💾 Archived View for dece.space › notes › 20240915-read-and-forget.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 10:05:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Is it acceptable to read and then forget what you've read? Acceptable in the sense that you're not going to blame yourself, telling yourself you've wasted time, that you'll have to start again.
It's a problem when you're studying a subject that you're going to need to return to afterwards: for an exam, a professional application, or to practice something that's particularly close to your heart in one way or another. It's embarrassing or dangerous to realize that we're missing the basics in these situations.
It's perfectly acceptable in any other situation. It's perfectly acceptable to learn about a subject and then forget all about it. Moreover, the forgetting is probably only conscious, and the act of reading permeates our memory, our mind on several levels: we may find it difficult to retell precisely what we read years ago on a subject, but the reconfiguration of our neural pathways has taken place nonetheless, and we have retained things from these readings. Sometimes, the work of study has even enabled us to see subjects, other than the one studied and forgotten, in a different way. In short, it's possible, it's common and it's not a failure.
I think it's important to note this because I'm lost and tired of taking notes on all the subjects I study, and it even seems counterproductive in terms of energy.