Developing Reading Systems

How much do you remember from books you read five years ago? How about your high school classes? The last magazine you read?

In all cases, my answer (and I imagine most people’s answer) is not very much at all. I can’t tell you the plot of a Turn of the Screw, the Catcher in the Rye, or To Kill a Mockingbird, and I don’t remember much about calculating chemical equilibria.

Of course, certain things have been reinforced over time for some reason or another. Since I’m a math major, I recall the obscure trigonometric identities I learned in precalculus. 1984 was my favorite book in high school, and I can recall some of the scenes vividly in my mind’s eye.

This diminishing memory is natural, as we don’t remember what we don’t use, need, or care about, and the best way to tell your brain you care about remembering something is to reinforce it through various means. Most of these activities occur without great intent, and shape our memories based on our own needs and preferences. For example, someone who watches a favorite TV show every week is much more likely to recognize and name the characters a year later than someone who watched a few episodes. Someone who does engineering calculations all day is more likely to know the densities of certain materials off the top of their head.

Now, if we know we need to understand and recall certain types of information in advance, how can we prepare our minds to do so. What can we do to build and reinforce memory of the things we read? Thus, developing effective reading systems is a productivity issue I’m going to explore in the coming weeks.

Why?

1. I’m concerned about my own personal lack of retention (short and long term).
2. A number of projects I’m working on require the filtering and processing of complex ideas (research here and my math thesis).
3. I need to build a system of organizing and cataloging ideas.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to assume that different types of materials can be read effectively in the same way. At the least, we need to consider three separate categories:

1. Fiction books
2. Nonfiction books
3. Academic papers

For each category, we need to determine what we want to get out of the reading (during and after), and then develop a system that will best achieve those goals. This is a personal process, as the effectiveness of any method is certainly not universal, and there are a lot of methods out there. Today, I’m going to develop my requirements for a reading system as an example.

Fiction Books

I want to get enjoyment of the text, a basic long-term knowledge of characters, plot, and themes, any interesting ideas or quotations. Thus, I need a reading system to not interfere with the pleasure of reading fiction, provide simple means for locating and recalling interesting sections, and provide a method for plot summary and book summary.

Nonfiction Books

I want to learn and retain actionable ideas, important references and facts. Further, I need to draw connections between different ideas throughout the book, since nonfiction tends to be less linear than fiction. This means I need a reading system which focuses on developing, retaining, and connecting ideas while I’m reading. This will be more interactive reading, and less straight-through reading. The system must also provide an organization scheme to find the ideas in the book once it is read.

Academic Papers

Because I read academic papers to develop my own ideas about a very specific topic, I need to quickly determine whether a particular paper is worth reading. If so, I need to understand and extract the relevant complex ideas, as well as understand the relation of those ideas to other ideas and papers on the topic. This system will require the most constant engagement and organization. It must develop not only a logical system linking papers, but ideas within papers, and examples/explanation of those ideas.

Next Steps

In the coming weeks, as I receive books for Christmas and begin work on fashion, philosophy and sociology research for this website, as well as work on my mathematics thesis, I’ll be using a significant amount of trial and error in working towards developing these systems. My goal is to have a working system for each case within two months. I’m looking forward to doing a lot of reading!

-Barry