How to remember everything you read

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One of the ways you can deconstruct an argument is being actively attuned to what you're reading.

To better remember content, take a blank sheet of paper and write down what you know about that subject. You can write it in bullet points.

When you later come back to what you're reading, go to that sheet and skim it – it will prime your brain for what you're going to read.

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SHANE PARRISH:

Shane Parrish is a former Canadian intelligence officer and the founder of Farnam Street, a go-to resource that CEOs, athletes, professional coaches and entrepreneurs rely on to find signal in a world of noise.

Shane's work has been featured in nearly every major publication, including Forbes, Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and most recently, the New York Times.

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TRANSCRIPT:

SHANE PARRISH: I think the physical books just work for me. They work really well for note taking. They work really well for annotation. They give you something tangible. And there's something about it that I can't quite explain, right? Like, you can know something's in a book on the left-hand side of the page, between page 80 and 90. But if you're reading on a Kindle, you can't do that. So reading on a Kindle is great. I use a Kindle for traveling. But the vast majority of the reading I do, I try to do in physical books because I can write about the idea in my own penmanship. I can draw arrows, and pictures, and diagrams, and try to connect to the argument that the author is trying to make.

Because how can I agree or disagree with somebody if I don't understand the fundamental principles of the argument that somebody is trying to make? One of the ways you can deconstruct that is just sort of being actively attuned to what you're reading. I find when I read on the Kindle, I'm not necessarily as actively engaged in the book. But if I'm taking notes and I'm following along with the article, or I'm occasionally underlining a word that I don't even know what it means, and I want to go look it up later. But it means that I'm actively reading, that what I'm paying attention to, which is super important. And also one of the other things that I find easier to do with a physical book, although you can do it with a Kindle book, I call it like the blank sheet. And what we do there is before you read a book, you take a blank sheet of paper, and you write down what you know about that subject.

You can mine map it. You can write it in sort of like bullet points. And then you read maybe a paragraph — or not a paragraph. You read a chapter of that book. And that's all the reading time you have for that day. Well, now you go to that sheet and use a different color pen and you just fill in, like, what gaps did I learn? Did I learn a different terminology for the words? Can I connect it to what I've already read? And then before you pick up the book for the next chapter, you just skim the sheet. And it sort of primes your brain for what you're going to read. And I think that that's a really effective way to sort of not only build on the knowledge you have, but connect what you're reading to the existing knowledge. It's going to show you what you learned while you were reading because it's going to be a very visual distinction.

It's going to be a different color of ink. And I think that that allows you to sort of connect it to the book. And I often do that in the jacket of the book where, if I don't have a physical piece of paper, that's O.K. because I can just do it on the front cover. That is so much harder when you try to translate that to electronic. It's possible. But it's a lot more difficult.

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A mind-blowing explanation of the speed of light

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The only things that travel at the speed of light are photons. Nothing with any mass at all can travel at the speed of light because as it gets closer and closer to the speed of light, its mass increases. And if it were actually traveling at the speed of light, it would have an infinite mass.

Light does not experience space or time. It's not just a speed going through something.

All of the universe shifts around this constant, the speed of light. Time and space itself stop when you go that speed.

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MICHELLE THALLER:

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit

NASA.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE THALLER: So, Tom, you asked the question, "How does mass increase as you go faster?" And this is really a wonderful part of Einstein's theories. It actually is also relatively slippery and kind of complicated because to even answer this question at all, we have to ask the rather strange question: "What do you mean by mass? What is your definition of mass?" You may have heard that nothing with mass can possibly go at the speed of light. The only things that travel at the speed of light are photons pure energy, light, the speed of light. Nothing with any mass at all can travel at the speed of light because as it gets closer and closer to the speed of light, its mass increases. And if it were actually traveling at the speed of light, it would have an infinite mass.

So think about that. Even if you had a tiny little particle that was, say, billions of times less massive than an electron just a tiny, tiny little piece of mass if for some reason, that tiny thing accelerated to the speed of light, it would have an infinite mass. And that's a bit of a problem. So let's talk about this. One of the things that you really have to realize is the speed of light is very, very special. It's not just simply a speed of something moving through space. As you go faster and faster and closer to the speed of light, time itself begins to slow down. And space begins to contract. As you go close to the speed of light, the entire universe becomes smaller and smaller until it basically just becomes a single point when you're going at the speed of light. And time, as you go closer to the speed of light, gets slower and slower until basically time is a single point at the speed of light.

