[HN Gopher] People who are good at reading have different brains...
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People who are good at reading have different brains: study
Author : pseudolus
Score : 102 points
Date : 2024-12-13 17:32 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| erehweb wrote:
| Do we know if this difference is present at birth, or something
| that shows up as a result of doing more reading, like how the
| brains of London taxi drivers changed when they studied for the
| taxi-driving exam, which meant they had to memorize lots of
| routes.
| citadel_melon wrote:
| I was thinking of the same example for this article. Nature vs
| nurture arguments often need much more evidence than many can
| provide.
| philipov wrote:
| Nature vs Nurture arguments always suffer from a reductionism
| problem by assuming there's a dichotomy between the two,
| which owes its origin to a feeling of exceptionalism that
| separates anything Human from anything Natural. In fact,
| nurture is a subcategory of nature, and there is a complex
| intertwined relationship between genetic and cultural
| heredity. Trying to reduce it to a debate between one or the
| other will poison one's understanding before even getting
| started.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I know that 4 years of college rewired my brain.
| smeej wrote:
| The part where it talked about how the brain changes when
| people practice reading more made the title and first
| paragraphs seem like they have the causation exactly backward.
| It _sounded_ like they were saying "people are good at reading
| _because_ they have different brains, " implying some sort of
| unfair advantage, rather than that people who read a lot
| develop different regions of their brains than people who
| don't.
|
| I'm surprised by the number of adults I've worked with _who had
| graduate degrees_ and yet could not read a paragraph out loud
| on the spot and sound natural. I found out most of the reason I
| was having so much trouble communicating with them was because
| almost all our communication was in writing, and they couldn 't
| read fluently.
|
| It's hard for me to imagine completing, like, 5th grade without
| being able to read well, so it's a testament to their fierce
| determination that they'd been working around that challenge at
| such high levels!
| feoren wrote:
| > read a paragraph out loud on the spot and sound natural
|
| As someone who reads aloud a lot, I contend that this is a
| subtly different process than simply reading quietly on your
| own, and something that must be practiced. You need to set up
| a "reading system" and a "speaking system" and have them
| operate independently, like a drummer doing a polyrhythm or
| like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same
| time. You also have to throttle your "reading system" to a
| slower pace than is natural to fluent readers reading
| silently. They say that poorer readers "sub-vocalize" which
| limits their reading speed -- well, fully vocalizing does
| too. All this to say that you can't conclude someone is a
| poor reader just because they can't read aloud naturally; nor
| even can you conclude that someone good at reading aloud is a
| particularly great silent reader.
| jwiz wrote:
| In grade school when we read aloud (taking turns in class),
| I would be able to read my section out loud, but have no
| idea what it said until I went back and "really" read it.
|
| When I started reading out loud to my son, decades later, I
| finally learned how to "really" read at the same time as
| reading out loud. I also learned how to read ahead to see
| who was going to talk next so that I could do the voices
| properly. (Discworld books are great for this, because his
| writing really helps you know how to pronounce the dialog.)
| hollandheese wrote:
| >I'm surprised by the number of adults I've worked with who
| had graduate degrees and yet could not read a paragraph out
| loud on the spot and sound natural
|
| It's hard to shift gears like that. I can read vastly faster
| than I can speak so it can be difficult to coordinate the two
| on the spot. Most reading people do is silent reading, so
| this shouldn't necessarily be that surprising.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| When they were surveying readers vs non-readers, does the reading
| have to occur via books? Does reading text on the internet not
| count as reading? I've always wondered why this apparent
| dichotomy exists. I read quite a lot of lengthy texts, but
| they're often technical documents that exist on the internet. I
| hardly ever sit down in a quiet place with a book. Am I not a
| reader?
| tbomb wrote:
| I have this conversation with my wife (who is an avid book
| reader) at least once per month. I read so many technical
| documents for work, via my computer, that I often don't want to
| read a book for pleasure.
| ruthmarx wrote:
| Reading technical docs is closer to reading shop names and
| street signs than it is to the intention to sit down and
| consume a work of art.
