Why We Forget Most of the

Books We Read
... and the movies and TV shows we watch

Julie Beck

Jan 26, 2018

Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words

and more about the experience. “I almost always remember
where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the
physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times
Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I
remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually
remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t
remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”
For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read
that book, I knew not everythingthere was to know about Ben
Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the
American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I
probably could not give you the timeline of the American
revolution.”
Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once
and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of
consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and
then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a
film in the tub, but the rest is gone.
“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says
Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca
University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”
The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the
first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you
forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the
material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with
more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of
what you took in.
 Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared
Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says
that the way people now consume information and
entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and
it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you
saw six months ago.
In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to
spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less
necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-
do list, but largely, 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.
Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of
externalized memory. “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. You don’t need to
remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once
videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show
fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of
culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.
With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the
internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we
consume even further. But it’s hardly as if we remembered it all
before.
Plato was a famous early curmudgeon when it came to the
dangers of externalizing memory. In the dialogue Plato wrote
between Socrates and the aristocrat Phaedrus, Socrates tells a
story about the god Theuth discovering “the use of letters.” The
Egyptian king Thamus says to Theuth:
This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the
learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they
will trust to the external written characters and not remember of
themselves.
(Of course, Plato’s ideas are only accessible to us today
because he wrote them down.)
“[In the dialogue] 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: You can access and consume as much information and
entertainment as you want, but you won’t retain most of it.
It’s true that people often shove more into their brains than
they can possibly hold. Last year, Horvath and his colleagues at
the University of Melbourne found that those who binge-watched
TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than
people who watched one episode a week. 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.
People are binging on the written word, too. In 2009, the
average American encountered100,000 words a day, even if they
didn’t “read” all of them. It’s hard to imagine that’s decreased in
the nine years since. In “Binge-Reading Disorder,” an article for
The Morning News, Nikkitha Bakshani analyzes the meaning of
this statistic. “Reading is a nuanced word,” she writes, “but the
most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption:
where we read, especially on the internet, merely to acquire
information. Information that stands no chance of becoming
knowledge unless it ‘sticks.’”
Or, as Horvath puts it: “It’s the momentary giggle and then
you want another giggle. It’s not about actually learning
anything. It’s about getting a momentary experience to feel as
though you’ve learned something.”
The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want
to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I
used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus
would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a
good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you
recall them, Horvath says. 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.” The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it,
it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be
slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t
stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in
certain strategies that will help you remember.”
People might do that when they study, or read something
for work, but it seems unlikely that in their leisure time they’re
going to take notes on Gilmore Girls to quiz themselves later.
“You could be seeing and hearing, but you might not be noticing
and listening,” Sana says. “Which is, I think, most of the time
what we do.”
Still, not all memories that wander are lost. Some of them
may just be lurking, inaccessible, until the right cue pops them
back up—perhaps a pre-episode “Previously on Gilmore Girls”
recap, or a conversation with a friend about a book you’ve both
read. Memory is “all associations, essentially,” Sana says.
That may explain why Paul and others remember the
context in which they read a book without remembering its
contents. Paul has kept a “book of books,” or “Bob,” since she
was in high school—an analog form of externalized memory—in
which she writes down every book she reads. “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.”
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?”
To me, it doesn’t seem like narcissism to remember life’s
seasons by the art that filled them—the spring of romance
novels, the winter of true crime. But it’s true enough that if you
consume culture in the hopes of building a mental library that
can be referred to at any time, you’re likely to be disappointed.
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.
 “It’d be really cool if memories were just clean—information
comes in and now you have a memory for that fact,” Horvath
says. “But in truth, all memories are everything.”

