Reddit reviews Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

I find audio to be much more efficient actually. I can fully keep up with audiobooks at 3x speed and actually find that I absorb more of the information that way than when I read visually. I can actually zone out and visualize what's going on in my head when I'm listening to something, whereas I can't really do that when I'm too busy focusing on the words printed on the page. I can actually go through an entire audiobook in one sitting, but have a hard time finishing any regular book within a month.

I'm a really heavy auditory learner though, and suffer from chronic fatigue/fibromyalgia, along with possibly borderline add (which seems to be a common INTP thing), so stationary reading and focus is incredibly difficult for me. I just cannot parse printed words nearly as well as I'd like to, even though I have a fairly solid grasp on the language. I even have text-to-speech apps and browser extensions installed on all my devices it's so bad.

That being said, I actually did share your perspective for the longest time, and basically deprived myself of knowledge because I was too ashamed to resort to audiobooks; they just didn't feel 'genuine' to me. It actually took a good while (read: several years) for me to say "fuck it" and just start resorting to audio as my primary resource comfortably without all the guilt. I can honestly follow highly complex technical lectures for hours when on video/audio, but trying to read a dense textbook just gives me anxiety and puts me to sleep after a few pages -- I have no idea why. I recently "read" a really good book that actually talks about reading difficulties and the development of reading in the brain, but I'm having a hard time figuring out whether any of it actually applies to me (despite relating to a lot of it). Awesome read nonetheless -- highly recommend it.

So yeah, I think it's cool that people can naturally get that kind of sustained experience with just text, and I'm totally jealous of it, but hell, everyone should just do what works best for them, cause silly stigmas like this are just annoying. I have to practice a lot to be able to even remotely match the level of engagement I get from an audiobook with text, and even then it mostly only works with simple stuff, so enjoy what you have cause I know my selection of material (that I can actually get through) is quite limited.

Food for thought: http://www.ldonline.org/article/6394/

Having dyslexic kids, I am obviously a fan of explicit, systematic, phonemic-based instruction. The way my mind processes the "reading war" is this; we all become whole word readers eventually, which is the ultimate point of reading instruction - reading fluently, essentially by memorization, without having to decode every single word. But, before you get there, you need a thorough, systematic, explicit, phonemic based approach in order to become that whole word reader. Those who excel naturally with reading will develop into readers either way; for the 30-40% of kids who struggle with reading development, they will only benefit from a phonemic approach.

If you really want to dive deep into the science behind the reading brain, http://www.amazon.com/Proust-Squid-Story-Science-Reading/dp/0060933844

We've actually been discussing this in class last week. I've been pondering on this, because I remember being suggested to be mindful of learning styles when it comes to language learning. My professor suggested reading [this book] (https://www.amazon.com/Proust-Squid-Story-Science-Reading/dp/0060933844).

She said that reading was a human invention, as opposed to, say, sound. For instances, babies do not need to learn how to hear sound, but humans have to learn how to read a certain language/character system (I'm not quite sure if I'm using the terms correctly).

Hopefully, this can be edifying. I hope to be able to read this, since I haven't yet!

If you are interested in how our brains process text in general, pick up a copy of Proust and the Squid.

The language ideas, if I recall correctly, are discussed in Wolf's Proust and the Squid. I think she talks about the brain activity needed to read kanji versus latin letters, and more genreally the degree of automatization / abstraction you can achieve with different language / writing systems. It remember feeling like it didn't go super deep but it might be worth checking out!

The blind painter is amazing, to the extent that, honestly, I do also find myself a bit on the skeptical side (maybe being influenced be that video of a blind man drawing a cat, which turned out a lot more like you'd expect...) It's fascinating question though. I'd tend to think that we do have an abstracted representation of spatial information that could be informed by any modality including touch. Abstract from perception anyway, not from the body or motor system.

I read a book a couple of years ago: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. The question you bring up wasn't discussed explicitly, from what I can remember, but here's my sense of it after reading the book. The speed at which you read most likely has to do a lot with how your brain formed while you were first learning to read, and probably can't be changed all that much afterwards.