| mingus88 wrote:
| I'm "reading" all day long. Code, chats, news, documentation.
|
| There's really all the difference in the world if you can sit
| still and focus on a good engaging long-form work. I think
| most folk are losing the discipline to do that, as we all
| communicate in brief spurts of async messaging and anything
| published for mass consumption is written at a 4th grade
| level
|
| I try to read novels in chapter length segments. It's hard to
| avoid to urge to context switch or get distracted
| graemep wrote:
| I agree that the big difference is between short and long
| form reading.
|
| i do not think this is discipline so much as inclination. I
| never had to discipline myself to read a book I enjoyed
| (whether fiction or non-fiction). Some books grip me so
| much it takes discipline to but the down.
|
| What this seems to show is that long form reading has
| significant effects on your brain, developing the ability
| to read long form. I am not clear on whether they have
| shown which way the causality runs: maybe having a brain
| adapted to long form reading just makes you more likely to
| do it. It could even run both ways?
| amenhotep wrote:
| Your wife's right.
| em-bee wrote:
| maybe listen to audio books instead. i don't read books
| because i would forget everything else around me, but with
| audiobooks i can do other mundane activities (like housework,
| going for a walk) alongside it, and it feels very different
| from reading.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| for some reason experientially is different, when i read on
| computer it's mainly grab some piece of data that im looking
| for. i almost never read books on computer, my desire for
| reading came after i bought a kindle - the difference is
| absurd.
|
| even paper books suck compared to kindle, which saves space,
| access to billions of books in a comfortable way to read.
| (can't read brother karamazov laying in bed)
| ruthmarx wrote:
| > Does reading text on the internet not count as reading?
|
| I guess it depends on intent. Reading a fiction epub in an app
| is different from reading HN threads with 500+ comments.
| disambiguation wrote:
| My take is that different types of reading affect the brain
| differently. Reading for facts stimulates the learning parts of
| the brain, reading comments stimulates the social parts. But
| Reading books, as in novels, is an act of immersing yourself in
| storytelling. It's not exactly learning or social, but it's own
| category.
| okwhateverdude wrote:
| Vivid hallucination, or dreaming. It is a way to vicariously
| experience something through the lens of the author's
| narrative.
| kurthr wrote:
| Yeah, vivid hallucination or dreaming with open eyes while
| reading.
|
| It's a hypnotic state. How else can you imagine a world
| while your eyes rapidly scanning pages of words?
| parasti wrote:
| I used to read books with ease but have had to limit my reading
| to online texts, both short and long form, mostly technical. I
| know for sure that I am not a reader anymore, because whenever
| I pick up a book I can't sit through it. It's an entirely
| different mode of consuming text, for me, one that I would have
| to relearn.
| johngossman wrote:
| I struggled to read books while I was working. When I retired
| and suddenly stopped getting hundreds of emails every day, my
| book reading ability--my general ability to focus--came back.
| I read a lot of books this year, including long novels
| (1Q84...much longer than it should have been) and histories.
| dingnuts wrote:
| The linked article doesn't make this distinction and only talks
| about reading comprehension in general.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| But what about someone like myself who is good at reading but
| doesn't get the same pleasure from it anymore and can no longer
| finish books?
| imzadi wrote:
| I was wondering something similar from a different perspective.
| I love to read, but I'm actually terrible at it. My eyes don't
| track well and I jump lines constantly, get confused about
| where I am, and have to start whole pages over sometimes. My
| mind also wanders, and I can go several pages before realizing
| I haven't really been reading. It takes me twice as long to
| finish a book as it does my friends, but I still enjoy reading
| and love books.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I can go several pages before realizing I haven't really
| been reading.
|
| You're not alone there.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Oh wow, i thought you were describing me for a moment there!
| feoren wrote:
| > My mind also wanders, and I can go several pages before
| realizing I haven't really been reading.
|
| I think this is an under-rated _benefit_ of reading. Would
| you feel like you failed if your mind wandered during a
| guided meditation? Can reading serve a similar function?