The Curse of Reading and

Forgetting

By Ian Crouch
May 22, 2013
 Recently, a colleague mentioned that she had been
rereading Richard Hughes’s “A High Wind in Jamaica,” which was
first published in 1929 and is about a group of creepy little kids
who become the unwanted wards of sad, listless pirates. She
praised it, and her recommendation sent me to Amazon. The title
was familiar, as was the vibrant cover of the New York Review
Books reissue. One cent and $3.99 for shipping, and the book
was on its way. A couple of weeks later, I opened to the first
page and started reading. By the fifth page, I realized that I had
read this novel before, and pretty recently, about three years
ago, when another colleague had also praised it and lent me his
copy.
The passage that tipped me off is about the children’s pet
cat, called Tabby, who has a penchant for “mortal sport” with
snakes:
Once he got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to
see a spectacular death-agony; but he just went off into the bush
and probably ate something, for he came back in a few days
quite cock-a-hoop and as ready to eat snakes as ever.
Tabby’s name stood out, as did the creature’s particular
daring, and I had the strange sense of already knowing that the
poor thing was doomed to a gruesome and shocking end: hunted
and murdered by a pack of wild cats, some pages later—by which
time I was marvelling both at the various peculiarities of the book
and at my unsettling ability to forget them.
This passage is also characteristic of the novel more
generally. Its detached and slightly sadistic sense of the animal
world is a prelude to all kinds of violence and injury that befall
the book’s pets and wild things. The phrase “probably ate
something” is oddly fuzzy, the kind of imprecise notion that a
child might have about what cats do when they are unwatched.
This kind of language communicates a lazy innocence mixed with
vague malevolence that gives Hughes’s sense of childhood its
special character. “Cock-a-hoop” is a great old idiomatic
phrase—meaning in this case exulting or boastful—just one of
dozens of such sparklers that flash from the pages.
 All of which is to say that “A High Wind in Jamaica” is
remarkable in all kinds of ways—in its diction, its syntax, its
characterization, its imagery, its psychological depth, and its
narrative movement. It opens with a hurricane in Jamaica, which
precipitates the decision by a colonial family to send its children
to the safer haven of England for school. En route, they fall in
with those pirates, captained by an odd Dutchman named
Jonsen. The children are, mostly, better off for their adventure;
Jonsen and his men, less so. The book deconstructs the pirate
fable—but is still, at points, a ripping yarn itself—and, as
Francine Prose notes in her introduction, it is an altogether more
sophisticated and subtle version of “The Lord of the Flies,” which
was published twenty-five years later. It is, simply, entirely
memorable, which makes the fact that I forgot it so thoroughly
all the more difficult to account for.
It’s a bit circular but I cannot recall forgetting another novel
entirely—both the contents of the book and the act of reading it.
Others may be out there, lurking, waiting to spring up and
surprise and dishearten. But, looking at my bookshelves, I am
aware of another kind of forgetting—the spines look familiar; the
names and titles bring to mind perhaps a character name, a turn
of plot, often just a mood or feeling—but for the most part, the
assembled books, and the hundreds of others that I’ve read and
discarded, given away, or returned to libraries, represent a vast
catalogue of forgetting.
This forgetting has serious consequences—but it has
superficial ones as well, mostly having to do with vanity. It has
led, at times, to a discomfiting situation, call it the Cocktail Party
Trap (though this suggests that I go to many cocktail parties,
which is itself a fib). Someone mentions a book with some cachet
that I’ve read—a lesser-known work of a celebrated writer, say
Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda,” to take an example from my shelf—and
I smile knowingly, and maybe add, “It’s wonderful,” or some
such thing. Great so far, I’m part of the in-crowd—and not lying;
I did read it. But then there’s a moment of terror: What if the
person summons up a question or comment with any kind of
specificity at all? Basically, what if she aims to do anything other
than merely brag about having read “Daniel Deronda”? Uh-oh.
It’s about cotton production, right? Maybe blurt something about
that. No, wait, that’s Gaskell’s “North and South.” I must either
vaguely agree with what she says, hoping she isn’t somehow
putting me on or lying herself, or else confess everything, with
some version of the conversation killer: “I read that entire novel
and now can tell you nothing of any consequence about it.” Or
else slink away, muttering about needing to refill a drink.
This embarrassing situation raises practical questions that
also become ones about identity: Do I really like reading?
Perhaps it is a failure of attention—there are times when I notice
