'I'm a professor and this simple trick will help you read and retain information better'

With the growing influence and responsibility placed on AI in our day-to-day lives, plenty would admit, perhaps privately, that they've noticed a struggle within themselves to digest blocks of text and retain information.

Short video sharing platforms, such as TikTok, as well as AI tools which provide instant summaries of books, prompting people to claim they've read hundreds of books within a week, have impacted retention skills.

But, a professor at the University of North Carolina has shared a simple method to help you read masses of text and retain the information better.

Dr Jeffrey Kaplan teaches philosophy and has a YouTube channel dedicated to the subject, with more than 570,000 subscribers and has amassed more than 28 million views.

On the channel, Dr Kaplan highlights several philosophical theories and paradoxes as well as ways in which to improve your memory and study better.

"In order to retain what you read, in order to understand it and absorb the material into your brain so that you can recall it later...you need a procedure by which you force yourself to interact with the semantic content of what you're reading," the associate professor explains.

Semantic content refers to the meaning and relationships within text, beyond just the literal words, and involves understanding the underlying context and intent.

"You have to have a procedure that forces you to think through the ideas contained in the text," he clarifies, adding, "The procedure I'm going to recommend is a version of marginalia."

This simply means the process of making notes in the margin or whatever text you're currently reading, and has been credited as helping improve information retention as a form of active reading.

By summarising key points as you read, questioning the information internally and making connections when possible, you're more likely to understand the material.

Dr Kaplan added: "It's important that you summarise. If this paragraph is six sentences long, you can't just write six sentences in the margin. Copying over text, you can do that without really thinking about what it means.

"You can only take six sentences' worth of ideas and condense them down into one sentence...if you understand what they mean and figure out the central core idea."

The professor recommends you continue this for each paragraph, jotting down your summary of the details and then, when referring back to previous sections, you can summarise by rereading just one or two lines. This synopsis can then be placed in the margin to cover the previous set of paragraphs.

"That forces you to connect these ideas," Dr Kaplan contends, adding from the fourth paragraph onwards, each margin should contain an overall assessment of the ideas you're reading as well as a condensed version of that paragraph.

"Whatever you want to do [with your free time], if you want time to actually do that stuff, then you've got to do this. This is efficient, it will take a little longer, but it will mean the time you spend reading is better used."