Slashdot Mirror
Online Skim Reading Is Taking Over the Human Brain
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Michael S. Rosenwald reports in the Washington Post that, according to cognitive neuroscientists, humans seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online at the expense of traditional deep reading circuitry... Maryanne Wolf, one of the world's foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the Web and hundreds of e-mails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse's challenging novel The Glass Bead Game. 'I'm not kidding: I couldn't do it,' says Wolf. 'It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn't force myself to slow down so that I wasn't skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.'
The brain was not designed for reading and there are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. ... Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. ... Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade our ability to deal with other mediums. 'We're spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scrolling and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you,' says Andrew Dillon."
The brain was not designed for reading and there are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. ... Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. ... Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade our ability to deal with other mediums. 'We're spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scrolling and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you,' says Andrew Dillon."
tl;dr
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Didn't read
Doesn't apply to me. Perhaps because I don't skim articles and read the entire thing.
No it's called neuroplasticity, here's a wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
As a culture have improved our speed-reading skills? I don't see how this is a problem, especially as a student who can apply these concepts and skills to textbooks. Disclaimer: I skimmed this summary and TFA may address this.
Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry sutdy the oredr of letetrs in a wrod dosen’t mttaer, the olny thnig thta’s iopmrantt is that the frsit and lsat ltteer of eevry word is in the crcreot ptoision. The rset can be jmbueld and one is stlil able to raed the txet wiohtut dclftfuiiy.
I've found that as I read older, non-digitized books, I want to touch the page to click on an obscure word to find its definition. I teach, and it's interesting/surprising/disappointing to see how many of my students never learned how to use a paper dictionary because they could always put a word into a search field.
All that moving and whatnot gets adapted real quick with NoScript. I can still read books just fine but looking at cnn.com without NoScript I can't do.
How many of you actually read each and every word of the tens, if not the hundreds of books and journals that are in the "must read list" hand to students by the professors in our graduate studies ?
Learning how to skim through the thick tomes while picking up useful info was the first thing I learned.
That was before Al Gore announced his "Information Superhiway".
Is this really something that's only been occurring with the advent of the internet? It might have exacerbated things, but we've already been doing this for ages with newspapers.
get over it.
I am a fast reader (>400words per minute), and when i skim a screenful of information or code I exceed this significantly.
There are some things which you need to understand:
* Reading may be fast, but comprehending may be tricky. If a page of code contains a tricky algorithm, it can take a week
* Classic literature (for which my speed drops below 200 word per minute) is not structured for being read quickly. If may be structured to model a thought process, or even a pattern of spoken language. Take your time to read it, and accept it.
* Literature often has dialogues, or reflections of dialogues. keepign two viepoints necessarily disrupts your reading speed. Books which have a lot of decription of though processes or viewpoints of characters contain more information. The more brilliant of these books manage to refer indirectly to the processes and let you infer a large part of what is going on (e.g. "Midnights Chrildren"). Obviously the limiting factor is not reading, but understanding.
I have been doing this since usenet days. I got hooked to newsgroups early. I was about 18 years old and this was 1990. I have not been able to read ordinary books since then. I can read technical books just fine. The kind that pack a lot of information. I have tried several times, but have utterly failed to read fiction. Something inside me tells me that I am wasting my time. Not that I don't waste time. I do that a lot. I watch plenty of movies, TV, hang out with friends and family etc. etc. and I "skim the Internet" a tonne. I have a good job, wife and two kids. It is not entirely clear to me how this "problem" is hurting me.
I always pore through anything I read. I remember learning speed reading around middle or early high school and hating it. If something is worth reading, it's generally worth fully processing and thinking about while you read it. It's no wonder I frequently find myself having better recall of things I read and more fully grasping what the writer was trying to convey than those around me if everyone else is just skimming and speed reading.
PARSE ERROR:
"Michael S. Rosenwald was so disgusted with myself.'
The brain was not designed for reading Andrew Dillon."
Wait, what??? Could you please write shorter paragraphs?
well, look ahead.
She could have just picked a book that is not boring.
Are you old enough to remember this
http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Ev...
I did the speed reading course when I was 14, still couldn't read Shakespeare, ah well.
Go well
skim, reading, brain, wolf, circuit
The brain was not designed for reading
It wasn't designed for anything.
