remembering and understanding exactly what we have learned or read.

Many studies show that, even if this happens even before the internet when we tend to access more information online, the rate of retrieving information into our brain will be lower. Appearances, at that time, entertainments emerge and serve us with the same purpose.

A study from Horvath found that people who watched an entire movie were much quicker to forget than those who watched an episode a week. This is similar to reading. The average American will read about 100,000 words (in 2009), but they don't really "read" them all. Reading, especially when reading online, is only meant to collect information, and most of this information is rarely transformed into memories, unless it is truly noticeable.

Information is not knowledge in fact, it doesn't stay much in memory and memory. We are not really learning through reading, we are deceiving ourselves.

So, in a nutshell, how do we retain what we read, saw, or heard? The most important thing is to take the time to "digest" that information and dig into it. Memory will be greatly strengthened when we try to remember something.

If you are learning a complex topic, a difficult formula, keep thinking about it and reviewing it.

Often when we read, information flows into our heads and we feel like we're doing a really good job, right? But it doesn't really save much, unless we really focus on the words to remember. We can hear and see , which is what most of the time we do, but we are not noticing and listening.

So if we are learning a complicated topic, a difficult formula, keep thinking about it, reviewing it . The more we remember it, the more it is firmly remembered in memory. Try to remember what you learned without reading the material. Somewhere forgotten, we review, and repeat the same thing after a few hours. When reading up to note, take note, this will make us remember more deeply. To make note taking more efficient, don't write down the points we need to remember, instead take notes as questions.

Similarly, when reading a book, remember yourself about the main ideas mentioned in previous chapters so that your brain remembers and enhances your memory. When you have finished reading a chapter, ask yourself what you knew during the last reading. However, we should not try to memorize all the details and overdo it, it will increase the pressure and make studying and reading become boring. We just need to remember the main points.

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