How to Remember Everything You Read

In this video, I'll teach you a system for remembering everything you read, study, or learn. I've been using the system for the last seven years, starting from learning disease pathophysiology in medical school through to reading research articles and learning science, or reading books on productivity or business.

The reason the system works so consistently and so well is because it breaks down the process of reading into two distinct stages. The first stage is the consumption period, and the second stage is the digestion period. Most people think that by focusing on the first stage and consuming more information, they'll be able to remember and apply more information. So, they focus on trying to read faster, or watching lectures at triple speed, or binge listening to audiobooks, or watching hours of YouTube tutorials.

But that is not how learning works. Once we understand how learning does work, you'll see why my system is so effective. You see, when it comes to remembering and applying information, it's much less about what comes into your brain and much more about how much stays in your brain. That is what the second stage, the digestion period, is all about, and it's the part that is often neglected.

So, I will teach you a system for mastering both of these stages, which in turn increases your overall retention as well as your ability to actually use the knowledge in the way that you need to. But first, we need to ask ourselves: is it even possible to remember everything you read? The short answer is no.

But here's the secret: trying to remember everything we read should not be the goal in the first place. We know this because of a man who actually could remember everything. This man's name is Kim Peek, and his story is so crazy that Hollywood made an entire movie about him. Kim Peek was a mega genius, and his memory was ridiculous. He was able to memorize a book with such perfect recall that after reading a book one time, he would be able to write it out word for word, with every comma and full stop, back to front.

He memorized so many maps and atlases that he could give you driving directions between any two cities in the world, and the path that he gave you was mentally calculated to be the shortest distance. Now, the reason Kim had such supernatural abilities is because of a very rare medical condition he had called FG syndrome. He was born with macrocephaly, which means he had a larger brain, and he had no corpus callosum, which is basically the bundle of neurons that connect both hemispheres of the brain together.

Scientists believe that because he didn't have the normal pattern of neurons, his brain adapted and developed new connections to compensate, which I guess gave him like superhuman memory. Now, I want you to imagine that both you and Kim Peek were about to sit the same exam. Who do you think would do better? The answer is that it actually depends on the exam.

You see, despite his superhuman memory, Kim Peek struggled with reasoning and problem solving. This means that if the exam was at the junior levels of schooling, which often tests on the lower levels of learning that involve a lot of memorization and recall, then Kim Peek would definitely win. But if the exam was at a higher level, like university or postgraduate, where reasoning and problem solving—the higher orders of learning—are examined as a higher priority, then you may actually have the edge.

Now, for most of you listening, probably using the knowledge you have consumed to reason and problem solve is kind of the whole point of why you're trying to read and remember in the first place. This basically means that it is not enough to remember everything, which is good because for most people that's not possible anyway. But it is possible to remember everything you need to remember in such a way that we can use that knowledge in the way we need to, and that is what the system that I'll teach you helps you to achieve.

To start using the system, we have to understand that not all information is equal. In fact, I break down the information that I read into five different categories using the acronym PACER. It's important to be able to identify which category the information you're reading belongs to because for each category, there are specific targeted processes that then help you to deal with and manage that information more effectively.

When we use the wrong process for the specific category of information, it makes remembering and understanding what you read much harder, much more time-consuming, and much less effective. You're more likely to forget what you read. It also increases the chance of you entering the passive mode of reading, which is where you get to the bottom of a page and you can't even remember what you just read.

So, the system goes like this: in the first part, where we are consuming information, we want to identify which category what we are consuming belongs to using the PACER acronym. Then, during stage two, we digest what we have read using the targeted process for that category, which takes the information and stores it in our long-term memory through the process called encoding.

Let's go through PACER together so that you can accurately identify the category of information you're trying to remember. The P in PACER stands for procedural. Procedural information is any information that tells you how something should be executed. For example, this is a book that I used during medical school that taught me about how to do a clinical examination, like listening to a heartbeat or taking someone's blood pressure.

A lot of the information in this book is about the correct technique to perform the examination. Some subjects and domains have a lot of procedural information. Some great examples of this would be coding and languages. The targeted process for working with and mastering this type of procedural information is practice. The key is that you want to apply procedural information in real life as early as possible.

