Memory Fades, Dissolves, Decays, and Leaks Away

(From the Persuasion Powerpoint section in Volume 20, No. 8 of the Liberator Online. Subscribe here!)

Maybe you’ve carefully read everything Ayn Rand ever published.

Or you’ve studied the complete works of Murray Rothbard.

Or the complete Harry Browne or Henry Hazlitt or Ludwig von Mises or Milton Friedman.

So you feel ready to discuss or debate something your favorite author covered.

Perhaps you were prepared… while you were reading the works. Or right after you finished reading them.

But how long has it been since you read the material? Three months? Three years? Five years? Ten or more?

Because memory fades, dissolves, decays, and leaks away. 

And unless you’ve re-read the books… or reviewed the crucial parts… chances are that you remember only a small fraction of what your favorite writer explained. And you may misremember a number of the author’s key points.

This is why we need to re-read, review, and even write out — in our own words — the evidence and arguments the author made.

Want to make sure that you remember the insights, analyses, and explanations of your favorite writer?

Yellow highlight, bracket, and underline the key sections of each book as you read it.

Makes notes and write questions in the margins of each key section.

Inside the front page of each book, write the date you finished reading it. (After several years, you may think you read a book in 2015 — and discover from your date that you read it in 2011.)

Often, just a sixty-minute review of your underlined and bracketed sections, your notes and your comments will yield you a motherlode of refreshed, renewed knowledge.

And you will become far better at explaining and winning others to liberty.