in order to retain what you read in order to understand it and absorb the material into your brain so that you can recall it later in order to do that you need a procedure by which you force yourself to interact with the semantic content of what you're reading semantic content is just a fancy phrase for meaning the meanings of the words that you're reading another way to put this is that you have to have a procedure that forces you to like think through the ideas contained in the text the procedure that i'm going to recommend in this video is a version of marginalia marginalia is just a word that means text written in the margins of a printed work so if you've got some words printed on a page or even inscribed they're not printed or whatever right you've got the page and then you have the edges of the page where there are no words like right over here this is the margin well you can write your own notes in the margin there you write them in there like that right that's marginalia now i know what you're thinking oh that's it that's not going to work well you're right that's not it i'm not just saying oh you should take notes in the margins what i'm recommending is a very specific way of taking notes in the margins and this is a procedure this is the one that i use i'm a professor of philosophy here at the university of north carolina at greensboro throughout my entire college career uh you know undergraduate and then getting a master's degree and a phd this is the method that i use what i'm going to do in this video is i'm going to lay out the procedure not just marginalia but a specific version of it i'm going to lay it out in this video and the result will be that if you do this you will remember what you read you will retain it you will absorb it into your brain here we go if you know how to drive a car then you've maybe had this experience where you're driving someplace and you get there and then you realize oh i zoned out like i don't remember any of the last 10 minutes but i took a left turn and then i stopped at a stop sign and then i took a right turn and i and i got here but i but i just zoned out while it happened and this happens because if you drive a lot then it all sort of becomes muscle memory and you don't have to do it in like a in like an engaged focused way it just it just sort of happens this is the exact opposite of what you want to happen when you're reading anything when you're reading any text if you want to stand a chance of remembering that text what you want to do is you want to read with focus and thought like you want to be thinking through the ideas mulling them around in your mind right as you're going through you don't just want to pass your eyes over the words okay and so one way to do that is to just try really darn hard okay better is if you have some procedure that you can follow that will force you to think through the material it will guarantee that you that you think through what you're reading and then you just will remember it what i'm going to give you is a procedure that will do that this procedure works 100 percent of the time here's what you do you read the first paragraph of the reading you read that paragraph and in the margin you summarize that whole paragraph in one sentence it's important that you summarize right so if this paragraph is six sentences long you can't just write six sentences in the margin that won't work because copying over text you can do that without really thinking about what it means but summary you can only summarize something you can only take six sentences worth of ideas and and condense them down into one sentence of ideas you can only do that if you like understand what those six sentences mean and figure out what the central core idea is that all of those six sentences have in common so it has to be a summary you write a one sentence summary in the margin then you move on to the second paragraph you read that paragraph and for that paragraph also you write one sentence of summary in the margin and by the way by writing these sentences summarizing the text you're also going to have those sentences to look back on right so if you need to refresh yourself about what was said in this thing that you read you don't have to reread the whole thing you just have to reread one sentence per paragraph so far okay so that's pretty good then you get to the third paragraph and this is where things get interesting when you read the third paragraph of the text you're going to write two sentences in the margin the first sentence in the margin next to the third paragraph is not going to have anything to do with the third paragraph this sentence is going to summarize the first and second paragraphs right there and what that forces you to do is it forces you to connect these ideas right just like summarizing this first paragraph what you have to do is take all of the ideas in that whole paragraph six or seven or eight sentences of it or whatever and mash them into each other see how those interact those ideas interact with one another and come up with a summary now you have to do that for the whole first two paragraphs and then you write a second sentence in the margin of the third paragraph and the second sentence summarizes the third paragraph and then we move on to the fourth paragraph the fourth paragraph also gets two sentences in the margin the first sentence in the margin next to the fourth paragraph summarizes everything previous paragraphs one two and three and then the next one just summarizes paragraph four and then you keep going this procedure in the same way right so for the fifth paragraph you have one sentence that summarizes everything that came before you condense it all down into just one sentence you're gonna leave things out of course you have to because now you're you're condensing many paragraphs into just one sentence so you're gonna have to leave a lot of stuff out you're gonna have to make a decision you have to think through what's the most important thing that all of these paragraphs have in common or that connects them or that they're getting across one sentence for everything previously and one sentence for that last new paragraph and then you keep going that way for the entire text this is so hard this is gonna take so long this is just a waste of time no it's not a waste of time you know it's a waste of time a waste of time is sitting and passing your eyes over the text and not retaining it not thinking through it and absorbing it that's a waste of time that's inefficient if you're gonna do that you might as well go play dodgeball or go sailing or whatever whatever you want to do go do that if you want to use your time efficiently so that you have time to go sailing or play dodgeball or whatever dungeons and dragons or fortnite is that a thing i don't know whatever you do want to do if you want time to actually do that stuff then you got to do this this is efficient it will take a little longer yes but what it will do is it will mean that the time that you spend reading is is better used is