Getting More From Nonfiction Books

What I read: How to Remember Everything You Want From Non-Fiction Books by Eva Keiffenheim in BetterHumans. Published December 14, 2020.

One of the legacies of my upbringing by my father is my love of books. He placed a book in my hand the moment I could point to pictures and words and garble out something to which my father would smile, whether he understood me or not.

People have asked me if there is any one thing that has served me best throughout my life above all else and I always say my love of reading books. Books have transformed me as a person. Books are responsible for my successful career paths. Books are my companions late at night when the world goes away except for the wise words or enthralling story on the page.

I can’t remember exactly when, but early in my adolescence my father gave me the book How to read a book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. It was life changing.

Adler and Van Doren’s iconic work on how to read deeply and strategically is full of great tips and approaches. The one thing that stuck with me was the wise advice that it is better to read one high quality book deeply and thoroughly than it is to quickly read many books.

As a child I consumed books at a breakneck pace. I read anything I could get my hands on. My dad bought me countless books. I was checking out books from the library once or twice a week. Some of them I read deeply per the advice of Adler and Van Doren. Books were my friends and reading has been a consistent tool of self-development for me, then and now.

As Keiffenheim points out in the article, frustrating as it might be, there are few instances of schools teaching students how to learn. Sure, they teach about all sorts of subject areas, but they neglect the science and practice of how to learn well.

Where, if not in an education program at university, should you learn how to learn?

I was wrong. There were no classes on learning or cognitive science. Being assigned dry, academic, self-promoted professor books, I hadn’t figured how the right books could teach you anything. Instead, I asked the best-performing fellow students about their learning techniques and copied their bulk-learning and memorizing. But after graduation, I felt dumb. I forgot almost everything from my classes.

Many of us can recount an experience when we read a nonfiction book and a while later could not remember much about the details. Perhaps we would remember a few overarching points, but we might not even recall that much.

Yet, about 80 books into my reading journey, something felt odd. Whenever a conversation revolved around a serious non-fiction book I read, such as ‘Sapiens’ or ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ I could never remember much. Turns out, I hadn’t absorbed as much information as I’d believed. Since I couldn’t remember much, I felt as though reading wasn’t an investment in knowledge but mere entertainment.

I know many others feel the same. When I opened up about my struggles, many others confessed they also can’t remember most of what they read, as if forgetting is a character flaw. But it isn’t.

Forgetting most of what we read isn’t a character flaw. It’s the way we work with books that’s flawed.

I’ve studied a great deal about learning theory. The ways we learn best and how we learn best from books can vary. But this from the article encapsulates so much of how I view the foundations of learning theory.

Instead, we store new information in terms of its meaning to our existing memory. And we give new information meaning by actively participating in the learning process — we interpret, connect, interrelate, or elaborate. To remember new information, we not only need to know it but also to know how it relates to what we already know.

For me, it’s the “actively participating” aspect that’s the cornerstone to learning well, from books or from any source. Passive learning isn’t really learning, at least not in the deepest sense. You must fully engage with the material, toss it around, massage it, reflect on it, rephrase it, repeat it, connect it to other knowledge, and otherwise wrestle with the information in an actively engaged manner or the material just won’t stick.

Keiffenheim does a nice job of concisely explaining how we acquire, retain, and retrieve knowledge as we work to memorize what we learn. In particular, Keiffenheim explains that the retrieval stage is cue dependent. The more cues, the better the retrieval process. By creating more mental links while you’re acquiring information, the better your retention and ultimately your retrieval of that knowledge.

Much of the rest of the article is dedicated to articulating some evidence-based learning strategies one can use when reading nonfiction books. They are based on the research done by scientists Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel that was eventually published in the book Make It Stick. In a nutshell, here are the five strategies. You can read the article for a deeper dive into each of them.

Elaboration

This is one my father used all the time. He was a college professor and would rephrase and describe whatever he was learning in his own words. By concentrating on how to explain whatever is learned in your own words, the details become more solidified. Engaging past knowledge in service to new knowledge creates stronger memory bonds.

