Created: February 23, 2020
Modified: February 23, 2020
Modified: February 23, 2020
reading is processing
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- One model you could have of reading a book is that the book contains information, and once you've read it, you now possess that information. The book has duplicated itself in your mind, so that the original artifact is no longer needed.
- Another model is that books---fiction or non-fiction---contain ideas, and those ideas are almost never built on exactly the same conceptual scaffolding that already lives in your head. When you read a book, the ideas that are closest to your current scaffolding may seem clear, and memorable; those that are not will seem fuzzy or meaningless. The experience of reading the book once might give you some surface ideas, but it will not deeply change your conceptual scaffolding---unless you are very young it's not possible to do that in the time it takes to read a book.
- The second model is closer to the truth but it's still not exactly what I want to get at. Reading a good book is stimulating: it is full of new insights, interesting ways of seeing the world, connections between concepts. To incorporate these into your worldview requires significant processing, reconciliation. The brain is very good at holding contradictory positions at once. Any position in a good book will be somehow in contradiction with thoughts you already had, in ways you might not realize. On any given read through, you will notice some of these contradictions and not others. Different aspects of the book will seem powerful. Each time you read is an opportunity to do more processing.
- You can only really learn by mapping things you read onto concepts or ideas that are currently salient to you (in particular this implies that they are part of your cognitive scaffolding, but salience is a stronger condition). Every time you read a book, different things will be salient, so you'll see the concepts in it from a new perspective.
- A related point is that communication is processing. The brain doesn't have the luxury of infinite processing time outside of our daily lives, so the stimuli you provide determine a lot of what gets processed.
- The corollary of all this is that I should reread good books. And not just books, but essays and other insightful content.
- What should I re-read? Books to re-read. essays to reread.
- External views on this:
- https://dariusforoux.com/re-read-books/
- the mind requires repetition: nothing sinks in the first time. This is why we practice important skills.
- the books don't change, but you do, so you get something new out of it every time.
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2101516/Reading-book-really-better-second-time-round--reading-offer-mental-health-benefits.html
- for fiction books: the first time we focus on facts and plot, the second time on emotions.
- https://dariusforoux.com/re-read-books/