Light does not experience space or time. It's not just a speed going through something. All of the universe shifts around this constant, the speed of light. Time and space itself stop when you go that speed. So the reason you can't accelerate to the speed of light, and the reason we say you have an infinite mass is a little complicated because the idea that mass actually is a measurement of energy. You may remember Einstein's famous equation, E equals MC squared. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Energy and mass are equivalent. Mass is basically a measurement of how much energy there is in an object. When you're moving, you have the energy of your motion, too. That's called kinetic energy, energy of motion. So E equals MC squared, now your mass has not just the stuff that's in you but also the energy of your motion.

And that's why mass seems to increase as you go faster, and faster, and closer to the speed of light. It's not that you are actually getting any heavier. The increase in mass is something that's only observed by people that are watching you go by. If you were on a spaceship going very fast at the speed of light, you don't notice anything getting heavier. You are on your spaceship. You could jump up and down. You can skip rope. You can do whatever you want. You don't notice any change at all. But if people try to measure your mass as you go by, they not only are measuring your rest mass — your mass when you were still — but this added energy of this h...

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The science of why we die

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According to scientists the reason we die is because the second law of thermodynamics and natural selection.

The whole universe runs down, so, ultimately, even if you could lengthen your lifespan indefinitely, the universe itself will eventually die in a heat death.

We die, one predominant view goes, so that our progeny may live — because there are limited resources.

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MICHAEL SHERMER:

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of

Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and Presidential Fellow at Chapman University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHAEL SHERMER: From a scientist's prospective it's going to be rather different from that of most religious traditions, which holds that we die because this is only a temporary staging area before we go to the big show the next stage in which we go to heaven or hell or wherever some kind of afterlife. For scientists the question has a rather different answer and it has to do with the kinds of causes we look for in science. So you have proximate causes versus ultimate causes. For example, why does sugar taste sweet or why does fruit taste sweet something like that? You would say well because there's molecular receptors on your tongue that are geared toward sending signals to a certain part of the brain that register sweetness and pleasure and so on with fruit. That's approximate answer. And ultimate answer is because foods that taste sweet are more likely to be consumed and those in our natural environment are the kinds of foods that are both rare and nutritious and so the more of them you eat the better and we evolved that tendency.

To answer the question why we die, it's the same kind of thing. Approximate answers include cancer, heart disease, arthrosclerosis. The ultimate answer though is found in two principles of nature, that is the second law of thermodynamics or entropy, which means everything runs down, including our bodies. And the whole universe, the whole universe runs down so ultimately even if you could double your lifespan, triple it, live essentially forever you can't really because the universe will eventually die in a heat death. And then second is the principle of natural selection that drives evolution. And it has to do with a cost benefit analysis of how many limited resources you put into organisms. So obviously natural selection is going to select for infants and toddlers and babies to be well cared for, have super regenerative powers to keep their bodies going in order to get the genes into the next generation, get them up to reproductive age and so on. So we see cells that divide very rapidly in infants and babies. A little cut you could practically watch it heal. It's incredible. Whereas someone my age when I get cut it takes much longer to heal.

And so the question is why wouldn't evolution just make it so that I, now in my early 60s, can't just keep going to 200/300? And the answer is there's no reason for it. Because after I've brought my own offspring into reproductive age and then they've brought their offspring into reproductive age I'm really of no use anymore. I can serve a useful purpose as a parent, of course, bringing my genes up and then useful purpose as a grandparent to help my offspring bring their offspring up to reproductive age, but beyond that really there's no sense in pouring any more resources into great, great, great, great, great grandparents because the genes in the little infant are already going to be well taken care of. So it's sort of a weird way to think about it, but in a way nature operates because of entropy. Nature has to select and choose in kind of a triage where are we going to put the resources. I'm saying it like there's somebody up there allocating resources, the government is doling out checks to organisms. No, there is nothing like that, of course, this is just how natural selection operates. So in short, we die so that our future generations may live because there are limited resources.