And who's to say the invention of writing hasn't already had some impact on human evolution? I know it hasn't been long in the grand scheme of things, but moths didn't take long to adapt to the industrial revolution.
there are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision
Well, there are genes which have an impact on language development if faulty or missing, but are they necessarily "genes for language"?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's the fact most people have not read a book since school and then they only read books because they were forced to.
I had been learning it about 20 years ago; developing ability to cherry-pick key words and to absorb the _rough_ meaning of the whole page in a couple of seconds was one of the keystones of the technique. They promised it won't hurt when reading fiction, but it actually turned into inability to enjoy the reading itself. On the other hand, it did help to digest tons of technical books, so I'm not complaining.
That word doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
I notice this as well.
I enjoy recreational reading very much, but notice that I must make a definite effort to slow down so that I better appreciate the book.
SYNTAX ERROR
I read Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" long before the Internet even existed, and it was completely fucking opaque even back then.
licet differant, aequabitur
It depends on the book. I for one started reading Arthur C Clarke's Rama series, and I couldn't put it down.
They played marbles, then made a necklace with those beads.
It's taking over the brains of those who participate 24/7 in, for lack of a better word, might be called the Twittersphere. I'm not condemning Twitter in general, but the entire weltanschauung of the situation that people like Maryanne Wolfe live in. Anyone who doesn't exist in this false world (i.e. most of humanity) doesn't have this experience at all. They're able to read deep texts, and you bet your ass they'll be ready to supplant these feeble minds in the future.
The really scary part is that these Twitter minds lack the ability to see outside themselves. If it happens to me, then it happens to all of humanity. After all, all the people I know are in the Twittersphere, and that's the whole world...or at least the world worth knowing. Because if Maryanne Wolfe can't do it, that means the human brain is changing. Sad...but then again I find myself understanding why civilizations that have everything fall. It comes from taking it all for granted and neglecting the first principles that got us here...like realizing the world has an independent existence outside of you and your little buddies.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
God wanted us to read faster so we don't remember as much so we don't question his authority as much.
Even before the internet, there were books and magazines you typically skimmed through. You read a pulp romance and Ulysses at different speeds..
Dammit man, you made me break from reading the comments and into the Wikipedia article. Throwing my brain around like that gets confusing.
signature is pants
Given that this is the way the (modern?) real world works, I don't see it as a problem.
The only drawback is the sentimental loss of no longer being able to sit down and be completely focused on a single thing for any length of time. Whilst this may be a shame, the fact is that such an activity these days is purely recreational and probably impractical for most people anyway. Time has moved on and so should we.
File this under "buggy whips".
Skim first to get the gist and then deep read to really grok it and then I'll skim again sections I really want to retain. Trying to deep read the same material again within a few months just doesn't happen with me - my mind wanders.
That's why it helps me to read different authors on the same topic and deep skim and deep read each if I REALLY want to master a topic.
I was surprised when I was a kid back 25 years ago, that my dad could skim through text very fast.
He worked as a journalist, and as such he was used to skimming through a lot of text to find the good bits that he could use as leads and sources for his articles.
The difference to the Internet today, is just that more people are exposed to larger amounts of many different types of text, just like "text-workers" like my dad was back then.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I caught myself skimming the wikipedia article, and suddenly realized the irony.
I've always been able to switch it on and off just fine, even after spending the vast majority of the past 15 years sitting at a computer, on the internet.
I skim through things at great speed when they don't really interest me, or I'm mostly looking for specific pieces of information, but it's never prevented me from being able to change gears and linearly read something...
And I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a patient person (or particularly disciplined, for that matter) so it's certainly not because I'm making a conscious effort *not* to skim when I read linearly.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
It's not just reading.
I think I only ever sit through a movie from beginning to end at the cinema. I can't remember the last time I watched something on a computer without dragging the progress-bar cursor past a bit I found less engaging.
Online Skim Reading Is Taking Over the Feline Brain
Better title.
Maybe we are adapting to skimming, filtering, and jumping from source to source of information.
Given that this is the way the (modern?) real world works, I don't see it as a problem.
The only drawback is the sentimental loss of no longer being able to sit down and be completely focused on a single thing for any length of time. Whilst this may be a shame, the fact is that such an activity these days is purely recreational and probably impractical for most people anyway. Time has moved on and so should we.
