(IMHO this post adds very ltitle)

The poster is quite skeptical that books change us. I don't understand why because the truth is this (IMHO) is blatantly self-evident.

Even our machine learning models are capable of taking inputs and changing the internal structure creating or modifying the ability to make inferences. Why do you think our brains are any different?

When a conversation happens, at first you remember the exact words that were spoken. Soon you think you do but those details will change between different participants (they will in fact probably be different from the first moment for any non-trivial exchange). Then you're left with the gist of what was said and then later typically an emotion or association with a person, time, place or some other stimulus.

Books are no different. You may remember key quotes. After awhile you'll struggle to remember all but the broadest plot elements. Most often you'll remember that you liked or didn't like the book and often won't be able to quantify why (in any kind of specific way).

Reference books or books that teach you anything are more "obvious" in this regard. Read "Effective C++" or "Effective Java" and it'll essentially reprogram your brain (to varying degrees) by a change in habits, preferences, etc.

Fiction is harder to pin down. Sometimes it's pure entertainment. It may not necessarily change you. But there is something about human development that is particularly receptive to the meme of fiction. The greatest ability we evolved is the ability to teach our young significant skills such that one generation is building on the fruits of the last and we've all learned something beyond how to crack nuts open with rocks.

Fiction often has a moral. Books are capable of changing our behaviour and attitudes (although many don't).

All of this just seems so obviously analogous to reprogramming a computer (albeit an incredibly complex one) that it baffles me that people would think otherwise.

Actually, our minds and memories are particularly receptive to narrative. Which can also result in problems, both the narrative fallacy ("Our need to fit a story or pattern to a series of connected or disconnected facts" which leads us to overvalue "facts" embedded in a story format) and undervaluing of statistical and other numerical data.

"The study of argumentation compels us to take into account not only the choice of data but also the way in which they are interpreted, the meaning attributed to them. It is to the extent that it constitutes a conscious or unconscious choice between several modes of meaning, that the interpretation can be distinguished from the data being interpreted, and can be opposed to them. . . . It is precisely when incompatible interpretations make us hesitate as to how we are to conceive the datum that the problem of interpretation is very important." -- Treatise on Argumentation

Reading a sensory description actually activates the respective areas in the brain, a bona fide simulation of reality. The reason reading can absorb one so much is that the brain is actually generating signals that are essentially the same as if the person was actually experiencing the phenomenon* .

Better than common sense, scientific evidence is actually showing that reading has measurable beneficial effects.

( * ) What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neurosc...

We know that the dynamic electrical state can't have much to do with it, because you can cool the brain to the point where all electrical activity ceases and it doesn't have any significant effect when you wake them up. That only leaves the configuration of the brain's parts.

I suppose that there is so much of the biology we don't understand that we can't make strong claims at all, what with microtubules and the like.

I would guess it happens in different degrees depending on how novel the experience is. Going to work for the 1537th time - not so much. Watching a predictable movie - a little bit. Reading an unpredictable book - now we're talking!

Passing sodium ions around still sort of counts as electrical though doesn't it, because you're transferring charge? Or have I misunderstood?

- Checklist Manifesto - Made to Stick - Confessions of a Public Speaker - Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite - The Power of Habit

I think the fact that he's questioning the value of reading such books is fair (and I find it ironic that he's applying such rigor to try and extract value from such books), but these are hardly the books of great literature. Self-improvement and self-motivation books are, perhaps too often, profit-guided and banal.

You don't read, say, Steinbeck or Vonnegut, to 'remember what's in them.' (Furthermore, things like 'active recall' aren't going to help you out.) Authors you have made it to the upper echelons of literature are the ones who develop distinct voices and talents to attract and evoke you in ways lesser literature cannot (I can barely remember East of Eden , but I can point to the emotions it made me feel and the questions it raised about my life) -- these are the books worth reading, worth bruising yourself on.