|
| This is one reason why I gave up trying to significantly
| increase my reading speed. Blazing through a nonfiction book
| at 700 WPM might make you feel like you've learned a lot, but
| you probably haven't really digested anything. Do you really
| want to uncritically ingest a nonfiction book? I've listened
| to enough episodes of If Books Could Kill (amazing podcast,
| btw) to no longer have any desire to quickly "absorb
| knowledge" from a book, with how likely it is that that
| "knowledge" is flawed in myriad ways. I now think it's much
| better to go slowly, ponder what you read, take time to let
| your mind wander (it's connecting the rest of your life to
| what you've just read), and be critical and questioning of
| everything you read. If a book isn't worth taking this time
| on, it's not worth reading.
|
| And for novels or reading for fun, why would you want to rush
| through it? It's for pleasure: go at whatever speed gives you
| the most pleasure. It's not a contest.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Some years ago, I noticed that I read less and less, and it
| troubled me. Then one day I tried on a pair of reading glasses
| over my regular glasses.
|
| I was amazed.
|
| The trouble turned out to be it simply got harder and harder
| for me to read, and so I enjoyed it less, so read less. Getting
| progressive lenses fixed that.
| kbelder wrote:
| My case exactly, except I'm still in denial.
| OJFord wrote:
| Very similar with me - I've never been a _huge_ reader
| (actually, I wonder in the opening stats how many are people
| like me humbly saying they 'don't read regularly' because
| although they absolutely do read a lot more than others it's
| not as much as they would like) but I noticed it was very
| fatiguing, I'd often barely read anything before I was
| yawning or closing/stretching my eyes, wanting to look away.
|
| Earlier this year I went to the opticians (it'd been a few
| years) and lo and behold I had a prescription for the first
| time. A very mild one, and I suspect it's the astigmatism
| that affects reading more, since it makes smaller fonts sort
| of 'fuzzy' around the edges, even though everything seems
| perfectly fine at that distance (or any other) without the
| direct comparison.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Could this be a case of modern screen-based dopamine delivery
| systems affecting your attention span?
|
| From personal experience, I find it much easier to get absorbed
| reading books like I used to when I'm on a detox from the
| tyranny of the screen. It doesn't take long at all; a day or
| two and I start to feel some recovery.
|
| Taking even that much time away feels increasingly difficult...
| But like going to the gym, you rarely regret it afterwards.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Also, people who learn to read very early end up weird:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia
|
| I was hyperlexic, and I always found it very bizarre when people
| said they had a voice in their heads while they were reading
| (subvocalization.) I think I read so much as a very small child
| that I was exposed to much more written than spoken language, and
| I never needed subvocalization (or left it behind at some point.)
| After learning a second language with very different
| pronunciation rules, I realized that I was not only subvocalizing
| in that language, but was also now subvocalizing while reading
| English.
|
| It struck me when I was reading a book on the operations of the
| House of Commons, and I realized I was reading "clerk" as
| "clark." The word "clerk" is spelled identically and has exactly
| the same meaning in both American and British English, but I was
| distinguishing them because I was reading in a UK context.
|
| I actually wrote about it yesterday; using a database metaphor, I
| think I turned the natural primary key of the visual appearance
| of words into a composite key that now included the sound in
| order to distinguish between the meanings of very similar Romance
| language words from their English counterparts. I had to read in
| an accent. I'm considering blaming how impossibly hard it was for
| me to pick up a second language on the disability of _not_
| previously subvocalizing.
| graemep wrote:
| Interesting, but I wonder about the causation implied by your
| first sentence.
|
| The article you link to seems to show a correlation, but surely
| a more likely explanation is that the same factors cause both
| early reading ability and autism.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I have a younger sister that was hyperlexic. At age 5 we
| discovered she'd taught herself how to read French literature
| (it looked interesting) and she'd taught herself how to play
| piano, and was surprisingly good... She was whisked away to
| special schools, and I've never gotten to know her. She's as
| distant as a stranger.
| 65 wrote:
| I always wondered if there's a link between handedness and
| reading comprehension. E.g. Left handers tend to use more of the
| right hemisphere for language processing. Does this mean reading
| ability is diminished?
