How to Retain Information From Audiobooks: 8 Habits Backed by Research

To remember more of what you hear, test yourself after each chapter instead of just listening again, space your sessions out, and keep your eyes on the text when the material is dense. Retrieval is the big one: in a classic 2006 study, students who recalled a passage from memory kept 56% of it a week later, against 42% for students who simply studied it again.

The good news is that audiobooks are not a weaker way to learn. A 2022 meta-analysis of 46 studies found no reliable overall difference in comprehension between listening and reading. But listening does make it easier for your mind to drift, and the narrator never waits for you. The habits below fix both problems.

Do you retain information from audiobooks as well as reading?

For most books, about as well. In the 2022 meta-analysis by Virginia Clinton-Lisell, which pooled 46 studies with 4,687 participants, the overall difference between reading and listening was too small to be reliable.

A 2016 experiment by Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal found the same thing directly. They split 91 adults into three groups: audiobook only, ebook only, or both at once. The groups scored the same on comprehension, both right after and two weeks later.

There are two places where print still wins, and both explain the habits below.

• Inference questions. Reading did better on questions that ask you to connect ideas and draw conclusions (effect size g = 0.36), but not on simple recall of facts.
• Pace. Reading did better when readers could set their own speed. Readers naturally slow down on hard sentences and glance back. A narrator does not.

So the gap is not about your ears. It is about control. Audiobooks retain well when you take back some of the control a page gives you for free.

Why audiobooks are easy to forget

Mind wandering. In a 2013 study in Frontiers in Psychology, Varao Sousa, Carriere and Smilek had 211 students read aloud, read silently and listen to passages, and asked at random moments whether their minds had wandered. While listening, students were off task at about half of the check-ins (0.51), compared with about a third (0.36) during silent reading. Listening also produced the worst memory for the text.

When your eyes drift off a page, you stop reading. When your mind drifts off an audiobook, the narrator keeps going, and you lose a few pages without noticing. Our guide on how to focus on audiobooks covers the attention side in depth. This post is about what to do so the parts you did hear actually stay.

1. Test yourself after each chapter

This is the most useful habit on the list. In the 2006 study by Roediger and Karpicke in Psychological Science, 120 students read short passages and then either studied them again or wrote down everything they could remember.

• After 5 minutes, restudying looked better: 81% versus 75%.
• After 2 days, the recall group pulled ahead: 68% versus 54%.
• After 1 week, the recall group remembered 56% versus 42%.

In a second experiment, students who studied once and recalled three times forgot only 14% of what they knew over the week. Students who studied four times forgot 52%. The restudy group was also the most confident it would remember. Rereading, or relistening, feels like learning more than it is.

Does this work for audio? Yes. In a 2024 study in Sleep Advances, 114 students listened to a recorded story. Those who practised recalling it remembered it more accurately than those who only listened again.

How to do it: pause at the end of each chapter and say or jot down the three most important things that happened or were argued. Thirty seconds is enough. Then check, and replay what you missed.

2. Space your listening out

Spreading study over several sessions beats cramming it into one. A 2006 review by Cepeda and colleagues, covering 317 experiments, found the spacing advantage held across tasks and grew with longer gaps. In studies that tested memory a month or more later, spacing gave an average benefit of about 15%.

For audiobooks, that means a chapter a day often beats a six-hour binge if you want to remember the content, not just finish it. Before each session, take one minute to recall where you left off. That turns the start of every session into a free retrieval test.

3. Read along when the book is dense

For hard non-fiction, having the words in front of you helps. A 2012 meta-analysis by Adesope and Nesbit, covering 57 studies, found that people who got spoken and written text together learned more than people who only heard it. The advantage held for readers new to the topic and for material that moved at a fixed pace, which is exactly what an audiobook is.

Be realistic about the size of the effect. Compared with reading at your own pace, adding audio makes little difference, as a 2023 meta-analysis of 30 studies by Clinton-Lisell found. Reading along mostly helps compared with listening alone, because it brings back the two things listening lacks: something for your eyes to do, and a way to see exactly where you are. We look at when reading along helps and when it gets in the way in more detail.

That is the problem we built HushBook for. It highlights each word of an audiobook as the narrator says it, so in a dense chapter you can follow the text instead of trusting your ears alone.

4. Rewind the moment you drift

Don't push on and hope the context fills itself in. Go back to the last sentence you clearly remember. Studies of learning from narrated lessons, summarized in a 2019 meta-analysis by Rey and colleagues of 56 investigations, found that breaking material into learner-controlled chunks improved both retention and understanding, with lower mental effort.

Those studies used short multimedia lessons, not audiobooks, so treat this as a sensible principle rather than proof. But it matches the reading research: control over pace is where print gets its edge.