more productive that time produces understanding and retention there is no way to summarize a text like this without thinking through the material and understanding it and retaining it i want to emphasize this point again taking notes in the margin in this way where you summarize what's going on this actually saves time here let me let me do like a little made-up demonstration let's say that you just pass your eyes over the reading that's the reading method that you use you just pass your eyes over it okay that's two hours times 20 readings over the course of the semester let's say that generates an understanding and retention at a d plus level you're just passing your eyes over the reading you're going to get a d plus but you realize things aren't doing going so well and so at the end of the semester you spend 25 hours cramming a lot of hours cramming well you don't have the benefit of lecture it's the end of the semester okay and that bumps you up quite a lot actually to a c plus by comparison if you use the summarize in the margins method of reading then you're going to spend more time per reading let's say you spend three hours instead of two hours three hours times 20 readings but this method is just massively more powerful massively more efficient and so you get out of that an a minus level of understanding right and also you go into the lectures with that understanding and so you get more out of the lectures it's just better you're just oh you're just way better off then at the end of the semester you don't have to cram so you just spend two hours reviewing you're reviewing your margin notes you just read over those summary sentences for all of the readings that just takes you two hours that bumps you up that activity that took two hours that bumps you up from an a minus to an a this this method took you 65 hours over the course of the semester and it generated a c plus this method took 60 hours and it generated an a which is more efficient and let's say you don't believe my numbers tweak them however you want right you think that this method of reading is going to take twice as long fine bump this up to four hours for each reading okay well then this number will be higher than this number by a little bit but you'll get a way better grade right and if you if you keep doing this through your whole college career then you're going to get faster at doing it to the point where you'll be able to do this not as fast as passing your eyes over the reading but like you know at a pretty good clip and you will end up spending less time because you won't have to cram at the end of the semester and getting way better grades with way less stress this is how you do it folks this has basically been my superpower i went to williams college look it up it's the best liberal arts college in the country and i graduated in the top two percent of my class i went to oxford i went to cambridge i got a phd from berkeley i'm medium level smart but i show up to everything having thought through the material right and retaining it this started for me in high school i i it was this was in 2002 in 2002 i was in high school and a teacher told us to start taking margin notes so here's a book i'm going to try to go through this quickly because you know you should never let people read the notes that you wrote in high school because that's embarrassing now at this point in high school i hadn't yet developed the the method of summarizing in exactly this way it took me a few years and i and i sort of solidified this early in college but this method which i started in high school this has been my trick the whole time and it worked when i was in college this happened in 2006 i was in college and i took an economics course okay it was like an introductory level economics course and on the first day of lecture the professor asked what is economics there was silence in the room for like a long time there was silence and then i just like raised my hand and i was like it's the study of the allocation of scarce resources and the professor was like correct and then just moved on he just moved on to the rest of the material that was it then a student another student came up to me after class and was like hey how did you know the answer to that question of like what the definition of economics was and i was like oh uh it was like the first thing that they said in the first chapter of the book which was the chapter for today it was the first thing in the chapter was the definition of economics it's the study of the allocation of scarce resources now here's what i had done right i had been reading the textbook in preparation for class and i was like one paragraph or two paragraphs in and they gave a definition of economics and this was like an introductory economics course and i was like oh you know what that might be important the study of the allocation of scarce resources so i like wrote it down and then i rephrased it in my own words and then i just sort of stopped reading and thought about it for a minute scarce resources like what's a scarce resource well money money is a scarce resource here's my money i keep a paper clip on my money now you know money is a scarce resource scarce just means there's not an infinite amount of it if there's a scarce resource a resource that that that there's not an infinite amount of it and it has to get distributed or allocated right in some way um then economics is the study of how people you know distribute this thing like money well money's not the only scarce resource right there's other things like like basically everything is scarce like sand you know sand can i edit in a photo in the b-roll of sand here's some sand sand is scarce there's only so many beaches on the planet and and the beaches make the sand somehow with the waves or whatever anyway there's just only so much sand and people need sand for things like making glass or other sand boxes if someone were to study how the sand gets distributed like who gets the sand and how much they have to pay for it and who doesn't get sand they wanted sand but they didn't get any today or whatever right if someone were to study that well then according to this definition they would be doing economics okay economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources okay so i like went through a thought process like that something like that and then i went on and kept reading i didn't explain all of this stuff to the other student that came up to me after class i just said oh it was like the first thing in the reading and then she says to me she's like oh yeah i read it i read the chapter i just it didn't stick or whatever i assume that she just sort of read it in the passive pass your eyes over the reading way this is how most of my students today in my classrooms read most of the things they read they just sort of pass their eyes over the words but if you think through the ideas the the powers of retention of memory that you will gain will be incredible i mean think about this i took this course as a college student 15 years ago