A lot of people will spend time reading it, memorizing it, and writing lots of notes about it, and then a week or two later they'll try to practice it. But by then, it's too late; we've already forgotten a lot of it, and a lot of that time is just wasted. Instead, as soon as you take that procedural information into your brain, try to apply it and practice it as early as you can.

Now, straight away we run into a problem with using this approach. What if we're reading something and we don't have time to practice it right now? The answer is you either move on to something else, or you stop consuming anything and wait until you have time to practice it. But you do not waste your time trying to just memorize it on the spot.

Here is the crucial part about learning that everyone overlooks: the two stages of consuming and digesting must always be balanced. Everything you consume must be digested in order for you to retain and use it. Only when stage one is followed by stage two does learning actually occur. If we're reading something and we don't have time to use the right process, like practice, then most people will say, "Oh, well, I don't have time right now. I'm just going to get through as much of it as I can."

They spend more time reading and reading, essentially just consuming more and more. But this is the learning equivalent of overeating. They haven't had a chance to digest it, so they're just going to end up vomiting it all up again through the mental vomiting process we call forgetting. This is why, for most people, the amount that they forget after reading is extremely high, with some studies suggesting that up to 90% of what is consumed is forgotten despite hours of consuming.

If we're forgetting 90% of what we read, rather than consuming more and taking time away from digesting, it actually makes more sense to spend less time consuming and more time on the digesting and processing. This increases your retention, which therefore increases the amount of working knowledge you're able to build.

So, earlier I said what goes into your brain is less important than what stays in your brain. This principle of balancing stage one, consuming, with stage two, digesting, is important not just for procedural information but for every other category of PACER. Unfortunately, stage two, digesting, is almost completely neglected for the second category of the A in PACER, which stands for analogous.

Analogous information is actually one of the easiest types of information to work with, remember, and apply because analogous information is related to something you already have prior knowledge about. Even if we don't have direct prior knowledge about it, it may remind us indirectly of something that we do have knowledge about.

For example, let's say that we are avid swimmers and we're learning about the physiology of a muscle contraction. When we look at that muscle contraction cycle, we might think, "Hey, that reminds me a lot about the swimming technique I use." By connecting the new information about muscle contraction physiology with what we already know about our swimming technique, we have created an analogy.

Analogies can form with any prior knowledge, including knowledge within a topic itself. In most fields of study, there are concepts or patterns of concepts and relationships that tend to repeat and recur throughout that field. You might have learned about how to solve a particular type of problem last semester, and now this semester, this new problem-solving approach that you're learning for the first time reminds you a lot of that old problem-solving process. Relating those two approaches is also an analogy.

So, when we're engaging in stage one, the consumption period of reading, we want to actively think about whether what we are reading is related to something that we already have knowledge about. Once we identify it as potentially analogous information, the targeted process we want to use here is critique. This is the part I said everyone misses.

Once we create an analogy, critiquing it means we examine critically how good that analogy actually is. For example, with the analogy of muscle contraction and swimming technique, critiquing that analogy means asking ourselves in what way specifically are these two things similar or related to each other? In what ways are they different? In what situation does this analogy not make sense anymore?

If there are a lot of differences or a lot of conditions and situations where the analogy breaks apart, then is there a better analogy? Or can we extend or modify that analogy to make it more comprehensive and more accurate? This critiquing process massively drives up our attention and depth of understanding of this new information.

The reason this works is because instead of new information just being new information that your brain doesn't know what to do with, we're actually extending it from what we already know. We're taking our existing network and connecting it to the new information straight away, which is the reason why creating analogies has been shown in studies repeatedly to be so powerful for our retention and understanding.

Now, at this point, you might be looking at the system and thinking this seems a little forced; it doesn't feel natural. You're right. In fact, it's crucial that you understand that this is not natural, and that's why it works. If you have no time pressure and it doesn't matter how well you learn something, then you can learn and read however you want.