|
| I myself struggle with reading and am left handed. It sort of
| feels like I'm forcing a muscle instead of using a muscle and
| strengthening it. I also have poor reading comprehension. I do
| read a lot but no matter how much more I read my comprehension
| and reading ability always stays the same.
|
| I also wonder if left-to-right languages are better suited for
| right handed people. Often my eyes will jump around the text in a
| way that feels like it'd be easier to read text right-to-left.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| There could be a link, but n=1 I'm left handed and read
| more/faster then all in my social circle (that I'm aware of).
| Arrath wrote:
| I'm left handed myself and have always loved and excelled at
| reading (according to various tests or programs in school
| anyway), not that anecdata is much good but there it is
| btilly wrote:
| What about people who don't just read, but have absurd speed?
|
| My brother and I both read around 900 wpm. My children only read
| at a normal adult speed, but both love to read. If I had a way to
| have passed on my reading speed, I would have. But I have no idea
| how to do so. And no idea how my reading speed is possible.
|
| I've met only one person outside of my family with similar
| reading speed to my own.
| bogdan wrote:
| Can you read technical text at that speed and understand it?
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Another faster-than-average reader here, I don't remember
| what my result was when I calculated reading speed.
|
| Anyways, I do slow down dramatically when it's technical. I'm
| learning then, and limited by my learning speed.
|
| When I'm reading fiction, I forget that I'm reading, and
| don't even know what speed I'm reading. I'm completely in the
| flow and the story is playing out in my head.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| > Anyways, I do slow down dramatically when it's technical.
| I'm learning then, and limited by my learning speed.
|
| Do you also find that this happens with different types of
| fiction, or are they all basically the same?
|
| Personally, if I'm reading someone like Toni Morrison or
| Marquez, I find that I like to slow down and savor what's
| going on. It's like ready poetry. If it's something I can
| read fast, I tend to find it's not something I'm drawn to
| spending the time with.
| Xelbair wrote:
| i my case yes, but i experience severe slowdowns when reading
| anything written in verse or legalese.
| prisenco wrote:
| r/speedreading on reddit is where you'll find people at that
| level.
|
| It's a skill that can be learned, but likely you self-taught
| and simply don't remember learning it.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| Do you find that your comprehension is as high at this rate as
| at a lower rate?
| treetalker wrote:
| I'm skeptical of claims like this. How do the claimants define
| reading? If we mean extracting a subset of information from a
| particular, arbitrarily defined block of text, well then I can
| read tens or hundreds of thousands of words per minute: I know
| how to pick up a typical business paperback, flip to the last
| chapter (or even just the conclusion), and skim for the 1-3 big
| ideas.
|
| But try to read a text like a complex SCOTUS majority opinion,
| or one of the Great Books, at anything close to that speed --
| good luck! Even trained and very experienced appellate
| attorneys can study such texts for hours, days, weeks, and
| still find important intricacies that require not just
| perception, but ingestion and digestion.
|
| As an exercise, one might grab any text and have one's computer
| read it aloud at 900 WPM. If one were to glean a single
| sentence, let alone the important bits, let alone all of it,
| I'd be shocked.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Anecdatally, I have two reading modes - full comprehension
| and skimming. In full comprehension I read and subvocalize
| each word, often slowing down, pausing, or even re-reading to
| make sure the meaning sinks in. In skim mode I look at
| phrases, sometimes whole sentences or even simple paragraphs,
| and move to the next chunk before consciously comprehending
| the previous one. Skimming effectiveness highly depends on my
| alertness level and works best with fiction or other media
| with low information density. For fiction books I can
| generally recount the plot and events pretty well.
| nottorp wrote:
| I'd say you only read to assimilate info and not for
| entertainment then.
| minihat wrote:
| Reading speed might follow a normal distribution near the
| middle ranges, but I'd expect non-trivial deviations in the
| tails due to dyslexia, ADHD on the one side and trained speed
| readers on the other. Perhaps this individual just falls on
| the far tail of that distribution?
