Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
It seems I'm forgetting details within books much faster than about 10-15 years ago.
Back then, I could remeber about anything I read only once for months on end; now I'm having trouble remembering details of books I read a few weeks ago. I don't think this has to do with e-reading, because the same is happening with regard to movies, or music.
To be honest, I find it disconcerting. I'm used to reading or hearing something once, and then remembering it for months or even years, and it seems this is becoming more difficult. I could understand that had I been 78, but I'm barely into my 30's.
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I'm guessing information overload. When I started programming I could remember almost everything about a program. They were written in COBOL that only has about 70 pre-defined words & the rest are user-defined. Average program length was probably 1000 lines of code.
The last program I worked on was in Visual Basic .Net which, including the add-in tools that are pretty much needed to do anything with it, has over 1000 pre-defined terms. The 'program' was actually an inter-linked system of 1200 programs containing almost a million lines of code. No way could I remember that so I learned to write documentation to help me.
I still do that today, write 'documentation' to help me remember what I want to remember. Basically I've found that the older I get the more stuff there is that I want to remember and the more stuff I want to remember the harder it is to remember it all. Less important things (like details about books I've finished reading) get dropped unless I write something down to remind me. That's one of the reasons I love Calibre-I list my pbooks in it too & keep them listed even after I get rid of them. And I make sure they comments include a synopsis that reminds me of what the book was about.