The Forge Guide to Reading Better
And why your brain makes it so easy to forget
Illustration: George(s)
It was only around 5,000 years ago that the human brain made a major breakthrough: Building on neural circuits that could already interpret scratches on clay tablets and the symbols in cave paintings, it developed the capacity to link the sounds of spoken language to the abstract visual marks we call words. In other words, humans learned to read.
The act of reading activates a symphony of brain activity, involving not only the visual and auditory systems but neural circuits that build meaning, evoke emotion, and encode memory. When you read, your brain does much more than simply comprehend the words in front of you: It enables you to empathize with people you?ve never met, to engage with ideas that challenge and inspire you, to imagine other worlds.
That is, if you can remember what you?re reading.
As you read this, right now, you may find that although your eyes are skimming from left to right, you?re barely taking in the meaning of the words. You may get to the end of this very paragraph and realize that you can?t really recall any of the ones that came before.
If that?s the case, you?re at least in good company. A 2012 review paper by Ziming Liu, a professor of information science at San Jose State University who studies reading behavior, noted that when we read digital text, as opposed to words on paper, we tend to default to skimming over more careful reading. And as screens occupy an increasingly prominent presence in our lives, this kind of distracted skimming has become the new norm of reading, according to the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, and Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.
Based on Wolf?s own research on the neuroscience of reading, she thinks this hurried form of reading is sucking much of the benefit ? and pleasure ? out of one of humanity?s greatest evolutionary leaps forward. It also explains why so many people struggle to remember what they?ve read even a few moments afterward, she says.
To understand why we so often forget what we read, we need to understand what?s going on in the brains of both attentive and distracted readers, Wolf explains. Engaged readers are constantly making associations between what they?re reading and what they already know, evaluating how the material fits with their past experiences, trying to decide if they believe or agree with what they?re reading or taking another person?s perspective. ?There?s a lot of hypothesis-generating that goes on in your frontal lobes: ?Oh, this is true. This is what it means. Oh, wait a minute, is that really true??? she says.
But when people try to speed through a text or half-focus on the words in front of them, she says, they aren?t processing at a level that allows this critical analysis. Being distracted and in a hurry also shortchanges our ability to form the associations we need to make the information stick, Wolf says. ?You will have some memory of it. But at a deeper level, you haven?t had time for consolidation? ? the neurological process of encoding an experience as a memory.
That?s not always a bad thing. Forgetting some of what we take in is essential to functioning in a complex world. ?There?s so much information in the world, we can?t possibly process it all,? says Monica Rosenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. Attention is an important tool for filtering that information, separating the things that make it into our memory from the things that don?t. The trick is getting attention and memory to work together as we read, allowing us to carefully select the things we want to recall and ignore (or forget) everything else.
Rosenberg has observed in her lab the importance of attention on remembering what we read. In a 2018 study, for example, she found that when people were asked to read passages of Greek history, those whose brain-activity patterns reflected more focused attention were better at later recalling what they?d read.
The practical takeaway is a simple one: If you want to remember more of what you read, do your best to eliminate distractions before turning to your reading material. ?I often find myself trying to read a paper,? Rosenberg says, ?but then I flip back to my email or maybe my student comes in and we chat about research projects, and I?m going to remember less of what I read.?
For Wolf, going distraction-free means getting offline, away from email and all the other temptations of the internet. ?If I were to give the reader a tip, it would be to begin their day with hard copy, something that requires slower, deeper reading, and just do 20 minutes of it,? she says. Especially with the always-on demands of modern life, trying to block out an hour or two to go off the grid and read is unrealistic for most of us. Carving out a smaller chunk, as Wolf does, may be easier to fit into a busy schedule as well as less mentally taxing.
Active reading ? taking notes, sketching, and talking with a friend about the text ? can also help forge mental connections between the information you?re taking in and what you already know, increasing your retention. This doesn?t mean passively highlighting, re-reading, or retyping what you?re reading but effortfully engaging with the text: jotting down your own thoughts, questions, and connections that occur to you, whether you do it in the margins or take notes elsewhere.
There are, unfortunately, no hacks or shortcuts to reading at this deep level. But the rewards are well worth the effort, says Wolf. Through her own practice of reading for even 20 minutes a day, she says she?s managed to recapture the pleasure of immersive reading ? the feeling of losing herself in a book.
Wolf adds: ?The good reader,? Wolf adds, ?goes beyond knowledge, goes beyond emotions and perspective-taking, into a realm where the furthest reaches of our thoughts can be generated.? The ultimate goal of reading shouldn?t just be memorization, but reflection and insight.
