Absorb Information Effectively – Improve Familiarity!

Have you ever won­der after read­ing a mate­r­ial, lis­ten­ing to a pre­sen­ta­tion or attended a meet­ing and dis­cov­ered that at the end of it, you could hardly remem­ber any­thing relat­ing to what you had been doing, see­ing or hear­ing?  When you need to fur­nish a report for the mate­r­ial you had read or write the min­utes of the meet­ing you’ve attended, you were not able to bring out rel­e­vant points and get down writ­ing it.  Sounds familiar?

It is no sur­prise that you expe­ri­ence such things.  In fact, most of us actu­ally have this prob­lem of bring­ing past infor­ma­tion back for use. Our brains are excel­lent in fil­ter­ing incom­ing infor­ma­tion, retain those required ones and under­stand in our own world the rel­e­vant ones that are most appeal­ing to us.   If our brain does not do all these fil­ter­ing, we will be over­whelmed with the mas­sive amount of infor­ma­tion flood­ing into us.  Iron­i­cally, the main prob­lem that dis­al­lowed us to be effec­tive in absorb­ing infor­ma­tion is the fil­ter­ing mech­a­nism in our head.  Our brain fil­ter worked in a way not really intended by us.  We do not choose to retain the infor­ma­tion we absorb.  It is sub-conscious.  Our brain chooses to retain “right” infor­ma­tion that some­times isn’t use­ful to us.

It may be dif­fi­cult to really under­stand how our brain works.  They are built on our life expe­ri­ences and our map of the world (NLP con­cept).  To really under­stand how our brain works, we need to be fully aware of what we are doing, hear­ing, see­ing and think­ing from our past till cur­rent date.  That is a topic by itself.  Ok!  Let’s leave the under­stand­ing of our brain aside for now and focus on mak­ing your brain effec­tive in absorb­ing infor­ma­tion.  Now, expe­ri­ence is the key word here!

We need to get our brains expe­ri­enced with the things that we are doing, see­ing, hear­ing and think­ing now!  Expe­ri­ence is based on engag­ing cer­tain sim­i­lar things or events for a period of time, which means you, need to be famil­iar with the things you are engag­ing with.  Hav­ing expe­ri­ences of the events, you will be able to under­stand things better.

For exam­ple, when you are read­ing a doc­u­ment, it may take ages for you to com­plete it if it is like hun­dreds of pages long.  If you are not famil­iar with the doc­u­ment, you def­i­nitely take a longer time to com­plete read­ing it.  Even so, you may not under­stand what you had read fully and have to restart the process again.  This is counter-productive and waste lots of time re-reading it.  How do you improve the effec­tive­ness in absorb­ing infor­ma­tion then?  To get you under­stand­ing the doc­u­ment faster, instead of read­ing the doc­u­ment line by line, drilling to every sin­gle detail, try this.  Make a quick glance of the entire doc­u­ment.  Get an overview of the doc­u­ment and its flow.  Do this a few times if you do not get the big pic­ture ini­tially.  Once you get the big­ger pic­ture, you know what to expect from the doc­u­ment and you absorb infor­ma­tion faster as you know what is impor­tant in the doc­u­ment and what is not.  This top-down approach allows you to pin-point to spec­i­fied areas that you require information.

There are many ways to improve effi­ciency in absorb­ing infor­ma­tion.  This is just one of them, which is to improve famil­iar­ity and expe­ri­ence of the infor­ma­tion to fur­ther improve the effi­ciency in infor­ma­tion absorp­tion.  Note, this works for many peo­ple but not every­one.  Every­one absorb infor­ma­tion dif­fer­ently.  You may have your own method that works well for you too! J

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