Another strategy I’ve used is to have learning buddies and we explain to each other what we’re learning at the time. By forcing yourself to explain something to another person, or even to yourself, the information is more thoroughly encoded into our memories for retention and future retrieval.

I also keep extensive learning notes for subject areas I want to learn well and the act of writing out what I just learned in my own words reinforces the learning considerably.

Retrieval

When you are taking a test, writing an essay, or practicing with flashcards, you’re engaging in retrieval. The trick is to increase the workload for doing such retrieval. For example, writing a short essay on a topic is more likely to make the information stick than simply checking off boxes on a multiple-choice test. The more cognitive effort utilized, the better the learning.

Engaging in such retrieval exercises spaced out over time can help solidify the learning. As Keiffenheim explains it,

The more time has gone since your information consumption, the more difficult time you’ll have to retrieve it. Naturally, a few days after we learn something, forgetting sets in. And that’s why retrieval is so powerful. Retrieval strengthens your memory and interrupts forgetting and, as other researchers replicate, as a learning event, the act of retrieving information is considerably more potent than is an additional study opportunity, particularly in terms of facilitating long-term recall.

Another great way to practice retrieval is to write about what you learn in a journal. Many people keep journals in which they write about all sorts of things pertaining to their life – thoughts, ideas, struggles, and so on. Writing about what you learn will reinforce learning as another form of retrieval.

Truth be known, when I write pieces like this one, part of what I’m doing is helping to strengthen my own learning by explaining something to my readers.

Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition is repeating information you’ve learned at increasing intervals. The more you need to struggle to recall the information, the more permanent the learning effect.

Oddly, the reason this works so well is that we need to forget to remember. I know, seems crazy, but by engaging in spaced repetition recall over time you allow your brain to forget just a little, but not so much that with a bit of effort you can’t remember it. Recalling such information over time makes the learning permanent.

So, spaced repetition prevents your brain from forgetting. Research shows repeating the same information ten times over different days is a better way to remember things than repeating the same information twenty times on a single day.

Interleaving

Interleaving describes a process where you mix (interleave) your reading (or other forms of learning) among multiple subjects or topics while you read which results in learning improvement overall.

One of the main ways I do this is by reading a few books at a time. It’s common for me to be reading a novel, put it down and read a book on philosophy, then put that down and read a book about software technology. Maybe I’ll search online for a video about a topic that jumps out at me during my reading, even if the topic isn’t directly related to the focus of the book itself.

To further make the point of how jumping around topics and inputs can spark learning by fostering connections between various types of information, the article mentions one of my favorite quotes by James Clear that I reference all the time.

The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas.

Self-Testing

This is pretty much what is appears to be, testing yourself on what you’ve learned to make it stick. You can create situations where you must explain what you’ve learned by posing to yourself a real-world problem or question related to the subject matter and crafting a best answer solution.

This may also be why teachers and professors end up with such a thorough understanding of a subject area. When they prepare to teach students, they often create leading questions for class discussion or rehearse parts of a lecture to be sure they’re properly explaining something in a manner that will be easily understood by the class.

Interestingly, Keiffenheim uses a quotation from Mortimer J. Adler that my father repeated to me often.

The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.

For Kindle Users

You can leverage the power of the Kindle e-reader to learn better. Keiffenheim offers a few good Kindle study tips.

I read almost all my books on a Kindle. I love it. I can carry hundreds of books with me wherever I go, search for pertinent information I might want to use in my writing, and highlight notable passages. I use the one-touch dictionary lookup feature anytime I encounter a word for which I do not know the exact definition. I can’t recommend Kindles (or the Kindle app for your phone or laptop) enough. It has revolutionized how I read and study.

Debunking Learning Myths

Concluding the article is the debunking of two common learning myths: our brain’s capacity is limited (it’s not); and effective learning should be easy (it should be challenging).

Learning Better Rocks!

There is nothing in your life I can think of that will not benefit from discovering and practicing better ways to learn. Whether it’s your career, hobby, or random areas of interest, more effective learning is always worth an investment of your time.