Come ricordare quello che leggi (11 tecniche)

You guys know, right? That our voice doesn’t sound like how we hear it. Every time you hear your voice recorded you say: ahhh that’s not my voice?!?! But it is, it’s really your voice. I watched a video from a vocal coach who said: if you don’t want to record yourself, the best way to find out how your voice really sounds to other people, how they really hear you, is to pick up two things that will protect your ears, two sheets of paper, two books, whatever you have, put them in front of your ears and talk, and you’ll see how different your voice is, wow! This extraordinary scientific experiment shows that there’s a dissonance, in our voice, also for example when we read or when we study. Just because we read or study something doesn’t mean that we’ll remember it. In fact, in most cases we don’t remember it at all. With all the money I spend on books, if I only remembered 5% of it, I’d be ok with that! But most things, most films, I don’t remember. I cram it all in my head. Get in there! But it doesn’t go in, what a shame. But on the other hand, sometimes I remember things perfectly. A book, a document, some piece of information, if I need to give a presentation, I remember everything down to the letter, but why? Because in those cases I’ve read or studied differently. I’ll tell you 11 simple techniques that I use, and then you can tell me which ones you use, we’ll make a huge list of all the things one can do to remember what they read. The idea is that you can’t always be passionate about what you read or study. When I studied Greek, I wasn’t passionate about it at all. If I have to study accounting or tax issues, it’s not something I’m passionate about, but I still have to do it. Another aspect about the passion or pleasure with which you do something is, I really liked, for example, The Godfather, or Bourne Identity, the Jason Bourne trilogy, but if you asked me: “Monti, so tell me the names of the characters or the details,” I won’t remember anything. Because, maybe in that moment I was doing something I liked but I had no interest in learning, or remembering. This is the other idea: that often we make mistakes because we think it’s only about memory. You take a course in memorizing, which helps, but in the end you don’t just have to remember. You need to be able to automatically activate that knowledge, you have to understand. And when you find yourself in that situation, you’ve studied for the test, how do you do it? In that moment, you’re looking at a landing page and your knowledge needs to come out. Knowledge needs to come out ready, prepared in every situation. Ok, the 11 techniques then. I’ll tell you the first one: the first one is often forgotten: writing. In particular, annotating. If I want to remember something I always write on the book I’m reading. Some write in a notebook, but I write directly in the book, I annotate next to some key points. This is the important concept, because it’s not like everything in a book is important. It’s often just a concept, 10 concepts, 50 concepts. The second thing I do is, after reading a paragraph, I review what the main concept was. For example here I put it at the end of the chapter. Always written inside the book. Option B is to do it at the beginning. I massacre books, and on the first page of the book I write what the summary is. The third thing to remember is, find your best moment to study in. In my case, the best time to read or study something, in order to remember it and really understand it, is after physical activity. Maybe because I have all that adrenaline in my body, I don’t know, but I’m much more awake in those moments, which is really difficult, but then I’m a bit more awake. Number 4: If I need to give a presentation, for example, the next day, I’ll recite it the night before. Quickly. But I recite it the night before. And that gives me advice. Here again, I don’t know why, but it’s something that I basically need to do. Related to this is number 5, not to study or read the night before. It’s like saying the night before a race you don’t stay up training all night, that’s work you should have already done earlier. The night before you should just try to sleep, to make yourself fresh, but just before going to bed is what I need to focus on. This is related to number 6, I think, reciting loudly. For me it works, maybe it doesn’t work for everyone, but for me it does. Reciting loudly gives me the sensation that I’m learning, that I’m understanding. The sun is coming out, yeah! Number 7: sometimes what I do, and that I find useful, is to record my voice while I talk about a subject, and then I listen to the audio of my voice. I did it, for example, with the videos I recorded for Repubblica. In that case there were 9 or 10 episodes with a duration of 10, 12 minutes each, and we recorded them in just one take. We would start rolling the camera, and I would speak for 10 or 12 minutes without error and stop. Then we’d record another episode. It struck me to see how people were surprised “How do you do it, Monti, knowing it all like that and not making any mistakes?” In that case it worked both because I was already familiar with the subject for many years, and because I prepared like this, I don’t know, the details, the dates, the numbers, the sales figures. There’s so many, it’s not like you can remember them all. Repeating them in audio worked. Number 8: It’s essential to remove distractions. This gadget here, if you want to study with interest, to learn, to understand, and then to remember, it has to disappear. There must be no way out. It’s not turned off, it’s away, gone! Number 9: spaced repetition. For Codice Internet, for example, which was a 90 minute monologue, I prepared it in blocks. You memorize, learn, remember, and study one block at a time. For me this applies also to timing, to study 20 minutes, in 20 minute blocks, intensely and then stop, and that works well, as a concept. A book like this, I would divide it in many blocks, and at that point it becomes much easier to digest. If instead you try to read and study, at least for me, 500 pages in a row, it’s a mess. Number 10 is something I’ve been trying recently, it’s a piece of advice I came across that seems interesting: to study the same subject in different places. According to some studies, associating different places with the same concept that you’re studying can help you keep it in your mind. Number 11 is related: the usual Palace of Memory technique, that I imagine everyone knows a bit, is the idea that when you memorize you visually put your memories into physical places. I do it for some presentations and essentially I imagine my house, and in every room, on every floor, I put various concepts from the presentation and then all I need to do is go into my house and look at what’s around and there I know everything, more or less. I’ll stop here. 11 simple techniques, I hope you find them useful. If you have something more interesting, write me in the comments. This way we’ll all become the best readers and students, the best memorizers. The main point, in the end, remember, is not to remember but to understand. Because, as my middle school teacher used to say: if you study to remember, you’ll forget, but if you study to understand, you’ll remember.