Acquisition and Retention of Information in the age of AI

Information has become extremely abundant. The way information was available kept improving through the years. Information is available for ingestion in the most quickest way possible with the introduction of AI. AI is able to pull information from different sources, deduplicate them, contextualize according to our need and summarise it in a very efficient way possible. Quick chunks of information is being thrown at us in the form of reels, youtube shorts etc. One might think that they are ingesting and learning a lot of information in this way. But I don't think this is the most efficient way in which information can be ingested which can lead to better retention of the information gained. To understand this further, we need to dive into how memory is retained and what is the most efficient way of information gaining and how does brain process information gained in different forms.

The reason I started exploring this is, in the last few months I have had a burst of curiosity and I started reading different topics with the help of AI, not books. If I was interested in understanding the ideas of nihilism and absurdism, I had discussions with AI on what I feel and it would give me more historic thoughts which were debated and discussed. This way I learnt a lot about different philosophical domains. But now, if I want to recall, I can't remember most of them. I read a lot about nutrition, football, different stuff I found curios using AI. I felt amazing gaining that information then but the retention is very bad.

Sometimes, Instagram reels feel very educational but I have realised that the quick chunks of information just gives me a dopamine hit but I have not actually gained as much as I thought.

I have been thinking about around how I can optimise the information that I am gain every time. Because every second lost in gaining something and not retaining it is useless. Knowledge and patterns of it is the core of who you are. And when I say "who" I mean how you think. Definitely patterns aren't lost as quickly as the information used to form that pattern. But I feel it is also important to retain pieces of those information which led to that pattern formation in the first place.

This will help u learn better because when something new comes in, now u can actually ponder and think why u have believed what u believed in the first place to form that pattern and if this new information should change the pattern that u have already formed in your head.

If you don't know why, either u will adopt the new pattern without having complete information or analysis or you will just stay rigid to new information.

First one is a bit better because at least you are thinking in the information available to you but the latter is dangerous.

Now that I told you, what led to my interest in this topic, I am going to research more about it.