Notes From a Small Experiment

Spent Saturday trying to answer a small question: how much of my weekly reading do I actually remember a month later, without any notes at all? I picked five articles I'd read recently, wrote down what I remembered from each without looking anything up, then went back and checked.

The results were rougher than I expected. I could recall the general topic of every piece, but the specific claim or number I'd found interesting at the time — the actual reason I'd bothered reading it — was gone in three out of five cases.

This isn't a rigorous experiment by any measure. Five articles, one person, no control group. But it was enough to convince me that "I'll remember the important part" is not a strategy I should keep relying on, which is part of why notes like this one exist now.

Filing this as a seedling because I want to repeat it properly at some point — maybe with a fixed note-taking method on one set of articles and none on another, and a longer gap before testing recall. For now it's just the raw observation, kept here so I don't lose the thread.