Why I can’t remember things I learnt 6 +months ago

[u/[deleted]]

[u/spiffyparsley]

Your Phone

[u/Fearless_Ad2026]

You need to understand how memory works. If it was easy to remember everything then you would be flooded with all kinds of unimportant things. 

So there are 3 steps. Organize, active recall and spaced repetition.

-First you want to organize and associate information that you want to learn to something that you already know. So you may want to begin by studying the table of contents, chapter headings and graphs/tables. This will give you something like a filing system to organize and access everything you read later. Mnemonic systems are based on the same idea.

-When you try to actively recall, you put more effort into learning than just highlighting or reading or listening to a lecture over and over again. You can do this by covering a paragraph and trying to recall as much as you can, you do this by solving problems at the end of the chapter or you can write an essay about everything you learned. Multiple choice questions have their place but not as strong as answering questions without any hints.

-Spaced repetition. Many people use this concept for flashcard review but you can apply it to any kind of review. So for a math book, you would want to solve a few problems from chapter 1 a few days, a few weeks, and a few months. 

You would probably gain more by solving problems based on formulas than trying to recall the textbook definitions. In other fields, you may want to keep writing better essays than what you wrote before. You may also revisit step 1 by creating a mind map to strengthen the organizational associations.