How to Study and Remember Everything

A step-by-step guide to studying, understanding, and remembering

Contents:

Introduction

A student once asked Bill Gates what he would choose if he could have one superpower. Bill answered: “Being able to read super fast.”

When you sit and think through all the possible options — there is a particularly strong case for telekinesis — why would Gates choose flying through books? Well, it actually has nothing to do with reading; it’s about learning fast. Reading is just his specific bottleneck.

There are three bottlenecks for learning: how fast you can ingest information (Gates’s kryptonite), how well you understand it, and your ability to recall it. Gates is quite smart so his general comprehension is far above average — nothing to worry about there. He is also believed to have an eidetic memory which means he can recall just about anything he learns — go figure. It’s no surprise, then, that he would choose super-fast reading, even though he reads about three times faster than the average person already.

So what can us mere mortals do about these bottlenecks? First, it helps to understand them.

Learning Bottlenecks

Getting information into your head

You can only learn as fast as information entering your brain. And for the last couple of hundred years at least, reading has been the primary conduit. To learn more, you either need to read faster or find more time to read. Given how busy the world, faster reading is likely the feasible choice.

There is an unbelievable amount of content that covers speed reading techniques. I have my doubts about whether reading anything faster than 750 words per minute, without losing comprehension, is possible, but even that puts you in the same league as Gates.

Understanding what you read

There is no point in knowing something if you don’t understand it. It’s kind of like having a high-end sports car without knowing how to drive. Only you can’t sell unused knowledge nor use pictures of it to bump your social status

Comprehending what you’re learning makes remembering it a whole lot easier in the first place; comprehension creates meaning. That points to the difference between data and information. Information has meaning, while data does not.

Remembering what you read

Nothing you learn is worth a dance in the dirt if you can’t remember it. But memory is shrouded in mystery, which is precisely why so many people struggle with it. It’s not simple nor straight forward. And then there is the bloody computer metaphor. The brain does not work like a computer, moreover, thinking it does creates the misconception that memory is hardware-related when it’s not. You can improve your memory without upgrading your brain.

You see, a computer stores data in a specific, accessible location but the brain records information contextually; everything is related to something else. Which is why we find the complex categorisation of objects so easy compared to computers.

Human memory is a network of information that also relies on each other for recall. The information is stored and ready to go but finding and recalling it is difficult.

Right, so what can we do about this all?

Let’s start with my annoyingly brilliant wife. She has, probably, the best memory that I’ve ever come across, as well as a huge capacity for comprehension. She can study a textbook once and the entire thing sticks with her for life. Sadly, the same applies to the dumb things I say. Nevertheless, I asked her about how she studies. Her simply answer blew my mind.

Nested summarisation.

That’s it. That is the thing that separates intellectual mortals from study gods. She summarises each chapter, focusing on the important bits, then summarises those, then summarises those, and so on, until she has each textbook down to almost one page of summary. Seems too simple right? But when you break it down to see why it works, it makes perfect sense.

How to study

Firstly, to summarise something, you have to understand it. And the process of summarising it forces you to understand. Suddenly, you can’t rely on the words of the author but have to take the essence of what is being said and distil it. That ticks the comprehension box.

Secondly, effective summarization is turning information into a concentrated form. You are looking for the most important part of whatever you’re reading and cutting out anything else. Besides comprehension, which goes a long way to effective recall, you’re leveraging mnemonics without realising it. As mentioned, the brain works in a complex network of information and it’s inclined to remember things when something related triggers it.

For example, if I ask you about a specific date in your childhood, you’re unlikely to remember it in any detail, if at all (depending on the significance of the date, of course). But if I describe an event, particularly an emotional or impactful one, you’re likely to be able to remember it, as well as what you were wearing, the weather, and a whole bunch of other useless bits of information.

The same thing happens with studying. As you’re distilling the content into a more concentrated form, which in itself is easier to remember, your brain is storing the peripheral information. So when you commit the concentrated version of a text to memory, when you recall it later, it’s likely to bring a whole bunch of related information with it. That’s recall ticked.

And thirdly, you’re distilling the material into its most important bits. So worst case, even if you do only remember the one-page summary, you’re remembering what matters.

This studying technique covers both recall and comprehension, so all that’s left is ingestion, or increasing the rate of information gain. Here we will focus on reading. I’ve managed to improve my reading speed from about 300 words per minute to about 500 but, and this is the kicker, I have also improved my comprehension and retention rates significantly.

The thing is that while my reading speed has improved by ~60%, my reading time has stayed the same. Net knowledge gain has also improved drastically. Now that I can read faster, I can also spend more time on the important or complex parts.

I effectively shifted reading time to assimilation time.

How to improve reading speed

I used three techniques to increase my reading speeds:

Pacer. I use my finger, or a pencil, to trace under the line I am reading. It not only serves a pacer but also a tracker. This allows you to maintain a consistent pace, as well as helps prevent your eye from jumping back and forth as you read. This stops you consciously rereading (regression) and subconsciously rereading (back-skipping). Peripheral reading. Your eye doesn’t read a line in a continuous movement, instead, it reads it in saccadic movements. That is, your eye jumps from fixation point to fixation point as you read. Most people start to set their focal point at the beginning of the line and track it to the end, but this can waste up to 50% of your peripheral vision. Rather, start focusing on a couple of words into the line and stop a couple of words from the end of it. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it means that you can surpass the hard cap of 500 words per minute imposed by anatomy. Concentration. At first, when I started reading faster, I found my focus would drift. Because I am moving over the words quicker, it was easy to get distracted. To solve this, I treat reading like meditation and focus. As soon as that focus slips, I pause for a moment. This gives me a moment to use some of the assimilation techniques listed below.

How to improve comprehension and retention

These techniques improved my comprehension and retention rates dramatically.

Variable pacing. When I get to new concepts, words, or something I don’t quite understand, I slow down my reading a little. This helps ensure I don’t have to reread some of the more difficult concepts. Contemplation. When I get to an important point or something significant, I pause and think about what I have read — something that I picked up from a Jordan Peterson talk. I engage with the new information, relate it to what I already know, and find similar concepts in other subjects. This helps immensely with retention. Notes. I make notes in the margins of my books. But I make notes based off of the above point. I jot down an interesting realisation, or something significant, based on said contemplation and then underline the related snippet in the text.

We live in a world where almost everyone has access to just about anything on the internet. But most do not have the foundation of learning to be able to take advantage of it.

For me, this is one of the most important things to focus on because the result of learning is greater than the sum of new and existing knowledge.