i remember the definition of economics from that course 15 years later i didn't plan to tell you this story during this lecture video i'm just i'm just going off the cuff i didn't look up the definition of economics this morning to prepare to say this to you right now no i decided to tell you this story about my college economics course in 2006 i decided to tell you this story like four minutes ago but i remember the definition i'm pretty confident i'm not going to check it right now i'm going to edit this video and publish it and everything without checking the definition of economics you can check it if you want the textbook the textbook was written it was co-written i don't remember one of the co-authors but one of the co-authors was ben bernanke and i remember that because he had just become i think the chair of the federal reserve okay so ben bernanke wrote some intro economics textbook google that textbook google the definition of economics in it it might come up or you might have to get a physical copy of the textbook i don't know it wasn't digital at the time there were no we didn't have digital textbooks it'll say in that textbook that the definition of economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources and i know that because i summarized those things and thought through them at the time that's how powerful this is time for a bonus rant speed reading is a scam when i was 18 i took a speed reading course it wasn't a real course it wasn't in a real university it was like a thing that met you know four times met four times in like um the gym of a ymca or something like that some space that they rented out i was 18 and i took this course and they said things like the following if you're looking at a text i'm not kidding you a real adult with a straight face said this to me when i was 18 years old if you're looking at a text like a page of text like this instead of reading it you know from the left and going to the right and then starting back at the left of the next line and going all the way to the right instead of reading it that way like a chump instead what you should do is you should read the first line going this way and then read the second line going that way and alternate the direction with which you read each line this way you don't waste time you know with your eyes zooming back to the beginning of the line and not reading anything a real a person said this to me is this a joke and then then they said this this really happened i promise you in the mid 2000s in the gymnasium of ymca somewhere an adult not as a joke said and even better than that even better than that instead of reading each line all the whole every line when you get to a page of text instead of going through each line horizontally just pass your eyes over the page in the shape of a v and they drew a v like this that's how you're supposed to pass your eyes over each page of the book and then you move on to the next page i didn't know how skeptical to be at the time i was just sort of like huh okay maybe yeah but like is this a prank are you kidding me the order of the words in sentences matters to the meaning of those words you need to read all the words in order or else you're not going to understand what those words mean now you might be saying professor kaplan you're not being fair that's just one thing that one person said but but you should test speed reading by its most sophisticated methods such as the well-known technique of rapid serial visual presentation first of all just because you give something some fancy label doesn't mean it's a real thing i mean some things are real and they get fancy labels like you know the body parts or medicines that doctors real doctors prescribe yeah they have fancy names and they're fancy things and they're totally real okay medicine is real it works right but this might just be some fancy words and scientists have tested whether these are just some fancy words and they are scientists have tested every method of speed reading all of the different scam methods they're all scams they've tested them it's not hard to do these tests they've tested all of them and in every case it doesn't work here's how all of these studies are structured it makes sense when you think about it what they do is they go through all of the major popular notable speed reading techniques and they take a group of people and they give them the instruction in those techniques you bring in the real gurus right and have the real gurus give you their lessons okay so you have a group of people who've gotten those lessons and then all you do is you give those people a text to read with a little quiz that they have to take afterward and the quiz tests whether they understood and retained what they just read and then you do the same thing for other groups of people but those groups of people you don't give them the speed reading uh you know lessons or whatever you just tell them please read the text carefully and slowly or or another one you just say look skim this text and then we'll give you the quiz and then you compare their test results for these groups and the results every single time show that speed reading works like skimming which is to say it doesn't work one of the famous original studies was funded and published by nasa in 1999 and then there was another well-known study a comprehensive review of all the other research from 2016 and it was published in the journal psychological science in the public interest the research funded by nasa from 1999 this was some of the first you know really rigorous major research on speed reading it tested a method called photo reading the study concluded that quote the results for all measures yielded no benefits of using the photo reading technique the comprehensive review from 2016 is a study where they studied a whole bunch of other studies and they found the same thing that nasa found but for all of these other methods real quick at the very end of this video lecture pop quiz this pop quiz has one and only one question here's the question i'm going to pause after i say the question you try to answer it what is economics economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources at least according to some college textbook from 2006. if you remembered that how how did you remember it from a few minutes ago or whatever how did you remember it i didn't write that definition of economics up on the board i never wrote it up i just said it a few times how did you remember it if you did i suggest that the reason you remembered that if you did is because i made you think through it like when i told that story a few minutes ago i like walked through a thought process involving this definition of economics remember the whole thing about sand and i got the b-roll photo of sand and sand as a scarce resource that's thinking through the definition of economics if you have to think through what something means then you absorb it and you remember it that's how this works the next lecture in this series will focus on how to take notes you