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Depression is a silent killer. A.I. is turning up the volume.

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Artificial intelligence can digitize a person's state of mind by gathering data from their social media feeds and listening to them talk.

The filters you use on photos, the kinds of content you post, as well as your speech (your tone, sighs, and rate of speech) are just a few ways AI can detect depression or evaluate whether medications are working or not.

Furthermore, research shows people would rather confide their deepest feelings to an avatar than a human being. AI mental health coaches are already on the horizon — an effective and necessary development as we face a shortage of mental health professionals.

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ERIC TOPOL:

Eric Topol, a professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps, is an executive vice president at Scripps Research and the founder and director of Scripps Research Translational Institute (previously Scripps Translational Science Institute). His work melds genomics, big data, and both information technologies and digital health technologies to advance the promise of personalized medicine.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ERIC TOPOL: One of the most exciting things in the world of AI in health is being able to digitize the state of mind. That is being able to use different metrics to be able to say, this person is depressed, or this person is really happy and doing well. And so one of the really great examples of this actually was through Instagram, where they actually had a huge number of images, and they could diagnose depression based on the types of images and the filter that was used by the person posting. But it's actually really exploding, because it turns out that our speech – how fast we talk, and our intonation, our activity, our breathing pattern, if we sigh – a lot all these things can be easily quantified, passively. They go into this algorithm and then comes out of it is, where is this person's state of mind, and how can we get it boosted up, because that's really the issue. Are the medications, if a person is using them, is that not even working?

Now, in addition to that, which is a shocking part of the story, is that when a person is asked to disclose their innermost secrets, they're more apt to do that with an avatar than another human being. The idea that you would have this avatar that you selected to be your coach that was monitoring your metrics and giving you feedback and also that you can confide in, is really alluring, and we're starting to see that. I mean, it already is starting to blossom in China, for example. It wouldn't be at all surprising if we started to see it in the US in the near term. So when you take this ability to digitize a state of mind and also have a support through an avatar, this could turn out to be a really great way to deal with the problem we have today, which is a lack of mental health professionals with a very extensive burden of depression and other mental health conditions.

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Joyless economies: Unregulated capitalism, slavery, and feudalism

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Wealth inequality in modern capitalism creates a joyless economy for both the rich and the poor, says Yanis Varoufakis.

Wealth inequality in a time of economic abundance makes society less civilized. More evenly distributed resources allow humans to create the literature, art and intellectual works that make human life richer.

The universalized depression and stress caused by inequality is "incongruent with our fantastic advances at the technological level," says Varoufakis. "It's

a very silly way of organizing life."

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YANIS VAROUFAKIS:

Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece and the cofounder of an international grassroots movement, DiEM25, that is campaigning for the revival of democracy in Europe. He is the author of And the Weak Suffer What They Must? and The Global Minotaur. After teaching for many years in the United States, Britain, and Australia, he is currently a professor of economics at the University of Athens. His most recent books are Talking to My Daughter About the Economy and Adults in the Room.

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TRANSCRIPT:

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Inequality has always been with us. Ever since we lived in the jungles we had brute force, brute power, determine the spoils. Civilization was all about moving away from that situation where brute strength and power determined the quality of life of the members of our species. That was the theory. To a very large extent we moved in that direction. This is something we should be very proud of. But we're very, very far away from having created social relations between us, a legal framework, a way of organizing economic life that takes power out of the equation of civilization.

Economic surplus is essential for humanity to develop. If we don't have an economic surplus we cannot grow, not just physically but also spiritually; we cannot create new literature, we cannot create new film, we cannot create new theater. We need to have a surplus in order to be able to invest it in all those activities that make human life richer. But the question is who controls the surplus? And, of course, in societies that are very asymmetrical in terms of who owns the means of production – whether we are talking about slave-owning societies where there's a few slave owners, or feudalism or capitalism, where you've got 0.1 percent owning most of the productive abilities or machinery and factories of production in society – they can, in order to preserve their property rights over those means of production, they use debt, they use political power and they use the monopoly position that their property rights afford them in order to skew the whole process of creativity of production in a manner that, for instance, in the case of the media world, we have 50 channels of rubbish to watch from. We have industries that are dedicated to producing things that we neither need nor want, destroying the planet in the process. We have billions of people there working like headless chickens driving themselves into depression and going home and crying themselves to sleep at night if they have a job. Or consuming antidepressants and becoming obese and seeing shrinks if they don't have a job.

