Steve Yegge has a blog (his "Blog Rants" blog) where, once or twice a month, he posts a length (in Internet terms, at least) missive about some facet of programming, languages, and the software industry. He’s got a variety of good things to say, and I’ve found the posts of his that I’ve read to be rather insightful and worth paying attention to.

Anyway, the present topic. Recently, he posted an explanation of why he writes such long posts. In his defense of his blogging style, he discusses an interesting concept (albeit with no studied scientific basis). He discusses short-term (about 20 seconds) and long-term memory (lifetime), and proposes the existence of an intermediate memory bank, where thoughts are kept around for 10-15+ minutes while the brain decides whether they’re worth filing in long-term memory. An interesting hypothesis, and I can definitely see what he’s saying and where he’s getting it. Even if it is entirely irrelevant as far as actual psychological science goes, it does seem like a fun and useful working concept and it has some interesting practical results.

He uses this idea to argue that, to get someone to remember something, it helps to exposit on the idea to the point where this mid-level memory is no longer sufficient for dealing with it, and their brains are forced to shuffle some of the information out to their long-term memory. In this way, something has hit long-term memory, and they’ll actually recall something you said.

So what does all this have to do with Scripture? I hope that you can already see at least a piece of the connection. Often, we (and I’m as guilty of this as anyone) read a piece of the Bible, close it, roll over, and promptly forget what we read. And according to James, we’re falling into a trap of hearing but not doing.

I propose that part of the problem is that we aren’t taking the time to wrestle with it, to linger over it. If we spend 20-30 minutes (or more) over a passage (or over Scripture in general), instead of 10 or 15, then we may be able to "blow the cache" and force some of what we’re taking in to stick.

So yeah, the theory may be bogus. But may the pondering of it lead you and I to soak in more and linger over the word of God for real understanding and change.