my own distraction while reading, and can, in a way, feel myself
forgetting. There is a scarier question, one that might seem like
asking if one is good at breathing, or walking. Am I actually quite
bad at reading after all?
Perhaps, though there is comfort to be had. In April, on a
post by Brad Leithauser about the surprising durability of certain
seemingly disposable words (involuntary memory, essentially),
a reader left a quotation in the comments, which he attributed
to the poet Siegfried Sassoon:
For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very
little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second
time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh
everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and
his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it
were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.
“Humanly certain.” Well, that puts it to rest. The notion
changes our view of agency a bit. Books aren’t just about us, as
readers. They belong perhaps mainly to the writer, who along
with his narrator, is a thief. I wonder what writers forget about
their own books?
If we are cursed to forget much of what we read, there are
still charms in the moments of reading a particular book in a
particular place. What I remember most about Malamud’s short-
story collection “The Magic Barrel” is the warm sunlight in the
coffee shop on the consecutive Friday mornings I read it before
high school. That is missing the more important points, but it is
something. 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? Perhaps thinking of that
book later, a trace of whatever admixture moved you while
reading it will spark out of the brain’s dark places.
Memory, however, is capricious and deeply unfair. It is why
I can recall nothing about how a cell divides, or very little about
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” but can sing any number of television
theme songs in the shower. (“Touch has a memory,” Keats
wrote—but I can’t find my copy of his complete poems to test
the theory, and, anyway, I found that quote on Goodreads.) The
words that researchers use about forgetting are all psychically
hurtful for the layperson: interference, confusion, decay—they
seem sinister and remind us of all the sad limitations of the
human brain, and of an inevitable march toward another kind of
forgetting, which comes with age, and what may be final
forgetting, which is death. Yet those same researchers are also
quick to reassure us. Everybody forgets. And forgetting may
even be a key to memory itself—a psychobiological necessity
rather than a character flaw. That could be, but I still wish I could
remember who did what to whom in D. H. Lawrence’s “Women
in Love”—and the actual, rather than pompous and pretend,
reasons why I’ve told people that I preferred “Sons and Lovers.”
Or is it the other way around?
This may be a minor existential drama—and it might simply
be resolved with practical application and a renewed sense of
studiousness. There is ongoing dispute as to the ways in which
memory might, in a general sense, be improvable. But certainly
there are things that we can do to better remember the books
we read—especially the ones that we want to remember (some
novels, like some moments in life, are best forgotten).
A simple remedy to forgetfulness is to read novels more
than once. A professor I had in college would often, to the point
of irony, cite Nabokov’s statement that there is no reading, only
rereading. Yet he was teaching a class in modern fiction, and
assigned books that are generally known as “slim” contemporary
classics. They were short, and we were being tested on them—
we’d be foolish to read them only once. I read them at least
twice, and now remember them. But what about in real life, set
loose from comprehension examinations and left mostly to our
own devices and standards? Should we reread when there is a
nearly endless shelf of books out there to read and a certainly
not-endless amount of time in which to do it? Should I pull out
my copy of Eudora Welty’s “The Optimist’s Daughter” to relearn
its charms—or more truthfully, learn them for the first time—or
should I accept the loss, and move on?
Part of my suspicion of rereading may come from a false
sense of reading as conquest. As we polish off some classic text,
we may pause a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft,
standing with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast. Another
monster bagged. It would be somehow less heroic, as it were, to
bend over and check the thing’s pulse. But that, of course, is the
stuff of reading—the going back, the poring over, the act of
committing something from the experience, whether it be mood
or fact, to memory. It is in the postmortem where we learn how
a book really works. Maybe, then, for a forgetful reader like me,
the great task, and the greatest enjoyment, would be to read a
single novel over and over again. At some point, then, I would
truly and honestly know it.
Illustration by Matthew Hollister.
 Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for
newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.