In the end we have a joyless economy. Even those who are extremely powerful, in theory, the haves of the world are increasingly feeling insecure. They have to live in gated communities because they have fear all the have-nots out there that envy their wealth. And in the end, we have developed fantastic means of escaping need and escaping want which we are not putting to good use because in the end we are developing new forms of depravity and deprivation. And universalized depression – psychological depression – which is incongruent with our fantastic advances at the technological level. It's a very silly way of organizing life.

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Why stressing about aging shortens your life

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The best anti-aging advice? Stop stereotyping old people! Cultural messaging about the pitfalls of old age causes undue stress that prematurely ages the brain and shortens life spans.

People who have a positive outlook on aging can live 7.5 years longer than those who buy into cultural stereotypes about getting old.

It's important to look at the positives of aging, not just the risk factors: Alzheimer's rates are declining, 'mental sifting' can make us wiser, and older workers injure themselves less often than younger workers.

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ASHTON APPLEWHITE:

Ashton Applewhite is a Brooklyn-based activist and writer. Her latest book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, debunks many myths about late life.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ASHTON APPLEWHITE: When I started thinking about this, almost all my associations with aging were older, and where my fear was deepest had to do with cognition. Dementia is a terrifying disease, and we are nowhere near a cure. I think what people forget is that it is in no way typical of aging. The statistics, the latest statistics from the Alzheimer's Association and this statistic has dropped significantly just in the 10 years I've been studying this it is that one out of 10 of the entire 65-plus population does come down with Alzheimer's. The older you are, the more likely you are to get it age is the biggest risk factor so the percentage increases as you get older. But very, very few people my age, 66, have Alzheimer's. The point being, it is not typical of aging. And, telling both sides of the story here, Alzheimer's rates continue to decline. We're not sure why, but the odds of anyone listening to this coming down with Alzheimer's have gotten lower and lower. And people are getting diagnosed at later ages. So let's tell both sides of the story.

As we age, most of us do experience some decline in specific cognitive functioning, like the ability to remember the name of that movie you saw with what's-her-name last week. But one thing I'm always pointing out to people is that younger people forget stuff too, all the time. This is not just an old-age affliction. Where ageism comes in is that when you can't remember the name of the movie, and you're my age, you think, oh, crap, that means I'm getting dementia. Which it might, but it really, really, really probably does not. It is true that older people can take longer to come to a conclusion about something, or perhaps remember something. But one reason this is so, and interestingly, this came out a study done by data scientists in Germany, who weren't even studying anything aging related, is that as we grow older, we acquire more experiences and memories. So literally, just like a processor, the brain has to sift through more information to get to an answer. And it is that process of sifting that enables us, often, older people, to come up with a more measured or deeper response. That's why it is so terrific to have mixed age teams. For many reasons that are intuitively obvious, younger people might come up with more answers more quickly, and possibly think of things that an older, more perhaps experienced person might think, oh, we tried that 10 years ago and it's not going to work. But if you pair the agility of a young mind with the experience and more seasoned approach of an older worker, you arrive at a synthesis that is the best possible thing. You can make an analogy in terms of physical activity as well. Older workers certainly physically move slower, no doubt about that. But they injure themselves less often.

A growing body of really, really interesting evidence shows how attitudes towards aging affect how our minds and bodies function at the cellular level. People with more positive attitudes towards aging, which I would say is simply more realistic attitudes towards aging, because most of us are so brainwashed to equate aging with decline, show that they walk faster, they have better handwriting, which is a pretty good indicator of general health. They heal faster, even from severe disability. They live longer, not just a little bit, an average of seven and a half years longer. And the latest research shows that positive attitudes towards aging confer protection against dementia, even in people genetically predisposed to the disease. The idea is that if you are not worrying about aging, if you are not under this stress of believing that everything is go...

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Why pitting prejudices against each other keeps society free

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For society to stay open and free, you don't need to eliminate prejudice. You need the opposite: All kinds of prejudice pitted against each other.