5. Keep the speed where you can still explain it

Faster is fine up to a point. In a 2022 study by Murphy and colleagues at UCLA, 231 students watched lecture videos at 1x, 1.5x, 2x or 2.5x. Comprehension was similar up to 2x and dropped at 2.5x. Watching once at 1x was about as good as watching twice in a row at 2x.

Those were videos with visuals, not audiobooks, so take the exact numbers loosely. A simple test works better than any rule: if you cannot summarize the last chapter, slow down. We go deeper in what speed to listen to audiobooks at.

6. Do only simple tasks while you listen

Listening while doing something that needs thought costs you. In a 2010 study by Becic and colleagues, 96 pairs of people talked while one of them drove a simulator. Drivers remembered less of the stories they were told while driving, because they rightly put the road first.

Walking, washing up and folding laundry are fine for stories. For a book you want to learn from, choose a time when your mind is free, or save the important chapters for those moments.

7. Catch key lines as you hear them

Notes help, but how you take them matters less than the popular advice suggests. The well-known 2014 finding that handwritten notes beat laptop notes did not hold up: two direct replications, by Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson in 2019 and by Urry and colleagues in 2021, found no reliable difference in test scores.

What does seem to matter is putting ideas in your own words, which is a form of retrieval. So jot a sentence after each chapter in your own words, and save the exact quotes you want to keep. Our guide to taking notes on audiobooks covers clips and bookmarks in each app and the research on what to do with them. In HushBook you can save a quote with two taps on the read-along text, without stopping the book.

8. Teach it or use it

The fastest way to find out what you retained is to explain it to someone. Telling a friend about the argument of a chapter is retrieval practice with a built-in check: the gaps show up the moment you try to fill them. If the book is practical, try one idea from it the same week.

A simple routine for remembering an audiobook

1. Before: spend a minute recalling the last session.
2. During: listen at a speed you can follow. Read along for dense chapters. Rewind as soon as you drift.
3. After each chapter: pause and recall three key points. Check, and replay what you missed.
4. Across the week: spread the book over several days, and talk about it with someone.

What the evidence does not show

• It does not show audiobooks are worse than print for adults overall. The main meta-analysis finds no reliable difference.
• Almost no study let listeners pause and rewind freely, so we do not know exactly how much that control closes the gap.
• Reading along beats listening alone, but adds little over reading the text at your own pace.
• Speed studies used lecture videos, not audiobooks.
• Recall practice can also make people "remember" details that were never there, as the 2024 story study found. Check your notes against the book.

How HushBook helps you remember what you hear

HushBook turns an audiobook into a word-by-word read-along. It transcribes the recording on your phone and highlights each word as the narrator says it.

• See where you are. When you drift, the highlight shows exactly where the narrator is now.
• Go back precisely. Long-press a line to play from that spot, or use the 30-second rewind.
• Keep the lines that matter. Save a quote with two taps and find it later, grouped by book.
• Set your speed. Slow down for hard chapters while the text stays in sync.

HushBook works with audiobook files you own, such as MP3 and M4B, and with free public domain classics from its built-in LibriVox store.

Sources

• Clinton-Lisell (2022), "Listening Ears or Reading Eyes: A Meta-Analysis of Reading and Listening Comprehension Comparisons", Review of Educational Research
• Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal (2016), "Does Modality Matter? The Effects of Reading, Listening, and Dual Modality on Comprehension", SAGE Open
• Varao Sousa, Carriere and Smilek (2013), "The way we encounter reading material influences how frequently we mind wander", Frontiers in Psychology
• Roediger and Karpicke (2006), "Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention", Psychological Science
• Denis et al. (2024), "Sleep and retrieval practice both strengthen and distort story recollection", Sleep Advances
• Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer (2006), "Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis", Psychological Bulletin
• Adesope and Nesbit (2012), "Verbal redundancy in multimedia learning environments: A meta-analysis", Journal of Educational Psychology
• Clinton-Lisell (2023), "Does reading while listening to text improve comprehension compared to reading only? A systematic review and meta-analysis", Educational Research: Theory and Practice
• Rey et al. (2019), "A Meta-analysis of the Segmenting Effect", Educational Psychology Review
• Murphy, Hoover, Agadzhanyan, Kuehn and Castel (2022), "Learning in double time: The effect of lecture video speed on immediate and delayed comprehension", Applied Cognitive Psychology
• Becic et al. (2010), "Driving impairs talking", Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
• Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014), "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking", Psychological Science
• Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson (2019), "How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014)", Educational Psychology Review
• Urry et al. (2021), "Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer's (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies", Psychological Science