Reading and Its Effects on Memory

I couldn’t help but notice dramatic changes in my memory over the past 4.5 years, where I’ve focused on reading/learning as much as possible. Although these will be no more than speculations, I would bet on their high degree of correctness.

I’m a very lousy observer. For whatever reason, I’ve mostly lived my life introvertly, up in my mind. I tend not to pay attention to my physical surroundings, and even to people, if I find myself in a group.

This has certainly brought me trouble, but it has a peculiarly positive counterpart. I really pay attention to what happens in my mind. I sometimes feel the chains of thought being constructed, how there seems to be a typewriter and an entity suggesting words or phrases while writing, how ideas clash, others synthesize, others I ignore completely. In any event, this feature helps me better recognize what’s happening in mental territory.

To me, reading is passing my eyes through sentences, while my mind tries to figure out what they mean and how they connect to one another. Writing is the petrification of information, or the conveyance thereof. When reading, the mind wanders. Paragraphs create context and provide ground to be explored. A successful exploration entails the understanding of something. And the mind returns with a piece of knowledge. A failed exploration is one where the mind gets lost in the process and does not return. Incidentally, it’s my experience that the latter happens the most often.

What follows from this is that, if I’m continuously reading, my mind goes for these missions with incredible frequency. Hence the first effect reading has had is my increased capacity to seek and find. It is the same as exercising a muscle. The problem this in turn brings is complacency. The mind knows it’s getting better and becomes lazier. While on its first quest it had to do all kinds of tricks and things to solidify the piece of knowledge, after thousands, it fools itself into thinking it does not have to do that. And, curiously, it is true, to some extent. But this causes the loss of details I retain from incremental reads.

At the same time, there’s another dynamic playing out. Although I am not of the view that the mind has a fixed storage capacity, there’s high degrees of truth to that. I believe the conscious mind, which contains information we can quickly consult, has a definite limit, but I don’t think any human has ever reached it. It seems to take huge effort and skill to expand one’s conscious capacity to access knowledge. There is a fight between pieces of information, which at the beginning is not of zero-sum, but, as the mind gets more and more filled, the fights tend to be more and more zero-sum-like.

When a fighter loses, it’s sent to the subconscious. I think the latter really stores a very large percentage of the lessons and things one learns, maybe in excess of 90%. One only rarely has access to this pool of data, but it does help make decisions via intuition. This is something I’ll explore in the future, but it escapes the purpose of the article.

Now, the way ideas are built is by new information of a certain class replacing another in the conscious mind, but before being sent to the subconscious, they build a link. And that happens almost always thereafter; I have not found the limit to that yet, if there’s any. Then the idea that’s in the conscious mind, to which one has access, every time it’s recalled, the mind also summons the links it has. With some effort, you can bring those to the conscious mind and say them aloud. It works like pulling a thread.

That’s how you know someone has thought deeply about something. I feel most people do not build these layers; I eschew reading or listening to them altogether. Truly deep thinkers, like Munger or Dostoevsky, had built millions of layers to their conscious knowledge. And every time they build a new link, it tests all others, making connections stronger. These people also develop a capacity to deal with the hard questions no one else has because of the layers of knowledge and thought in between.

Going back to the main idea, it is contradictory and counterintuitive, but reading phenomenally improves your memory as well as it erodes it. What one needs to work on is in the contact with the subconscious to not lose much of the consciously acquired knowledge. I am far from knowing how, but writing and speaking help.

The second point I want to raise as to how reading impacts the memory is that reading dyes one’s opinions/sense on subjects. Over 95% of the arguments behind it fade, but the dye remains. This one is quite peculiar. When coming across a particular statement as of today, I sometimes realize that I have an approving or disapproving view of the statement, or that it triggers specific connections. Then I remember that I have in fact read about it in the past, my mind knows about it, but I cannot recall why is my opinion as such. I only have access to the feeling and manifest it accordingly.

I’m not really sure how it works, but this second thing is very dangerous. It’s very simple for a high-substance opinion to be faked by an empty one. The difference is tough to spot, considering our greatly developed talent of fooling ourselves.

Final Remarks

I feel I could write dozens of pages on these topics, yet I’ll abstain from doing so. Maybe in the future. There are many elements I left out on how reading affects the memory. Hope you found these two though-provoking.