Give it a shot, I am sure you will find something of value in it.

The best way somebody can teach you something is by narrating a story. I find self help book harping oft-beaten facts all over the book.

Such books put me to sleep.

On the other hand, tell a story and teach you what you want through that story. That will drive the point home.

I find this comment slightly arrogant and condescending. By choosing not to read fiction the author deprives himself of experiencing not only "ephemeral delight", but also removes the possibility of deriving insight from many inspiring and thought-provoking works.

Not all raw 'brain food' needs come from non-fiction. This is one reason I like science-fiction - the better works combine fantasy with reality, and bridge the dream / conscious worlds in a way that very readily lends itself to new thoughts and ideas.

In addition, the mental escape provided by fiction can be soothing and healing to the pattern and structure-obsessed mind I - and likely number of HN people - have. Sci-fi and fantasy books are, for me, as alcohol or drugs are for others.

I rarely read fiction simply because I don't have the time to. I've got too many hobbies that I enjoy, and there's always something about them that I can learn about them, so my reading is almost always hobby related.

Why? I don't read fiction and I have plenty of imagination. I watch movies and TV. That's not reading but it is fiction. Is that why I have imagination? (I don't know..)

You read fiction because you enjoy it. That's separate from having imagination.

I went a number of years only reading technical books, but I've been reading a lot of Project Gutenberg ebooks lately - a mixture of autobiographies, fiction, poetry, and essays. I don't read them to memorize them. I read them because they interest me. I don't seem to have any trouble remembering their content, but even if I didn't, so what? I don't envision myself looking clever, quoting Whitman and Emerson at cocktail parties.

The main benefit I've received is that they are sort of a detox from the internet and other forms of media. They have a calming effect and allow me to think more clearly. It's been nice and I never realized how much I indirectly benefited from casual reading (i.e., non-technical) until I started again.

I've experienced this, and in the course of my own studies, certain books have taken me down paths that were not the optimal, and I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I hadn't read (and remembered) those books so well.

That said, I've become a much more critical thinker after these episodes. Sometimes it's taken years to unwind the effects, but I guess my point is, books/blog posts/people are in many ways just ideas, and influences on us. Arguing over whether we forget them or not is not the most important thing about them--what is, is developing the critical thought process to wonder if they are in fact worth remembering at all.

Why do I think this? Because that's how ideas work. Sometimes we say that "we have an idea" for something, but that idea was formed from bits of pieces of our experiences and the knowledge we've gained over time, that allowed that idea to form. It didn't just pop out of nowhere. Your brain put things together from the bits of knowledge you gained previously.

Books are read for fun, to go through emotions, experiences and get a generic framework to do stuff in life. They must be read for the aha moments and 'You get the point' kind of moments.

Think of it like meeting an interesting person. Do you go about by remember each an every line you talked. You just enjoy the experience, go through emotions and take away what you can.

Reading text books is a little different. That is your art, you need practice and master. That may require you to 'remember' things.

Like taking a shower - which can be where my best thinking can be done!

This can be a really good way of solving tricky day-to-day issues, even if the process looks like time wasting for those that are overly ambitious.

What started happening to me after I read to a certain breadth was that I would encounter the same idea in different forms in different books. I feel that's when an idea sinks in -- when you can point to multiple instances of it, from different fields or domains, phrased in a different way. If you don't encounter connections between books you've read or other material I feel that you're probably not retaining anything.

Whenever I read a good book now I feel compelled jot down some of the main points and connections to other things I've read or experience. Could just be a paragraph; sometimes it turns into many pages if the book was stimulating. I don't view this as an exercise in retention; it's just something I have to do now.

Just talking with other people who've read the same book will probably have the same effect. But I write it down since I can't always find someone who's read the same book.

The real bottleneck is that no matter how rigorously you cram stuff into long term memory, you can keep precious few things - some experts think 2 - 4 is a realistic range - in short terms memory. Most of what's on your mind in any given moment is determined by your environment and activity, and we have extremely limited ability to randomly access bits of information at will (both our own memory and whatever we've gleaned from books and teachers).

