Why You Might Want to Take Notes While Watching YouTube Videos

I love to watch educational videos on YouTube. I'm talking videos about the space, planets, stars, animals, science, and much more. One of my favorite YouTube channels is MinuteEarth. They produce superb videos; informative, funny, beautiful, and short. A video that I really liked talks about how sled dogs never get tired.

I was having a chat with a colleague of mine and I told him about this video. He then asked me "how don't they get tired?". I opened my mouth to start explaining but something surprised me. I couldn't remember the details. I could only remember that it has something to do with how they process food. But that's it. I couldn't remember any of the details. And it's just a 2:38 minutes video.

That day I started thinking about all the similar videos I watch on YouTube. I came to the conclusion that I barley remember any of the details in these videos. In fact, I started watching a Vsauce video the other day and I recognized mid-video that I have already watched it.

I needed to figure out why. Why I cannot remember the details of these videos. First, I wanted to make sure it has nothing to do with my own memory. So I did some memory tests, checked with my doctor, and I asked friends and collogues and almost all of them have the same issue.

After thoroughly thinking about this issue I came up with 2 possible explanations:

1- Intensity of information: lots of these videos are very short (less than 5 minutes) and they are packed with (new) information. Take the sled dogs video for example. Within 25 seconds you ingest more than 15 new pieces of information.  Of course this number varies depending on a person's previous knowledge.

2- Because these videos are very short, we tend to watch few videos one after another because we don't feel that we 'received' enough knowledge.

3- We don't control the flow of information. When you are reading an article or a book, you can read as fast or as slow as you want. You can stop, think, continue, go back, etc. You control how much information you get.

But the question is: do we really need to memorize these videos? Now I'm not talking about memorizing them 100%, I'm talking about being able to understand the video and summarize it to someone else. Otherwise, in my opinion, watching the video is more less meaningless. What's the value if you watch a video and cannot take new knowledge from it. These bits of information we get from watching videos is what make our knowledge grow. What makes new ideas form.

If you are like me and you want to remember more than the title of the video then I have a solution for you. Well, it's a very old solution that you might have used it in school. Take notes! And take them by using pen and paper. I'm not talking here about notes that you can come back to later. I'm just talking about writing the new info you get without thinking about how good your handwriting is or how organized your notes are. The very act of writing these notes will help you commit this new information to memory.