Keywords:: PermanentNote
Reference: R: How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
Reading, especially rereading, can easily fool you into believing you understand a text. It's due to the mere-exposure effect: the moment you become familiar with something, you start believing you also understand it.
Arthur Schopenhauer puts it powerfully:
"When we read someone else thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. … Accordingly in reading, we are for the most part absolved of the work of thinking. … It stems from this that whoever reads very much and almost the whole day, but in between recovers by thoughtless pastime, gradually loses the ability to think on his own – as someone who always rides forgets in the end how to walk. But such is the case of many scholars: they have read themselves stupid. For constant reading immediately taken up again in every free moment is even more mentally paralyzing than constant manual labor, since in the latter we can still muse about our own thoughts. But just as a coiled spring finally loses its elasticity through the sustained pressure of a foreign body, so too the mind through the constant force of other people’s thoughts."
We're lazy creatures and the experience of familiarizing ourselves with text makes us feel that we understand it. That's why, we often tend to skew towards rereading a text rather than putting it into use - internalizing it.
However, to truly understand something you must internalize it. It means that you must put it into practice.
Writing is a form of internalization because to write something down you need to put it into your own words and into a proper context (otherwise you're just copying). You must make sense of them in your subjective context and this requires active work, which leads to internalization.
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