Intellectual diversity helps society as a whole learn the truth. And as long as society has rules that force ideas to be openly tested, the intolerant will not gain the upper hand."

In America it's legal to be intolerant. It may not be right. It may not get you accepted or respected. But absolutely it's legal and it should be legal," says Jonathan Rauch.

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JONATHAN RAUCH:

Jonathan Rauch is the author of six books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a contributing editor of The Atlantic, and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JONATHAN RAUCH: We live in a liberal society - small 'L'. That means we're committed to values like free speech and toleration. It means we try to create an open forum. And it also means we understand there are going to be some obnoxious, and sociopathic, and racist, and anti-Semitic, and homophobic people in our midst. And, to some degree, we not only allow that, but we embrace it. Because it reminds us that these ideas are there. And it reminds us that we've got to refute them, and we've got to stay on our guard. As a gay person, I want to know where these homophobes are. And I want to have the opportunity to refute and debunk them. I don't want to put them into hiding because then they'll emerge all the stronger at the other end.

But there's this age-old debate: What happens if you're so tolerant that the intolerant people gain the upper hand in society? Should you be tolerant of people who themselves would not be tolerant? What about the neo-Nazi? This is someone who, if they come to power, would shut me down. So I'm supposed to advocate their freedom, knowing that they would never advocate mine? This is an age-old challenge. It's a hard question. But right now in America it's an easy question. Because here's the thing. The important thing is not that every individual in a society, in a country of 300 million people, should be tolerant. That's impossible. That will never happen. Humans aren't wired that way. The important thing is that the rules of the society force people to subject their ideas to testing. So a crazy bigot with a conspiracy theory will not get their ideas taught in the universities or in the textbooks, in the public schools. They'll be marginalized. By the same token, these societies also commit to free speech. If you have those rules in society as a whole, it's going to be a pretty safe place to express intolerance. Now, if you don't have those institutions solidly in place, if you don't have courts that will vigorously enforce the First Amendment, freedom of speech, if you don't have universities and an intellectual culture which will hold the line on fake knowledge and say, no, we're only teaching true stuff here, then intolerance becomes much more dangerous, because it becomes much more possible for the intolerant actually to gain control and power in the society.

Years ago, I was trying to think through the approaches that people have to how we talk to each other in a complicated country like ours and how we decide what's true and what's not. And I made a distinction between pluralism and purism that seems to capture a lot of what's going on. Pluralists I put myself in this camp believe that the way you find truth is not by eliminating prejudice from society, because we're all prejudiced. It's part of being human. We all have a point of view. We all have pre-existing ideas. We're all stubborn and very attached to the things that we think are true. Rather, the way you arrive at truth as a society is you pit the prejudices against each other. So that means you don't want to have unprejudiced people. You just need to have a lot of different prejudices. You need intellectual diversity. And then those things will talk to each other. They'll persuade each other. Sometimes they'll conflict and criticize each other. But it's through that process that as a group, as a country, as a society, we learn what's true.

And then I said, well, there's a very different group. That's not the way, for example, a church operates. There you've got an idea of some doctrines that are believed to be true. And that's a function of, they w...

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Opinion journalism keeps the lights on. But at what cost?

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Basic facts are up for debate, especially in the realm of science and politics. So which facts can you trust? Start by looking at trusted sources like Wikipedia, Snopes, and factcheck.org."

If people with money don't start supporting fact-checking systems then fact-checking systems will become increasingly rarer," says Dreger.

Digital audiences are in the habit of sharing and reposting op-eds that agree with their existing opinions, rather than seeking out factual reporting. Opinion journalism makes money. Factual reporting makes less. That's a problem.

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ALICE DREGER:

Alice Dreger is an historian of medicine and science, a sex researcher, an award-winning writer, and an (im)patient advocate. Dreger’s latest major work is Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ALICE DREGER: It's important for us to know what's real in the world and if we're going to be making decisions about our own lives or about healthcare policy, environmental policy, what to eat, what to do in terms of medications, we need to know what reality is – that way we're not constantly smacking ourselves up against it.

