Put Learning to Use

I was talking with a friend this weekend who sadly shared, “I’ve given up on reading. I mean, I enjoy it, but I notice that within a short period of time, it’s gone. As if I didn’t read it at all!” He asked why I bother reading so much, and whether I experience the same issue. I told him that in the last two years, I’ve read more than most other times in my life, but what’s different is that I remember far more than I used to.

It has something to do with the daily discipline of sharing my learning via this blog: much of what I remember is not simply what I’ve read, but rather, what I’ve read and then connected to other thoughts through the synthesis process of writing. As Charles Duhigg said, “…We tell our friends about ideas because we want to educate them. But what's actually happening is that we're educating ourselves.” (which I likely wouldn’t have remembered if I hadn’t re-written it for another blog post!)

This hunch was validated earlier today when I came across a random article in Psychology Today:

“When you encounter new information and want to remember it, the formation of a memory is enormously affected by what happens immediately afterward. The most common problem is that you think of something else and that something else erases what you just learned from your working memory ‘scratchpad’ before it has time to set up in long-term memory.

The way to avoid this problem is to do something with the new learning right away. Memory scientists often call this a “production effect." That is, if you produce something from the new learning right away, it not only reduces interfering distractions but also strengthens the encoding and speeds up memory formation into lasting form.”

It’s more than just blogging, though. I’ve noticed that the quotes I share become the quotes I remember. The same with stories.

So perhaps, instead of swearing off reading, we should commit to sharing what we learn, as we learn it.

I’ve mentioned before how input drives output; what’s interesting about this research is that it would imply that output drives (retention of) input, as well…

Related: Make Sense of Things
Related: Input—>Output

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