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