Headphones Not Required

jayparkinsonmd:

“Our brains were never even designed to read. This “technology” is something that we have to train our brains to do…There is a fear by many, Mr. Keller included, that these devices will wipe out our ability to remember and force us to become dependent on the virtual world. Luckily for us humans, our brains do not work this way. Research shows that the human brain is capable of adapting to new technologies in less than a week, irrelevant of age or intellect.

The human brain evolved for over 400,000 years without reading. It was just in the last few thousand that we’ve been forced to learn a new technology. We sometimes forget that concepts as unconscious as reading, was at one point, a new technology. I wonder what the technology will be in a thousand years in humans that doesn’t exist today but becomes just as ubiquitous as reading?

Reading

Good scholars need to be good readers. But who is a good reader? Often when we think of “good readers,” we think of speed—good readers, so we’re told, can fly through material. But that’s not necessarily the case. Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University and noted historian before becoming U.S. president, was dyslexic, so it took him forever to read through material…

Psychologists have found that many people who take speed reading courses increase their reading speed for a short time but then fall right back to the plodding pace where they started. Part of increasing reading speed is simply breaking through one’s comfort zone and forcing yourself to move through material at a more rapid pace. Perhaps the biggest part of speed reading is knowing what NOT to read. Passing over material that is repetitious or that’s not central to your purpose in reading will help you to get through material quickly (many books could be condensed to a single chapter). Lots of speed reading is, as Stanford statistician Persi Diaconis says, “browsing.” Browsing can be an incredibly useful tool, in which you scan material that you don’t have time to read in depth but get the gist.

Some people just seem to have a gift for reading quickly, being able to grasp entire sentences or even paragraphs at one time, instantly extracting their meaning. Howard Berg falls in this category. He is regarded as the world’s fastest reader. He claims to be able to read tens of thousands of words per minute and offers a widely advertised reading course. Another popular course in this vein is the SpeedLearning program. It’s certainly worth trying them and seeing if they help you. True speed readers, who are approaching a thousand words a minute read without subvocalizing (i.e., without sounding out the words in one’s mind). If you can read without subvocalizing, you are on your way to greater reading speed.

But the bottom line in reading is always comprehension. If you’re flying past thousands of words a minute and don’t understand those words, you’re getting nowhere. For this reason, our favorite work here at Super Scholar on the subject of reading is not one that stresses speed but rather one that stresses comprehension: How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. With patience and effort, carefully studying and applying the advice in this classic reference work will turn you into a great reader, regardless of your reading speed in wpm (= words per minute).

By the way, if you read just 30 pages a day, you’ll get through the entire 54 volumes of the Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer Adler and John Maynard Hutchins, in under three years. Slow and steady will allow you to read an enormous amount of material. Just cutting out an hour of television a day and devoting it instead to sustained reading can turn you into a scholar.