Why We Forget Most Of The Books We Read: Julie Beck Flashcards
What is ‘recognition memory’..?
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
… and the movies and TV shows we watch
By Julie Beck
Horvath says, what’s called recognition memory is more important. “So long as you know where that information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need to recall it,” he says.
What happens when people ‘expect to have future access’ to information?
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
… and the movies and TV shows we watch
By Julie Beck
“When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it. But even before the internet existed, entertainment products have served as externalized memories for themselves.
Why does ‘Socrates hate writing’?
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
… and the movies and TV shows we watch
By Julie Beck
Socrates hates writing because he thinks it’s going to kill memory,” Horvath says. “And he’s right. Writing absolutely killed memory. But think of all the incredible things we got because of writing. I wouldn’t trade writing for a better recall memory, ever.” Perhaps the internet offers a similar tradeoff
What is the effect on recall of binge-watching?
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
… and the movies and TV shows we watch
By Julie Beck
Right after finishing the show, the binge-watchers scored the highest on a quiz about it, but after 140 days, they scored lower than the weekly viewers. They also reported enjoying the show less than did people who watched it once a day, or weekly.
Where is information ‘held’ if we read a book in one sitting?
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
… and the movies and TV shows we watch
By Julie Beck
If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say—you’re just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. “You’re never actually reaccessing it,” he says.
Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false “feeling of fluency.”
What is a ‘Book of Books’?
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
… and the movies and TV shows we watch
By Julie Beck
“Bob offers immediate access to where I’ve been, psychologically and geographically, at any given moment in my life,” she explains in My Life With Bob, a book she wrote about her book of books. “Each entry conjures a memory that may have otherwise gotten lost or blurred with time.” (Pamela Paul)
What is Ian Crouch’s strange argument about the transience of reading?
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
… and the movies and TV shows we watch
By Julie Beck
In a piece for The New Yorker called “The Curse of Reading and Forgetting,” Ian Crouch writes, “reading has many facets, one of which might be the rather indescribable, and naturally fleeting, mix of thought and emotion and sensory manipulations that happen in the moment and then fade. How much of reading, then, is just a kind of narcissism—a marker of who you were and what you were thinking when you encountered a text?”
Books aren’t ‘files we upload to our brain - they’re part of…
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
… and the movies and TV shows we watch
By Julie Beck
“Books, shows, movies, and songs aren’t files we upload to our brains—they’re part of the tapestry of life, woven in with everything else. From a distance, it may become harder to see a single thread clearly, but it’s still in there.”
Question: What does the false sense of reading as conquest refer to?
The Curse of Reading and Forgetting (New Yorker)
By Ian Crouch
Answer: It refers to the idea that as readers, we may treat reading as a conquest where we feel triumphant after finishing a classic text.
Question: What words used by researchers about forgetting are hurtful to the layperson?
The Curse of Reading and Forgetting (New Yorker)
By Ian Crouch
Answer: The words used by researchers about forgetting that are hurtful to the layperson are interference, confusion, and decay.
Question: What is one way to combat forgetfulness while reading? (More than…)
The Curse of Reading and Forgetting (New Yorker)
By Ian Crouch
Answer: One way to combat forgetfulness while reading is to read novels more than once.
Or to be constantly rereading (literature professors might argue that this is what reading actually is…)
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
… and the movies and TV shows we watch
By Julie Beck