It is true, certainly in politics, that it can be very difficult to get people to agree on basic facts, but I think it is possible in some circumstances to basically turn to scholars and experts in fields and ask them to try to help adjudicate what is real and what is false. And increasingly, because of the polarization within politics, there are more and more think tanks that are on both the right and the left that are actually very serious about facts because they're worried about this kind of denigration into a situation where everybody just believes what they want to believe. I think we're about to see a big corrective. I mean the fact that you're even asking these questions suggests to me that we're seeing a corrective where people are interested in trying to get closer to reality. And I actually see that on the right as well, within scholarship that is right of center, within foundations that are right of center. There certainly are some on both extremes that are interested just yelling their idea, whether or not it's real, there are various people who come to mind, but there's more and more interest in trying to do the corrective and trying to understand what's serious and real.

We see this, for example, with conservatives becoming very concerned around climate change. We see this I think on the left with regard to people who have historically said patients should have full autonomy, beginning to think about well what does that mean when patients have false knowledge when, for example, they think the measles vaccine is very dangerous when science suggests that it is not very dangerous? When they think that doing placenta treatments on their skin is somehow important and safe and scientific when it's really not. So I think that corrective is helping. How do we as individuals understand what is true? It is really hard. There is so much noise and there is so many things that look convincing that are not convincing. That's a relatively new thing in history to have the level at which people are able to produce things that look real and high level, high quality, high scholarly levels that are not real is kind of terrifying. So there are fake journals that look real, there are fake news stories, as we know, that appear to be real and it becomes increasingly difficult to understand what is real.

For the average person, it's very hard to know what to trust, but there are some trusted places like, for example, Wikipedia, Snopes, various places that do fact checking. There are various newspapers that do fact checking as well, factcheck.org for example is another place. But then in order for those places to survive it's really clear that people have to financially support them so that people can do that work and it's hard to convince people to support nonpartisan fact checking work because people have been taught to favor, with their clicks and their dollars and their like buttons, to favor opinion that they agree with. It's very rare for people comparatively to forward actual articles compared to forwarding opinion pieces. So what we see is that the kinds of things that come under your nose because your friends are sharing it or your colleagues are sharing it is much more often opinion than facts...

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How listening to the universe can help quiet your self-doubt

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We all experience self-doubt — sometimes called 'imposter syndrome'.

NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller explains how the universe itself has been a salve for her fears.

The universe chooses people to be interested in, she says. What has the universe chosen you for?

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MICHELLE THALLER

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/people/1040/michelle-thaller/

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TRANSCRIPT:

MICHELLE THALLER: I often get questions about what it's like being a woman in science, which has traditionally been a field dominated by men. And the interesting thing is the complexity of that to me because I grew up in the 1980s. I went to college in the 1990s. And that certainly was after the era, at least for the most part, where women were just told point blank, you shouldn't be here. You can't be a scientist. You don't belong here. That never happened to me. I never had anybody say to my face, in terms of a teacher, you're not welcome here. You don't belong here. And, in fact, when I was in college, some of the highest-performing students in my physics classes were women. They were certainly in the minority in terms of numbers. There were fewer of them in class compared to men, But they were doing very well. One of the things that's most surprising to me, and I've talked to a lot of my women colleagues about this is that I really didn't expect some of the biggest barriers to come from inside myself.

From the very start of my scientific career, and I'm talking about undergraduate, being a physics major. I grappled with almost crippling self-doubt. It was really hard to get myself into the class. I mean sometimes, I actually had to work myself up into a character. I'd sort of stand outside a classroom and think about how a physics student should feel or how they should behave. I felt very deeply that I didn't belong there, but that was coming from me. That didn't seem to be coming from anything external. Through most of my career in science-- and I'm talking about my education-- I was too scared to ask a single question. I spent my entire undergraduate and most of my graduate classes in the back of the class terrified. I was copying the notes. The teacher was deriving something on the blackboard. I was copying it down, but it could have been in a foreign language. I didn't understand it. And I was so embarrassed to admit that I was that lost and that far behind. I spent my entire scientific education being scared. And I look back and I think, why? It turns out-- I now have a doctorate in physics-- I can learn that. I can do physics. I can be successful at that. I'm not an idiot. So why was I so crippled and held back by my own fear and by my own shame at how I wasn't understanding this very quickly.