But unfortunately, what research has shown is that there are clear biological limitations of the human brain to how much it can consume and store into our memory in one go. In the modern day, when there is so much we have to learn, it is very easy to exceed that biological limit and then get overwhelmed. Learning is extremely complicated, so to be able to learn a lot in a short amount of time and reach a high level of knowledge, a lot of processes need to go right.

This is why most people will plateau on their learning ability and, after a point, not really improve for the rest of their lives. For me, figuring out what processes to care about and therefore what to improve on, and then how to even execute on those correctly, took me at least seven or eight years of almost constant experimentation and reading of research and coaching people to see what works for them.

Honestly, I got lucky because 10 to 15 years ago, a lot of the research didn't even exist. This is why, to make it easier for you, I've started a free weekly newsletter. I take everything that I've learned that helps you become a more efficient learner—the things that have the highest chance of giving you success in a short amount of time—and I package them in a way that you can take and implement into your own learning in less than 10 to 15 minutes.

If you want to sign up for the newsletter, it's completely free. I'll leave a link in the description for you. Now, getting back to PACER, you might notice that the way that I've written the A in PACER is like this—it's this kind of strange shape. The reason is because the analogous information can exist within as a subset of procedural information.

For example, you could create an analogy on a set of instructions to make it simpler and easier for you to understand, and then later you go and practice it. But analogous information also exists as a subset within the next category of information, which is the C of PACER, and this stands for conceptual.

If procedural information is the how to do something, then conceptual information is the what. For most science subjects, the majority of what you need to learn is conceptual. Conceptual information includes facts and explanations, theories and principles, relationships between concepts, and ways that that concept can be applied.

In most cases, we need both the procedural and the conceptual knowledge to solve a problem and apply our knowledge properly. For example, although this book goes through how to listen to someone's heart, I still need to have the conceptual knowledge about what I'm listening to in order to analyze that and make a conclusion on the diagnosis.

So, when we identify that a piece of text we're reading is conceptual type information, the process we want to use straight away is mapping. Nonlinear network-based note-taking, such as mind mapping, is an efficient way of increasing your attention and mastery of conceptual knowledge because conceptual knowledge inherently exists in a network.

Although a textbook or a lecture might be delivered word after word in a linear format, if we look at the mind and knowledge of the person that wrote that textbook, it doesn't exist in a linear sentence-by-sentence structure. Their knowledge and expertise exist in a highly connected network of information. There is no innate sequence of information; an expert can start at any point and navigate to any other point.

This is what allows an expert to do complex problem solving because they can look at a problem, understand what concepts are related, and see how those concepts connect together to solve the problem. Whereas a beginner, who's only learned it at a surface level, just sees individual separated concepts and they don't understand how they link together.

As a learner, our job is not to remember the sequence word for word; our job is to try to recreate that network of knowledge that the expert had. Mapping is such a great technique because it forces us to not only think about each fact and concept but also how they connect to each other to form a bigger picture.

So, when you are reading and consuming, take some time to get out a piece of paper or a tablet and make a map of the things that you're learning. As you read more, you add more to your map, you move things around, you reorganize things. As you read more, you also digest more, and your map grows.

Remember, analogous information can also exist within conceptual information, so you might find opportunities within conceptual information to create some analogies, and you might want to add those into your map as well. Even if the analogy doesn't make its way into the map, it could give you an idea in terms of how you want to structure your ideas on your map.

Now, here's that same problem again: let's say you're reading but you don't have time to draw a map, or maybe you don't have anything to map on while you're reading. Then again, we need to slow down and consume less so that consumption and digestion can stay balanced. If you don't, you'll just end up overwhelmed again and wasting time because not only are you going to forget a lot of what you are consuming, but now you've given the future version of you more work to do by having to go and figure out what you've forgotten and then re-consume it again anyway.

Now, the good news is that the digesting of procedural, analogous, and conceptual information is easily the most time-consuming. The E and the R of PACER are much faster and easier to deal with. I talk about E and R together because they're both very similar to each other. But pay close attention because the two are actually so similar to each other that most people never distinguish between the two, and that can lead directly to hours of wasted time per week.