So I'm sorry, but those connections that we form while learning and experiencing are about all we've got. The upshot is that reading and structured learning seem to be extremely efficient ways of building these connections/schema.

I've been using Goodreads.com, which is fantastic for a lot of things like book recommendations/discovery and reviews. It's easy to write a public review and to save private notes, and after my Kindle was stolen, I thought it might be useful for note-taking. However the private notes section is arbitrarily limited to a very small number of characters, which makes it useless to me as a note-taking tool. It's not much more difficult to use Evernote or whatever but I put enough effort into maintaining my shelves on Goodreads that it would be nice to have notes integrated.

For the time being, I'm back to paper. I miss my Kindle... I can see that it is still alive somewhere on my account, as I'll periodically email insulting messages that I can see are delivered on the Kindle control panel.

Of course, I'm talking of Adler's How to Read a Book.

Admittedly, it's intention was to help in absorbing and analysing The Great Books [2], but I have found it of unbounded usefulness when reading any non-fiction (retention rates went through the roof). Regardless: without using the techniques he discusses (some of you may already, without knowing it) you'll never be able to read or learn from books at your full potential.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Books

The other day I needed to brush up on 'The Post American World' when writing a recommendation on it. So I just read through my Kindle notes in a few minutes and 80% of the book comes back to me.

a. "Call me Ishmael" = The First Three Words b. Queequeg's Coffin = The Last Bit. c. there was a chapter called Cetology. d. Ambergris is (I think) Whale Sperm, e. At some point in the novel, I'm PRETTY sure someone puts on a whale penis and runs around. They're huge, whale penii, like 6 feet, easy.

That's about it, and I'm sure Herman Melville (I guess I remember that too) would be a little irked, but...

...if I had an idea, tomorrow, to write a book about an old guy chasing after a whale, I'd stop myself.

My point is, that one of the -other- benefits of having a breadth of knowledge, is that it helps prevent unintentional derivativeness and mimicry.

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Also, this author also assumes that the only worthwhile knowledge is that which can be recalled consciously at will.

Personally, I find that knowledge is a lot like any artist's artistic vocabulary. You consume and consume and consume, and then at some point you start creating, and what you end up making is the conscious and unconscious combination of all of the things you've seen/heard/read before.

The guitarist doesn't realize it's his love of The Beatles and Dr. Dre that's creating that work, but it is.

Those are just two things off of the top of my head. And by that, I mean these are two ideas that are undoubtedly the distillation of ideas I've heard/read elsewhere. Like maybe "On Writing" by Stephen King.

(The Above Idea about the distillation of ideas is likely the distillation of a speech from a great movie, which I'm sure I can find...)

"You come into a bar, you read some obscure passage, and then pretend you, you..pawn it off as your own..as your own idea just to impress some girls..?" - Good Will Hunting (1997)

And by "girls" he means "Hacker News."

(Try not to make that substitution too liberally however, or you'll be sorely disappointed when you walk into the "Live Hacker News! Hacker News Hacker News!" bar.)

I could not disagree more on the last part. Derivation and mimicry are the very foundation of creativity. Good artists copy. They take from whatever inspires them. In fact, there is no art that doesn't copy - you will not find art that exists in the void. Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. And that's a good thing.

Not exactly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris "Ambergris occurs as a biliary secretion of the intestines of the sperm whale..."

I think even if you cannot explicitly remember what you read, that's very far from them having no effects on you. (An analogy: you can understand scores of thousands of English words, even if you could only spontaneously use half or less of them.)

Ever since I began switching to electronic reading with the attendant clipping and searchability, I've been surprised how many "things I know" turn out to stem from books or articles I otherwise do not recall at all. If I had tried to estimate what I know just based on what factoids I could specifically remember learning from a specific book, I would grossly underestimate the value of my reading.