I've heard people use the term imposter syndrome. That for some reason, you're absolutely sure you don't belong here, and, in fact, you must have fooled people into letting you be here. I've had it pointed out that if you can pass comprehensive exams in physics, which I have, it probably means you belong here, probably means you learned the material. But it never felt that way. It always felt like maybe I had sort of pulled the wool over people's eyes, or I shouldn't be here and I've fooled people into thinking I belong here. And there was this sense of shame. And I'm going to admit this to you, I still feel that today. I feel that every single day I go to NASA, and I'm with these brilliant people all around me.

Every single day, I still feel like I don't belong, and it's been some kind of mistake that they let me in. Imagine your whole career being like that. Never feeling like you belong, and I'm not saying this is something that only happens to women. I'm sure this happens to men, too. But I've had to ask myself, why? It's true that society as a whole gives you lots of very sub...

For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/imposter-syndrome

Want to get more from books? Stop reading them cover to cover.

Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge

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We've been taught to treat books like a linear experience: start, then continue reading until the end.

But problematic because it doesn't correspond to how we actually extract knowledge from books.

Here are a few ways you can get more from reading books while investing less of your precious time.

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SHANE PARRISH:

Shane Parrish is a former Canadian intelligence officer and the founder of Farnam Street, a go-to resource that CEOs, athletes, professional coaches and entrepreneurs rely on to find signal in a world of noise.

Shane's work has been featured in nearly every major publication, including Forbes, Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and most recently, the New York Times.

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TRANSCRIPT:

SHANE PARRISH: Sure. I have so many friends who want to buy books and want to learn. But the problem is, they buy a book. They start it. They get two or three chapters in, and then they stop reading. And then they feel bad that they've stopped reading. They don't pick up another book because they know they want to finish this book. We've been taught that once we start something we have to finish it. And I think that so often we view books as this linear thing. Whereas I think a different view of books is, what information do I need out of this book right now? Is that an entertainment read? Do I need to read from start to finish? Is it a read where I'm comparing different views on a similar problem? Especially across non-fiction, right? Am I comparing and contrasting two or three different authors' argumentation or authors' views on a particular angle to a subject? In which case, I might not need to read the whole book. I just need to read a chapter. But then I've gotten everything out of that book. The books are there to serve you, right? You own the book. The book is your property. It's your mental property. It's your physical property. And you can do with it what you want. You don't have to feel bad about putting down a book. It's the author's job to pull you into the book. It's your job to extract what you need out of the book. And I think that extracting what you need, you can just read the table of contents, read the introduction, maybe read the conclusion, and skim a little bit. And is this a book that I want to read in its entirety? And most of the time, the answer is going to be no. A lot of the books that are published today could easily be 20 to 40 pages. You would get everything that you need out of that book. So it's a big waste of time to read it cover to cover.

But if you want to extract the general principles from the book, or the sort of like argumentation that the author's making, you don't need to read every little anecdote that's put in there, or every story about Billy and Bob. You just need to know what is the framework for this argumentation? Do I agree with it? Don't I agree with it? Do I have to make a decision on whether I agree with it or not? Does a different author have a contrasting view that I want to learn about? Or is this something that I'm just reading for general knowledge? I might not put into practice. Or if you think about skill development, right? Which is a common reason that most of us read. We'll think of, I want to learn about leadership. And we'll think of this very big, broad category whereas it's usually much more beneficial from a learning perspective to narrow down the aspect of leadership. I want to talk about leading a small team for the first time. I want to talk about team meetings. I want to talk about what are the-- like, break down what it means to be a leader, and then hone in on those particular categories. Pick up a whole bunch of leadership books. But then read just for those specific categories across the books.

If you're reading for knowledge, that's going to give you a much better outcome than sort of picking up one of these books and reading it cover to cover. Because it's going to be hard to put into practice. It's going to be hard to compare different contrasting views on the subject. It's going to be hard to determine what works for you. And, ultimately, that's why you're reading. You want to figure out what works for you. And that's not always what somebody else says. A lot of what books cover is, here's what worked for me. And what worked for me in this particular ecosystem, at this particular point in time, with this particular team. That may or may not work for you...

To read the full transcript, go to https://bigthink.com/videos/reading-books