Amassing more data from diverse sources is in no way superior to gaining deep insight/understanding by focusing on, and thinking through a particular topic. Have you ever had an argument over the internet with someone who doesn't even understand the fundamentals of what he's arguing about, whose response is to blindly regurgitate what others have correctly or wrongly posted elsewhere, whose stock reply is "But this website says..."? That is a product of this skimming culture.
When you skim sources, do you remember the details of what you read a day later, a week later? I know I don't, and I'll wager many others don't either hence the popularity of keeping bookmarks, saving files, apps like Pocket etc.
If we don't even remember the details, how can we ever formulate anything beyond a superficial understanding of what we skimmed? It's a safe bet that Newton would not have been able to write the Mathematica Principia if he skimmed mathematics texts. I'm certain you would not like it if your doctor skimmed his medical texts in med school. I don't think you will be happy if your lawyer skimmed through law journals while preparing for your case.
Skimming has its uses, but loss of focus is not the 'sentimental loss' you claim it to be. There will be times when you want yourself, and the people you deal with, to be focused like a laser.
I was skimming through some blogs the other day & realized I hadn't actually read any of them. No great loss, they were just blog posts. Another thing I've noticed is my book consumption appears to be lower than it was once. No I did not rtfa but I did carefully read the summary, carefully. It took direct effort to do it. All said & done, I am still reading complete books & now I am planning to make more of on effort to take more time to read.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Yeah, me too I would have chosen to read a second time The Glass Bead Game if I wanted to make that point, or maybe Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Don’t misunderstand me, I love Hesse and I read it all, ten years ago. Here is the flaw: anyone here used to read a lot and still reading a lot of novels or essays would have suffer attention troubles trying to get through that book, as “challenging” it may be, if his or her actual interests and questionings don’t merge with theses of the book. Yes the brain is rewiring itself when we’re browsing fresh news on the internet, jumping from “Nature” to “Io9”, checking “IEET page” on Facebook while writing a comment on some Singularity blog, yes we are constantly creating new neural pathways, adapting to our (virtual and “high frequency trading” environment), but maybe she would have better tried to measure her remaining attention skills upon some essay or novel she’d never have read before and which’d have presented some direct interest. For instance, I never read Bilbo the hobbit, I admit it, don’t kill me. I tried once I had eleven yo and I didn’t like it, and it’s still just not my thing, even if I “know” it’s a huge cultural piece blabla. I still would not get through it if I had to try now. And it’s not because of my new adapted skimming neural circuits wired for the internet. It’s just because I don’t care, as challenging it may be. I recently devoured Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifixion and made a second reading of Cioran’s All Gall Is Divided, without trouble focusing, even if I’m a huge and daily “internet resident.” I suggest she repeats the experiment reading an actual challenging novel/essay which could catch her interest and only If she did not read it once yet.
The internet "reads" like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books you find in childrens' libraries. You dont read those like you do novels. If you're having problems reading a novel after some exposure to the internet, the problem is most likely with the material being shitty, rather than "the intarwebz chanjed mah branes!"
All these people who can't read fiction because they can't skim it...Hilarious.
And yet sad as well. Makes me think of Mockingbird by Walter Tevis...
You may laugh, but I won't read novels by authors like Cormack McCarthy on anything but my kindle. Why? Because if there's a word I don't know, I push on it for a bit, and get the dictionary definition. Nothing has aggrandised my lexical ability as this humble feature.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Seems a bit ironical, the "research" on how people don't slow down to comprehend what they are reading is based on annecdotal evidence of someone's experience
NC
who where what when now?
Cognition ordinarily normalizes fragmented images, resolves meaning, and transfers information of nature between intelligences and surroundings. All reading is "skimming". We recoginze words as collections of letters not individual letters, considering the beginning and ends of the words more strongly, and this leads to our inability to see spelling mistakes easily, as in the second and last words of this sentance. The slower you "skim" the deeper the information you may be able to extract. There are patterns in words which skimming misses. Wordplay, alliteration, meter, even subtle repetition of concepts or phrases in different contexts, esp. for ironic or humorous effect; These do not lend themselves to skimming quickly. In fact, did you not skim the first sentence of this comment as one ordinarily does in reading, and miss the message the first letter of each word spelled out? One who frequently "skims" for such hidden messages would have recognized them. Point being: You are always "skimming" the information pool of reality, and humans can do so in many ways.