I can forget everything else about a book, but years later I'll still have a line kicking around in my head, word-for-word, because it just resonated with me. It's even gotten to the point that I've googled the line itself sometimes to remember what book it came from, at which point I'll usually give it a second read.

Maybe I'm just weird though.

"Two days ago I decided to kill myself. I would walk and hitch and sail away from this dark city to the bright spaces of the wet west coast, and there throw myself into the tall, glittering seas beyond Iona (with its cargo of mouldering kings) to let the gulls and seals and tides have their way with my remains, and in my dying moments look forward to an encounter with Staffa’s six-sided columns and Fingal’s cave; or I might head south to Corryvrecken, to be spun inside the whirlpool and listen with my waterlogged deaf ears to its mile-wide voice ringing over the wave-race; or be borne north, to where the white sands sing and coral hides, pink-fingered and hard-soft, beneath the ocean swell, and the rampart cliffs climb thousand-foot above the seething acres of milky foam, rainbow-buttressed.

Last night I changed my mind and decided to stay alive. Everything that follows is . . . just to try and explain."

When I'm in a bookshop I sometimes find a copy of Espedair Street and read that again, even though I have at least two copies at home.

Chip and Dan Heath's "Made To Stick" goes over how we remember stories naturally much better than data/information not in a narrative/story. For my part, I can't think of any non-fiction that could prompt curiosity and attention to detail like the Sherlock Holmes series, or the process of gaining self-mastery like Musashi.

There's obviously nothing wrong with a drive for continual self improvement, but it does seem to me (entirely anecdotally) that there are too many people following this track have a very functional, one dimensional approach to it which this seems to typify.

And I remember plenty of what I read just fine. (Enough of it to satisfy my requirements to keep doing so.)

I believe that one will get much more out of that approach than just hoping that the subconscious or something will absorb the character or key details of a work.

I'm at home. I go on a trip and have experiences which change the arrangement of molecules in my brain. Now I'm home again - the same except for some rearrangements. Why actually go on the trip if I could, instead, have the rearrangement implemented?

99% of a book is wasted on you but the last 1% slightly alters your perception or broaden your perspective.

It's like everything else in nature. To create you need to plough trough a lot of seemingly useless experiments.

Taking notes about things you read is good academic pratcice for ... a few hundreds? years.

"In the absence of rigorous experimental evidence, I’m quite skeptical." - This is not logic. This is an arrogant and out of hand rejection of a hypothesis that has not yet been proven or disproven.

" “expert” who “totally believes” you’re a “different person” for having read books even if you don’t retain anything, with some flimsy feel-good reasoning such as the “extraordinary capacity for storage” that our brains have"

This is better reasoning than that put forth by the author by far. I love the quotes around "expert". WTF? Does he mean the PhD in Neuroscience and Prof at Tufts? That "expert"? The one who actually has studied this subject in depth?

As many other poster point out, we don't even remember most of our own lives but it is totally absurd to say our life experiences therefore don't influence us and that we shouldn't try to fill our lives with pleasurable moments.

It is unfortunate he defends working to remember more of what he reads with such a flawed and irritating argument because trying to remember what you read is an awesome and worthwhile pursuit. There is no need however to bash all of literary fiction and the reading 99.9% of people on this earth enjoy.

Similarly, while he's trying to pose as an intellectual as you say, he misses the point that we learn things in multiple layers. Rememberance of the literal wording is only one layer. Witness Romeo and Juliet, a classic story which most people are familiar with, but extremely few would be able to quote a line from. Reading this guy's essay was like listening to those insufferable fresh graduates who claim 'but I never learned anything at university'.

The old adage of you remember 60% of what you read on day 1, 30% day 2 and 5% day 5. Within a day you are already suffering a painful decay rate.

Therefore any method to remember something (rather than nothing) is of importance.