You Don’t Have to Remember This
So, the latest novel in James A. Corey’s science-fiction series The Expanse came out not too long ago. I’ve been looking forward to its appearance but as I ordered it from Amazon for my Kindle, I realized I couldn’t remember that much about the previous six books. That’s not right, I said to myself (remembering to do this silently rather than appear lunaticical to anyone within earshot). How will I get the references to things past in the new book? With that in mind, I decided to reread the previous novels before taking on the new one. As I did, there were many “oh, yeah” moments when people and events came back into focus, as if the dots were still there but the lines connecting them had faded out and needed refreshing.
This kind of thing happens all the time. If someone asks me what movies I’ve seen lately, I have to stop and think. Sometimes I remember. Sometimes I blank. If too much time goes by before a new episode of a program comes on, I have difficulty recalling what went before. Why is that? Is it a sign of senility rearing its wrinkled head? Thankfully not, I say to myself (also silently), at least according to Julie Beck. In her Atlantic Monthly article “Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read,” she defines my experience this way:
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.
What she describes is called the “forgetting curve,” which has to do with the decline of memory retention. The curve shows how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it. She tells us that in the age of the internet, recall memory has declined in importance, citing a study that tells us “when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself.” The internet functions as “a sort of externalized memory.” So, it turns out, do books and movies and they have done so since their inception. Because you can almost always access the source, “there’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.” Binge-watching, while it may eliminate that nagging “what happened last time?” problem, accelerates the forgetting curve and reduces enjoyment of a show. I’m guessing this is because it cuts down, to borrow a Rocky Horror line, the “antici…..PAtion.”
In short, we don’t retain much of what we read and watch because “books, shows, movies, and songs aren’t files we upload to our brains.” Instead, Beck writes, “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, but it’s still in there.” I’m very glad to hear that something is in there — my brain, that is. I was beginning to have my doubts.
One person that Beck interviewed keeps a “book of books” or “bob” to track the books she has read. She has also written a book recounting this habit and the results called My Life with Bob. The act of writing down the book and a summary of it reinforces the memory of it, I assume, and perhaps provides a path to recalling details about it. I might try this approach. I will start simply, which is always a good technique for me, with movies, writing down (in my smartphone of course) the date and title and a filmstract [movie abstract]. I will call this my “book of feature films” or “boff” and the forthcoming collection of my notes will be titled My Life of Boffing. This has bestseller written all over it, don’t you think?