The brain structures and visual systems of humans were not expressly designed for reading, but they do lend themselves to it otherwise we wouldn't write thus. The development of written (physically encoded) language is an emergent process. Were our vision very blurry up close perhaps we would all be reading and writing in braille. There are no genes for language. As a cyberneticist the problem I have with such genetic reductionist statements is that they ignore that life is full of emergent processes at every level. Consider that the brain was not designed for verbal language either. There are structures of the brain at various scales which are described ultimately by genes (and their emergent process of tissue shape forming) which happen to be suited for verbal language. As was with verbal language, given time and evolutionary pressure (eg: selection favoring the more literate and wealthy) the human genome will express complex emergent structures favorable for written language too. Evolution itself is an emergent process.
While it is true the brain is good at quickly pattern matching among a field, the brain along with resolution of the eye and its near field focus are also very good at slowly picking out differences and concentrating on details. We are good at seeing movement of contrasting colors or brightness, and then zeroing in on the area of movement and picking out increasingly more detail to determine if said motion be wind among the trees, a prey, predator, or friend. If you skim a dense technical manual you will miss much of the pertinent information, just as ancestral hunters who only "skimmed" the plains, may find themselves on wild goose chases, or being hunted themselves instead. One could skim a manual or web page to discover the area one needs to focus, but in that subsection of data skimming isn't going to be useful so the other slower mode of detail comprehension will be employed. Furthermore, in "skimming" you may miss a critical detail and fall victim to a gotcha, like your ancestors may have missed the crouching camouflaged lion among the grass.
Graphic designers know much about your cognitive vision systems, and they exploit them. Drawing in the eye first with contrasting brightness of shapes, adding subtle curves, color, and increasing detail to draw the eye deeper or in the desired directions. You find the gaudy jittering "You've Won!" ad to be annoying because you can't help but "skim" for movement between high contrasts in your visual field and have your attention drawn to it... Yet there is no singular gene for this essential evolutionarily advantageous behavior. See?
Unlike when I "skim" a technical manual, fact heavy news feed or ramble heavy social statuses to zero in on information worth digesting, When I read novels when I read novels rich in artistic expression I do so for leisure and thus read at "slow" pace AKA normal verbal rate, or slower. I don't "skim" quickly then. Instead I
Skyrim reading *is* changing the human brain. You can't be subjected to the language of dragons without developing the ability to shout people off a cliff.
40ya most of us had only some other gray mass owners to talk to over whatever subject we worked on. the world has changed and now everybody has access the pipes - the result is that the average user of the pipes is well average (with or without a degree). The average human being cannot read with understanding anyway and does not see sense in going trough volumes of prose. It is not bad only different.
Which is why the Bible is so long. I guess I don't get atheist humor.
I could never read the classics in school for this very reason (pre-Internet, even!). I do enjoy reading, but it is often a struggle because I get into scan/skim mode. Reading stuff on the Internet hasn't required much change in my reading style. :/
I wrote up the instructions for assembling the Shapeoko (an open source / hardware CNC machine) and a recurring theme on the forums is people suggesting that such-and-such a hint / suggestion should be added to the text instructions --- and said text was already there:
http://docs.shapeoko.com/zaxis...
I did make the diagrams interactive, which at least cut eliminated the complaints that ``there are supposed to be 2 of part X in assembly Y, but only 1 is shown'':
http://docs.shapeoko.com/conte...
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Nothing has aggrandised my lexical ability as this humble feature.
But you still click "post" too soon... Would have preferred
Nothing has aggrandised my lexical ability as this humble feature has.
or, mayhaps:
Nothing has aggrandised my lexical ability as much as this humble feature.
You might argue preference of style, but life is too short to dwell on such trivia, isn't it?
... then skipped the rest of the bullshit.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Tru dat. I'm done reading books. Max I read the summary on Wikipedia and I'm done.
Ironically, I couldn't finish this post. I think this is what tl:dr was created for.
I've been ADHD since the 8th grade in the 80's. I simply can't read a book without skimming and turning pages when I come upon a section that seems boring. Since moving to unabridged audiobooks I'm actually hearing the whole novel.
...anyway, back to work.
