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Short summary: If you don’t have questions, something you’re looking for, something you’re trying to prove, a hypothesis that you’re collecting information for, or at least something that interests you so that you like to collect information about it, then no information could be stored in your mind, and if some of it got stored, then it will be stored randomly, sparsely and in the short-term slices in the memory. Most people can read, but apart from reading for entertainment, very few people are interested in information, and fewer are those who have ideas that organize information in their minds. But even if you weren’t that person who has questions and hypotheses about the world, you must have some interest in a few things, if you ever tried to read with the intention to acquire information, then try to focus on these things.
When someone told me once that he had recently read the book X, I didn’t believe him, and I was correct, especially when I examined his knowledge in some of the issues that are supposed to be discussed in such a book, or when I asked about the contents of the book in general, also when I saw how interested or passionate, he was about the book and the topic. I am not a book reader in general, I prefer articles and papers, but when I read some books, they get stored very well in my memory that I can make an interview with the author even 10 years after reading the book. The other type of readers that I faced are those who like to have knowledge in some field, they have passion about being knowledgeable in the field and they like to know more about it, but they don’t have questions, issues, ideas, or interest. It’s like someone who likes to be a doctor but he knows nothing about medicine nor has he any interest in it. This type usually accumulates information in an arbitrary way and without any structure, as they’ll be reading answers for questions that they didn’t ask or they’re trying to store data without having a database.
The interesting thing is that this issue happens often with medical students. Nobody can have enough interest or to have questions that cover all the information that’s contained in the curriculum of medicine study, also there’s so much information that it’s so difficult to bind them in the brain to something in the real world as we usually remember things. The only way they store the information then is in a way similar to what the computer does. The computer is so efficient in storing any kind of data without any interest in what is it, it’s also very efficient in retrieving them, exactly as the top students do. One day, I asked a student who was the first student in the college of philosophy about the definition of philosophy, she gave me a ready sentence and she was unable to explain the meaning of it in the real-life, she also told me that my definition wasn’t correct, even though I only described the same idea in different words.
Databases could be defined as models or templates to store data in a way that stores each object with all relevant attributes with their specific datatypes. For example, a person may have a name that is a string, a birth date which is a date, a skin color which is an integer triplet. Databases, either relational (where there’re relations between the tables) or non-relational, could be considered as the best way to store information in the computer, it’s also the main way to do so.
For humans, the matter isn’t that simple, dealing with numbers isn’t that easy, unlike storing faces which we do very easily. However, we’re not talking about storing data types or small pieces of data, but about the ability to remember a whole book or multiple books, and about the way we store all types of information that we read or hear, then how to demonstrate this ability, will it be possible to write a summary about the book? Or to relate it to a research paper that we may read later? Some people describe that easily as remembering without understanding, but that’s not necessarily correct, some people do understand but they don’t keep the information for a long time. The level at which you can give a good summary of a book after a long time from reading it is what I am talking about here. And, I am writing this in my blog not in real-sciences.com only because it’s still just an opinion that I have. My opinion is: unless we had previous ideas, questions, or a hypothesis that we want to prove, we won’t be able to store the information but only data. Even biases can provide a structure to store the information in some way
I respect those who have an interest in something until they start getting collecting information about it, someone who keep lists of football players, car engine specifications, or no matter what, because having this ability itself is something great and it’s not very far from a researcher who collects information to prove or refute his hypothesis.
My first advice to anyone who wants to read a book, is to ask themselves whether they really have an interest in the topic? Because if not, it will be impossible to have enough questions or hypotheses to prove. Trying to read just because you want to be knowledgeable in something that you know nothing about is a big waste of time, especially when you want to start with a book. Desiring to be knowledgeable in some fields may not generate interest in that field. It’s like saying: “it’s nice to know about anatomy”, but actually I don’t have any questions that I am seeking answers to and may find them in anatomy, maybe I am more interested in medicine than the average, but not enough to read a huge book of anatomy.