This afternoon, I started researching the topic of men’s
rights on my antifeminist friend’s saved posts on Reddit. Throughout my search
of men’s rights on reddit, I came across an article called “What’s the
difference between the men’s rights movement and feminism?” Having a paper to
do on gender inequalities, I read the article and found it to be informative.
Yet when I opened a new word document to begin to summarize the article, I found
myself struggling to put words down on the page. I just read this article yet I
couldn’t really summarize all the informative points that jumped out at me as I
read it. Frustrated, I read through the first few paragraphs of the article
again, and went back to the document. I found myself paraphrasing the author’s
words. It was then when I felt a hidden frustration that has always plagued me
when I read books. Reading books is a passive activity for the brain and it
contributes a very poor percentage towards retaining information. I thought to
myself, “goddamn! What’s the point of reading so many books if I can barely
remember anything afterwards?” I remember writing a previous post on my blog
about how to retain 90% of what you read. In that post I covered the fact that
we learn 90% of what we teach others. I concluded that if we taught ourselves,
in this case, the article I was reading, I would be able to retain 90% of it.
As I began doing this with Jared White’s article on the
difference between men’s rights movement compared to feminism, I read a
sentence, looked away and tried to repeat what I had just read. Disappointingly
and frustratingly, I even had trouble repeating the sentence word for word with
moments thinking to myself, “did I word that right?”, only to look at the
sentence and see I had used different words to describe the same meaning. I knew
intellectually that the sentence I had paraphrased based on memory had the same
meaning, but a huge tension of stress harped on my shoulders as I thought how
frustrating it was to try and learn through reading. Sadly, there was a part of
me that wanted to give up on reading books due to their poor lack of retain-ability.
I wondered what I would do with my time if I gave up on books. Would I just
watch television? “What a horrible way to spend my time!”, I thought to myself.
What was I going to do though? I yearned to learn things and improve myself but
the methods I’ve learned from schools to use are horrendous towards actual
learning!
Reading this article did not give me any new ideas as it was similar to an article I had read previously. As I was about to hit the back button, I saw a related post called “How to Recall an Entire Book in 5 Minutes or Less” that you can find here: http://litemind.com/how-to-recall-an-entire-book-in-5-minutes-or-less/
This article introduced me to the idea of creating a
mind-map after reading. From the looks of the article, I am intrigued at how
great this method seems to be at retaining from books. Perhaps this is the most
effective way to learn from reading. I’ll be trying the method of mind-mapping
and see how it goes.
What is Mind Mapping? (and How to Get Started Immediately)
http://litemind.com/what-is-mind-mapping/
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