If you give us a link to turn off beta on an article, direct the link to the god damn article....I've re-clicked the link to this article, from my RSS reader, and it gives beta every time - even after I click the link that returns the site to no-beta.
Fix the site and get rid of this 'screw up articles randomly with beta' crap - I'm not going to look around to search out, how to properly and permanently fix this crap - I have cookies enabled and everything, what would it take you guys to just store a 'beta/no-beta' cookie?
How long has this beta garbage been around now, and it's still not fixed?
No; GP was right, should have looked it up:
http://www.merriam-webster.com...
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The brain was not designed for reading and there are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision.
Nor was it designed for high speed, non-linear scanning of electronic data. It would seem that all this article is really saying is that the brain adapts to the input stimulus it receives. We already knew that.
I just skimmed the Slashdot description it looks interesting. It looks really interesting I'll come back to read it later ;) /sarcasm & irony.
I used to always love reading long books. Now, I do have to admit that I have a harder time keeping with reading for extended periods of time. It'll take me two or three weeks to read the Hobbit, when it took me about as many days to read it the first time. However, with the always-connected Internet and all, I find myself "reading" the classics, like the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, by listening to audiobooks while doing something that doesn't require verbal focus, like playing video games with the sound turned off. I can perfectly pay attention to the story I'm hearing, while playing video games, and in a couple days, I'll listen to the entire audiobook.
How perfect --- the quote of the day:
Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject -- the actual enemy is the unknown. -- Thomas Mann
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The brain was not designed for reading and there are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision.
Reading is language. It's the visual component of it. In MRI studies of blind people reading Braille they find that the brain uses the visual cortex to read no matter what activity you choose to use to do it.
As for the "genes" comment -- if you know of a gene for language, please, tell the cognitive scientists of the world, who are still desperately trying to figure out why we are genetically predisposed to acquiring language before we even leave the womb.
At the time, one of the most popular magazines was "Reader's Digest", which edited long articles into short three-page summaries. They did a pretty good job of it. They would often have a "condensed book" as well.
After reading the Reader's Digest versions of articles, though, it was difficult to go back to long-form reading. There's really nothing new here!
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
"Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways "
Author obviously never had a job (or understands the concept) where things called technical papers or refernece manual are employed...
Sorry mac, that predated the internet, the PC, and even computers
Ignorance is not a sin. Propagating it to others, is.
I'm retired, and I start my day by spending two to three hours reading stuff on the web. I have definitely noticed the effect described in the summary and have been a bit concerned that reading at a normal pace is so difficult now. I find that reading books aloud to myself helps slow everything down, allowing me to savor the stuff that qualifies as literature. I just finished The Silmarillion that way, mangling countless names along the way, but retaining much more of the book's stories than I did the first time when I read it silently.
I attribute the skimming technique (perhaps obviously) to a desire to find interesting nuggets amidst a vast pile of waste (or simply uninteresting nuggets). Now if we had software skimming agents that did that for us, we could have custom newspapers or journals that we could dive into knowing that the content was the stuff that we wanted to spend time on. Or perhaps simply have some kind of rating agents that went through the articles in front of us to communicate likely interesting.
Such agents would be fooled, gamed and even perverted by corporate giants for a while, but once created, the battle to make them work for the users would be under way.
TLDR
I can perfectly pay attention to the story I'm hearing, while playing video games, and in a couple days, I'll listen to the entire audiobook.
AD(H)D anyone?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I hope you eventually stopped to look up the definition of "irony."
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
I'm not sure why people can't do both. I tend to be very non-linear when I'm online and probably skim more than I should. But I can still sit down every night and read a novel or non-fiction book. I don't feel like I need to readjust myself or anything. If there's a day where I can't read it's more due to my mood than because I've spent the day skimming.
That said, I do think lack of focus and patience is a problem. It's frustrating at work to have coworkers gloss over an email and miss important points, even when I've set up a bulleted list for easy reading. Sometimes skimming works, but often it doesn't. And I think many people have gone beyond that to where they just read a headline and nothing more. Crap like Twitter certainly encourages that, as it's nothing but headline spam.
