Studying - Is It Worth It?

Where does all the information we read about go in our minds? It seems as though we are only able to gather a certain amount and then previous information disappears... can we get that previous information back again? we study study study. Always learning new things. taking new materials in... But is it worth it to study at all? or are we going to forget most of it anyway? Loren Eisley said in one of his books that our ideas become lost forever if we forget them, that they don't come back. need to write em all down. So for the last fifteen years I have been writing it all down. Like crazy. cause I observed that he was right. at night when I am falling asleep, I am very conscious of the thoughts as I try to get into that meditative state without thoughts. But just before you hit that state I usually get flooded with many good ideas. If there are just a few, then I make a mental note of them and count them, and then every morning I have gotten into the habit now for a few years of remembering to ask myself about the previous nights ideas just before I feel asleep. If the number is under five, I can recall all of them. I almost never now forget to ask myself upon first awakening, “O.k. now, recall all the ideas you had just before you feel asleep and then I will write them all down before I eve get out of bed. But if the number hits five ideas or more then I have to write them down because I know I will forget all of them, at least that's what I tell myself. So then I have to lean over and start scribbling them down. A few years ago I found this amazing pen that has a little green light at the tip where the point is, so you can write in the dark. It is amazing. you don’t have to turn the light on in your room. You just start writing and you can se what you are writing. it is a brilliant invention. God I wonder if that person made a fortune with it.... I hope so. Anyway, these are self generated ideas I am speaking of. Different than the information we collect when studying...  other peoples ideas. Its interesting when you think about it. because it is a physical phenomenon, although it seems rather metaphysical because its all happening in our brain... collecting and then accessing information... but this has got be a physical activity, I mean the information must be going somewhere, being stored somewhere in or on our physical body, in the brain they say. So one would assume that it stays there. all of it. everything we ever learn. forever. just isn't present in our consciousness at all times... I can’t necessarily recall right now what my phone number was when I lived in Atlanta ten years ago. but if you read me ten numbers I would definitely be able to tell you which one was mine. So the data does stay somewhere.... its stored somewhere.

And think of singers, which I try to be sometimes... I have written about eight or nine hundred songs so far, somewhere close to nine by now, and I cannot necessarily remember every song off the top of my head, but if I look on the list and remember the name of almost any one, and we’re talking now over a period of twenty years worth, I can instantly recall all the lyrics to any song. And all the chords. Almost instantly. And of course many people can do this with say the lyrics to every Beatles song ever written for example. Any song comes on and they know every lyric to every single song and can instantly sing along...

interesting.... the reason I bring it up is because I can’t seem to do this with other types of information, such as historical facts. Like dates and names and such. Or scientific facts... mathematical equations... very difficult to remember in the long term... but I wonder if its just a switch we can turn on in our brains like we can do with song lyrics... maybe just some mechanism that needs to be turned on...