The E in PACER stands for evidence. Evidence type information is the information that helps make conceptual information more concrete. They're often very detailed, sometimes very technical pieces of information, but they're useful because we can use these facts or statistics or cases as examples to prove a conceptual point.

For example, we could understand conceptually how World War I started, but we also need to know the evidence information of dates, certain specific events that occurred, between which specific people, at which specific location, to make that concept more concrete. The key process for evidence type information is to store and rehearse.

Store means that you just collect that information and note it down somewhere. You could add it to your conceptual map, or you could add it to a second brain system using something like Notion, Roam, or Obsidian, or you can put it onto flashcards. You could even just write them down on a document somewhere with all the other things that you are storing. This should happen as soon as you identify it.

So, as you are consuming the information and you identify that this piece of information is evidence type, we go ahead and straight away store it. The rehearsing part of it comes a little later. We put aside time to do the rehearsal, and rehearsing the information is the key to improving our retention of evidence type information.

Rehearsing means that we think about how we will need to use this piece of information. How are we going to apply it? What type of conceptual information is this an example of? We then challenge ourselves by using and applying that information in the way that we will need to use it. This means solving problems, writing detailed answers to questions, creating explanations, teaching it to other people, or maybe writing essays that use that piece of evidence as a supporting example for a wider concept.

So, while we store the information while we consume it, the rehearsing happens later—maybe at the end of the day or at the end of the week. But do not waste time while you are consuming trying to just memorize and read and reread and write copious notes on that piece of information. Otherwise, you are not going to have enough time for the P, A, and C—the first three types of information—which form the foundation of knowledge that the evidence type needs to build off of in the first place.

Now, evidence type information is very similar to the final type, which is the R of PACER, and this stands for reference type information. Reference information is the easiest to deal with. It is all of the nitty-gritty, very specific detailed bits of information that don't really change your conceptual understanding. They're not particularly that important, they're not analogous, and they're not procedural, but for whatever reason, we might need to know this later.

This might be something like the exact value of a mathematical constant, or a specific gene involved in a particular mutation, or the name of a very specific molecule of a disease, or maybe a list of attributes used to define a variable for coding. The process we use to deal with this type of information is the same as for evidence—almost. It's store and rehearse.

The storing part is exactly the same. You chuck it in a second brain, in your flashcards, wherever makes sense for you. But if you need to be able to recall this information from memory and you can't refer back to your notes when you need to use it, then you probably want to use something like flashcards.

The rehearse part is a little different because reference type information is, by definition, not very conceptually important anyway. It's quite hard to use this for problem solving or as part of an extended discussion or answer. The way we're probably going to use this information is just direct fact recall, which is why something like flashcards using a spaced repetition active recall strategy, like an app like Anki, is going to be the best way to handle reference type information.

So, as you're reading and you're thinking, "Hey, this might be reference type information," you dump it into your flashcards and you put aside like 30 minutes every day or whatever to just go through your flashcards to do your rehearsal. But please, again, absolutely do not waste time while you're reading trying to just read and reread and write notes and just memorize this information.

At the time, you need to use that time for the first three types, which form the bulk of your knowledge. As I said earlier, there are a lot of things that need to go right to be able to learn a lot of information in a short period of time. Wasting time on trying to memorize reference information while you are reading it, instead of spending that time on the first three types, is one of the worst offenders.

As soon as you get into that mind frame of reading something and then rereading it again, trying to get it into your head, you can say goodbye to your learning efficiency. So now you know the five types of information for you to try to identify as you consume in stage one and the appropriate targeted process that will help you to digest that information in stage two.

The key to being able to retain a lot and have a good high level of knowledge for what you have consumed is to keep that stage one and stage two balanced. However, when it comes to learning efficiently, this just scratches the surface. In fact, if you look at this map of learning that outlines the major processes that you need to be a consistently high-performing efficient learner, what we talked about today is like barely a few percent of it.

So, if you want to start unpacking what those other processes look like without having to dedicate a decade of your life to learning about it like I did, then make sure to check out my free newsletter. The link is in the description. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next one.