Isn't that pretty much what the article is about, that we're all getting a touch of ADHD because of our online habits?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Nah, the article claims that the internet is causing us to lose our ability to read deeply. It's pure nonsense. Anyone that dealt with writing reports and research papers in school using, gasp, dead tree encyclopedias certainly had highly developed skimming skills, jumping around through those pages looking for the pieces they needed to complete their papers with all the required footnotes and bibliography. And then they still had to read through more dead tree novels, if they were in the appropriate english classes, thus both skill sets were needed. I do both on a regular basis still, both on and offline.
Now what might be happening is that schools today have declined to the point that students are no longer required to read those more challenging novels, and thus never develop the deeper reading skills in the first place. Given all the group-think "learning" now in schools, this is quite easy to believe, and the blight (and savior) that is Cliff notes and the like along with mostly average teachers. It takes a great teacher to get students to actually read some of the admittedly dredge crap (Dostoyevsky, I'm looking at you for one) which at best is unpleasant reading and write about something that cannot be gleaned out of those abridged notes. There's many others, but it will vary by reader, which is why literature is such a great thing. Someone will love the Canterbury Tales, others will not be able to tolerate reading it by choice, Beowulf? Steinbeck? Hemingway? Bronte (any of the three)? But without exposure to the actual works, and the effort to absorb them, most will never know. (FYI - I threw in a mixture of authors and works considered classics that should prove challenging to any student to read that's not already read other peer works, I make no voucher of my opinion of any but Crime and Punishment, of which I feel I was sentenced without committing a crime...)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
My reading speed moves up and down to maintain a constant information density.
In a low-density text, like, ummm, Slashdot comments, I skim.
In a medium-density text, like a novel, I read every word.
In a high-density text, like a math book, I *study* every word.
And it's not something that I have to think about either: it happens automatically.
My subjective experience is that I'm managing a tradeoff between boredom (too slow) and incomprehension (too fast).
I don't tweet or text, but I skim through a lot of online news and articles. In the past couple of years, I've found it increasingly difficult to work my way through serious technical writing (e.g. research papers), math, or worse yet, my old code.
Yes, science & engineering papers are notoriously tersely (badly) written, as are most math and eng books. But these days I find myself almost unable to slow down and step through difficult passages. I gloss over the sticky stuff much more than I did maybe 20 years ago.
Maybe my brain is getting old. Maybe not.
Have gnu, will travel.
we soon skimming addition readers internet
she just hasn't been reading quality books, so abilities grew rusty. The issue has nothing to do with the internet. I still read large well-written books and have no such issues, everyone else should do the same, it's good for your brain 8D
I skimmed through David Copperfield by Charles Dickens in the 1990s before I got a dial-up modem. Only thing I remember about the book is Pegoty and Betsy and Agnes. oh yeah, Clara died after she married Mr. Murdstone. He is a creepy and mean guy.
The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them.
- Peter the Hermit, 13th Century AD
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... the present youth are exceedingly impatient of restraint
-Hesiod, 8th century BC
The art of letter-writing is fast dying out. When a letter cost nine pence, it seemed but fair to try to make it worth nine pence ... Now, however, we think we are too busy for such old-fashioned correspondence. We fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes, instead of sitting down to have a good talk over a real sheet of paper.
- The Sunday Magazine 1871
It is, unfortunately, one of the chief characteristics of modern business to be always in a hurry. In olden times it was different.
- The Medical Record 1884
With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion... The dreamy quiet old days are over... For men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel ... leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them... The hurry and bustle of modern life ... lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day's work done, took their ease...
- William Smith, Morley: Ancient and Modern, 1886
Conversation is said to be a lost art ... Good talk presupposes leisure, both for preparation and enjoyment. The age of leisure is dead, and the art of conversation is dying.
- Frank Leslie's popular Monthly, Volume 29 1890
Intellectual laziness and the hurry of the age have produced a craving for literary nips. The torpid brain ... has grown too weak for sustained thought.
There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.
- Israel Zangwill, The Bachelors' Club 1891
The art of pure line engraving is dying out. We live at too fast a rate to allow for the preparation of such plates as our fathers appreciated. If a picture catches the public fancy, the public must have an etched or a photogravured copy of it within a month or two of its appearance, the days when engravers were wont to spend two or three years over a single plate are for ever gone.
