If you don’t practice retrieving information from memory, it dissipates almost entirely.

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Have you ever had the experience of being unable to remember something despite repeated exposures, because you keep automatically looking it up from a reference instead of trying to retrieve it from memory?

That’s happened to me an embarrassing number of times with addresses, phone numbers, directions, etc.

And any books you read, movies you watch – the only ones you remember in proper detail are the ones you periodically think about and replay in your head.

If you just consume and don’t reproduce then you forget almost entirely.

Can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched a movie and didn’t even realize I’d seen it before until I got 20 minutes in and something felt familiar. And even then I could barely remember anything about the rest of the movie, just that it felt a bit familiar.

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