not every sentence in a book is important, but unless your strategy in marking up texts is to close your eyes and move the highlighter randomly, a highlight is a signal that the sentence was important to you in that moment.

why can't people reconstruct the meaning of a highlight? It happens because people don't have a reading strategy beyond "I'm going to read this, now".

pay attention to: whether you're doing Synchronous Reading or Asynchronous Reading and whether you're creating context around your highlights.

The most important thing to do to prevent Highlight Dementia is creating context around your highlights.

For every highlight that you make, try to also note down a couple of words on why you are highlighting the sentence.

The important thing is that you do more than just "mark up" a text - you have to create context.

Synchronous Active Reading, where you have your index cards, notebook or Roam database open alongside the text and immediately write down the quotes and thoughts you have.

Asynchronous Active Reading, where you only have your book/paper and a pen or highlighter.

Asynchronous Active Reading is much more vulnerable to Highlight Dementia than Synchronous Active Reading because the time gap between highlighting and transferring is often quite random, and even relatively short periods can lead to quite a bit of lost context, if you don't pay explicit attention to preventing that.

Highlights are useless if they're not liberated from their original location and enriched with your own personal context.

When you are reading, read actively and create context around your highlights. Then make sure you transfer your notes and highlights to your permanent note storage