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Rehearsing what you learn.
You may be one of those graduate students who uses all the tricks of the trade while trying to digest an academic publication but still find that there is little you remember about it afterward. You use the strategies to enhance recall like underlining, taking notes, highlighting and now a-days using AI summaries, but still your brain refuses to wedge it into it into short or long-term memory.
One trick to enhance recall is, as you are about to set the publication aside, pause a moment. Sit back and think about for a minute. If you are a visual learner, you might try to recreate an image of the first page. Try to rehearse two or three key take-aways. Even better, walk away and do the same thing again a few minutes later. Three times of this routine will improve your recall. You are expecting too much of yourself if you imagine that you will be able to recall much from a single reading of a dense academic article.
Rehearsing key take aways to inscribe them on your memory is different, but related, to strategies to single out key points from a scholarly publication. See a related post: Improving Your Comprehension of a Scholarly Publication.
Rehearse key take aways from you’ve read. It is like the active listening a counselor does when he/she re-phrases and repeats back to you what you’ve said to let you know that you are heard. I have a long-time friend who when he is listening intently repeats back what you’ve just said. It’s call echolalia. It’s the same thing children do when they learn words by parroting back what they hear. It is a way of concentrating attention to really finger a thought or to hear the rhythm of the way it was spoken. It has the distinct effect of communicating to a speaker that they’ve been heard.
Rehearsing what you read is a key not only to remember what you’ve read but to learning it. Learning occurs in layers. It occurs by building knowledge by successive reading and by drawing links between what you’ve read. This is how knowledge is created.
Poets, known for the intensity of their appreciation for language, are often distinguished by their ability to recite entire passages from memory. Writers who share a similar reverence for language, often sprinkle interviews with direct quotes from others whose works have influenced theirs.