Review It or Lose It

Think about the classes you took in high school, how well do you remember any of the information you learned in them? Most likely you have lost much of the knowledge you temporarily owned, forcing you to take essentially the same class years later in college. Imagine how far ahead you would be if you had kept all of that knowledge securely locked in your brain? Review it, regularly, or lose it.

Hooking

You have been amassing experiences your entire life, transforming them into pieces of knowledge, and then cementing these pieces together to build a knowledge base. When you read, you pick up pieces of knowledge and store them in your short-term memory. In order for these pieces to transition into your long-term knowledge base, you need to build durable connections between these new pieces of knowledge and the knowledge structures you have already built. Think about how the new knowledge relates to your existing knowledge, how they are similar or different. This technique is called "hooking" and is something you should be doing throughout the entire reading process, but most importantly in the review stage.

Transforming Your Knowledge Base Into a Castle

A useful hooking technique is to visualize your memory and knowledge base as a castle, where each object within the castle is a piece of knowledge. When you want to add a piece of knowledge to your knowledge base, just pick a symbolic structure that you will remember and visualize adding it to a spot in your castle.