“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”
IMO, this quote demonstrates a phenomenon I've long suspected to hold with the books that I read. The essence of a book's or an article's content is captured by a few key ideas and phrases (e.g., 'gestalt of knowledge', 'wraith of memory' in this case), but merely knowing these phrases is not enough. You need to read the entire book to have a sensation of the ideas getting fleshed out. The article on 'metrosexuals', the pamphlet on "the third estate", and the book on 'positioning' are other examples I can think of where this phenomenon plays out.
A rich 3-dimensional idea in the author's mind gets transformed into words. The words themselves are just information. You then fight with the words to reconstruct the idea with all its original potency in your mind. It is not necessary for you to recall every little detail of it unless you are an academic or specialist in the field.
My only worry with this takeaway is that it leads to an assumption that you don't have to fully read to get the gestalt. The active process of reading - each and every effort - builds the associative networks. To me that's what is so pernicious about the most popular platforms of the internet today. Because information is a click away, the immediacy masquerades as depth. Blogs, tweets, comments, and updates just feed the perception of being educated. By contrast, essays and books require a significant effort to digest. The effort is meaningful in building the pathways. That's why education is stressful. We're working to re-orient our heads. Walking up a mountain may just start out as one foot in front of another. 3,000 feet later we really appreciate and understand the height we've climbed.
I agree 100%, and to add on: I think it has to do with the context of those key ideas or phrases. You could simply tell a child that "the Boy Who Cried Wolf is about a boy who kept lying then got eaten by a wolf because no one believed him when he was telling the truth." But largely, the message would be lost.
Without the context of the rest of the story, getting the child emotionally involved, getting the child to see the short term benefits, the impact of reading about how the kid gets eaten when he finally does see a wolf, tells the truth, and no one believes him is greatly diminished.
Studies have shown that people remember how facts/events/information makes them feel more accurately than the specific facts/events/information, and I think the idea of context is similar. You remember the emotions you felt when you read a story about X action, you remember the context of your emotions, even if you don't remember the specific cause.
I find these "key ideas and phrases" summarized in "key takeaways" or "TL;DR" snippets to be quite handy.
If you've been through the entire piece of work already, it helps you wrap it up. If not, they're good to help you decide whether to dive in or not. Just like when you'd read a long paper's abstract + conclusion sections before committing your time to it.
Summarizing a long text into "key ideas and phrases" can also help the author see the structures and the patterns of his output, which is important for his own development, and critical if you want to generalize, go meta, and bring it onto other areas :)
I experienced this on my recent college exam on US history. The students have to write an 2-3 page essay and risk losing 40 points out of 100 points on the exams.
I had a little outline, not as complete as other students, but when I started writing, details just flow out of me. By the end of the exam(1 hour and 15 minutes), I written 4 pages.
Then again, I got a 98 on my world history exam weeks earlier and I barely study. I taken notes over the professor's lecture though. I think I have a knack for history.
The students have to write an 2-3 page essay and risk losing 40 points out of 100 points on the exams.
Don't you mean they can gain up to 40 of 100 total available points? I do hope Academia hasn't adapted 'innocent until proven guilty' to mean 'knowledgeable until proven ignorant.' If that's how your professor presents it, he's doing the class a disservice.
“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”
IMO, this quote demonstrates a phenomenon I've long suspected to hold with the books that I read. The essence of a book's or an article's content is captured by a few key ideas and phrases (e.g., 'gestalt of knowledge', 'wraith of memory' in this case), but merely knowing these phrases is not enough. You need to read the entire book to have a sensation of the ideas getting fleshed out. The article on 'metrosexuals', the pamphlet on "the third estate", and the book on 'positioning' are other examples I can think of where this phenomenon plays out.
A rich 3-dimensional idea in the author's mind gets transformed into words. The words themselves are just information. You then fight with the words to reconstruct the idea with all its original potency in your mind. It is not necessary for you to recall every little detail of it unless you are an academic or specialist in the field.