I noticed with interest a comment Mark Epstein reports that Freud made. In discussing the general lack of training psychotherapists in how to pay attention to a client's talking, Epstein quotes Freud "He should simply listen, and not bother about whether he is keeping anything in mind." This really got my attention because I am interested in whether I retain the most valuable parts of a book by telling myself a passage is well done or valuable and trying to make a mental note of it or by paying good attention to the words of the book without 'trying' to remember.
Whether you are listening to a lecture you will later be tested on or just watching an NCIS episode, I think it is possible to strain to remember or instead, to just let the information flow over you, letting yourself accept and enjoy whatever strikes your imagination. Freud was trying to describe what he thought was the most useful way to attend to the talk of a patient. I have often suspected that just listening might be more efficient and effective than noting and sweating to retain. Just listening, close to what Buddhists call "bare attention", just attending fully but with full openness and pleasure in what parts are pleasurable, seems like a powerful way to pluck the good parts and let those that are old news fall away.
This morning, I was looking over the interesting book "How to Live" by Sarah Blakewell. She is described on her Amazon author page as a former Wellcome Library archivist who went over to full-time writing in 2002. Her book, "How to Live" a comparison of the life and thought of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) with general and modern philosophical question of life, won the National Book Critics Circle biography award in 2010. During my life, I have often run into Montaigne's essays. I saw the Blakewell book a while back and I tried out the new software for borrowing ebooks from my local library by borrowing "How to Live". One of the short chapters on how to live, according to this Frenchman, is titled "Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted".
I haven't gotten to the slow witted part yet but the parallels between Freud's advice, my own questions, and the words "forget most of what you read" grabbed me. How much of what we read is retained, how much as well as WHAT parts of our reading and all our thoughts are retained is an interesting subject. It comes up, too, in connection with "Moonwalking with Einstein", a current book on memory champions and their techniques to remember incredible amounts of information.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