- Journal of the Institute of Jamaica, Volume 1 1892
So much is exhibited to the eye that nothing is left to the imagination. It sometimes seems almost possible that the modern world might be choked by its own riches, and human faculty dwindle away amid the million inventions that have been introduced to render its exercise unnecessary. The articles in the Quarterlies extend to thirty or more pages, but thirty pages is now too much so we witness a further condensing process and, we have the Fortnightly and the Contemporary which reduce thirty pages to fifteen pages so that you may read a larger number of articles in a shorter time and in a shorter form. As if this last condensing process were not enough the condensed articles of these periodicals are further condensed by the daily papers, which will give you a summary of the summary of all that has been written about everything. Those who are dipping into so many subjects and gathering inform
My company approved some technical training. So now I am watching the Ukraine news waiting for WW3 to breakout before I get to go!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I thought this was obvious. Other media (adverts) encourage DisregardBullshit agility, but the internet is a crossing point of sorts and you spend an awful lot of time doing mental filtering.
5-10 years ago I was a little bit better at digesting things like college textbooks. I was still slow; I'd have to stop and digest thicker nuggets of context since they'd be established onto later. Reading a legal document is little better than reading computer code, half the shit in there is "variables" (not just the literally invented parties) that are referred to repeatedly.
Nowadays I'd say that skill has diminished slightly, but still works the same, I just have to stop and chew. I suppose this MIGHT be of concern if your career includes reading thinks like sci/med/law journals/texts/research/idunno, and the time required is granted. However, most of us have jobs where The Man wants you moving along, wants quotas met and that memo or user manual or material safety data sheet read in 5 minutes so you get back to productivity. Even in our personal lives, where despite technological progress we must sell most our week, time is a premium and skimming is a valuable skill.
Everything I've written is old news. What I'd find interesting would be the shift in /writing style/, where we line up thoughts in a concise or convenient way when we want them read quickly, when we want to reduce TLDR walkaways, when we want maximum digestion speed. The "folding" of modern GUIs (tooltips, submenus) has penetrated already, and we're trying to find ways to more directly insert interruptions (like these parenthetical) or footnotes. Exempli gratia: Randall's "What If" posts.
-AC.Falos
I do a lot of reading on the internet, and have back before the WWW was popularized. I thought I had this very problem, since I just couldn't read large sections of text without skipping over much of it. It was genuinely worrying me. But then I realized it wasn't a fair test since I was reading Atlas Shrugged.
hint: The Medium is the Message.
in the article, which I will look at later, the feature that i most WANT TO see, is lots of pretty three-d graphs. graphs, that HAVE axis labeled in a clear, informative fashion. perhaps with color for the SEX of the subjects that were fmri'd. WITH labels on graph axis, even the most confusing graph, can become clear. YOU would certainly agree. human eyes are drawn not only to bright colors or rapid change -- other visual features can CALL and draw them in. a little offtopic, but ME is often on the upper-right of maps, almost AT a corner. further offtopic, benford's law says that most constants begin with 1. zero minus twenty-five squared plus eight is -617. a digital clock near me might read 1234, and the final digits of currenttimemillis might be 567.
A text to speech program.
We don't think linearly. Ideas spawn new ideas, and branch (like hyperlinks, right?!) to form a directed graph (like a mind map ... huh?) sometimes meeting up with other ideas.
Why would linear text be natural? It's not.
And the way humans have taken to hypertext like ducks to water should be a hint; maybe our brains are better suited to being able to follow ideas in a non-linear way.
I'll bet this is why I can re-read a (fiction) book two days after I finish it and still find it interesting and fun. Not surprising (I remember the story), but interesting and fun because I am really reading it for the writing. Am I screwed or what?
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Brains have not been "designed" to be "wired up" to do anything. Thinking of them in such terms is a pointless over-simplification. If you're struggling to read a book because you've been skimming the web for too long, stick at it, and it'll soon adapt itself back again. That's what it does.
This article amazes me because these people think they have discovered the New World. In the early 60's, my middle school grades, we used the SRA Reading program. We were taught both comprehensive and skim (speed) reading techniques. It is frustrating for me when someone thinks that they have discovered the "ultimate truth" when it had been discovered long ago by someone else in a more comprehensive and elucidated way. In this particular example, these people think that comprehensive and speed reading techniques are mutually exclusive and will most surely lead to disastrous, irreversible genetic mutations. "You can't fix stupid." Jeff Foxworthy.
Be grateful you made it back to this thread in under two hours. I am just now making it back after three days. Obligatory.
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