|
| During my graduate coursework I sometimes read 100-200 pages
| of technical material in a day while cramming for an exam,
| and was able to retain it for a day or two. I'd believe it if
| some people exist who could comprehend and retain all of that
| long-term. Alas, 'tis not I.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think Dyslexia has a lot of politics attached.
|
| If 25% of people have it then, practically, Dyslexia means
| you are in the bottom 25% of readers, as much as the
| Dyslexia industrial complex wants to see it as taxonic and
| not dimensional. (Sure they say it has two subtypes and
| sure, maybe there are two reasons that make most bad
| readers bad readers, there are probably more reasons that
| are more obscure and too hard to pin down)
|
| Personally I think there are a lot of white collar people
| who are devastated to have a child who is a poor reader who
| won't follow in their footsteps (college professors,
| journalists, people in ethic groups where people will think
| you're a loser if you're a cop or pro football player,
| etc.) Labeling it as a disease makes it easier for people
| in that situation to live with it.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Personally I think there are a lot of white collar
| people who are devastated to have a child who is a poor
| reader who won't follow in their footsteps (college
| professors, journalists, people in ethic groups where
| people will think you're a loser if you're a cop or pro
| football player, etc.) Labeling it as a disease makes it
| easier for people in that situation to live with it.
|
| Isn't this just how all diseases and indeed all _things_
| work? We 're the ones who come up with these simple
| categorizations and labels to describe reality which is
| vastly more complex. The terms are _necessarily_
| underspecified and the boundaries between categories are
| _necessarily_ fuzzy. This is true even within some
| medical community that attempts to have more precise
| definitions of "disease"/"disorder"/"disability"/etc.
| and it's all the more true for colloquial usage of these
| terms. But yes, these terms do end up just meaning "any
| condition that is not normal that causes problems for the
| person experiencing it."
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| I'm another "speed reader" skeptic. After significant
| repeated investigations I came to a stunning conclusion: I'm
| among some of the fastest actual human readers. My general
| reading speed 300 to 600 wpm depending on context and medium.
| For context I was your usual bookworm growing up: reading
| ahead of level, constantly reading everywhere, always reading
| while walking, always getting in trouble for reading with
| other people present like at the breakfast/dinner table, just
| churning through books non stop. And yes I now read random
| scientific articles and things for fun.
|
| Anything above that reading speed I've started just
| allocating to bullshitters, or generally techniques which
| come back to "not reading" rather than "reading".
|
| That is to say people who choose techniques to try to speed
| themselves up through strategies like "skimming" (that is to
| say, not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or
| "extracting key points" (that is to say not reading parts of
| the text to try to game metrics) or their comprehension drops
| beyond 100% (that is to say not reading to try to game
| metrics).
|
| And that's assuming you're not just dealing with the actual
| frauds trying to talk themselves up in a penis-measuring
| contest or sell something.
|
| So yeah, I'm in the anything above 400-600 wpm is in the
| bullshitters club. And technical or difficult text is of
| course lower and can't be sped up.
|
| No inherent offence intended to "speed readers"... Ok, maybe
| a little...
| maximus_01 wrote:
| So you have decided anyone who can read faster than you is
| a fraud? Meaning you think you are in possession of the
| fastest non-fraudulent human reading abilities possible?
|
| Do you have any evidence of this beyond the fact that if
| you sped up your own reading you would lose comprehension?
| The person reading at 150wpm could make the same case
| against you.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There are people who sell "speed reading" courses which
| is not the same as being a fast reader.
| Nadya wrote:
| After wasting the better part of a decade on speed
| reading as a teen and using speed reading tools I can
| only find myself to agree with them. Remove multiple-
| choice questions and ask questions about the material and
| speed readers comprehension crumbles apart to such a
| degree it is difficult to call what they do to be
| "reading".
|
| There are quite a number of studies on this, but I'll
| reference a blog that does all the referencing for me [0]
| since their experience and thirst for knowledge that led
| them to later be an advocate against - rather than an
| advocate for - speed reading is basically a 1:1 match of
| my own.
|
| 500-600 WPM is the upper limits, 99.99% of people
| claiming otherwise are bullshitting, I always leave that
| 0.01% because some people are literally just built
| different and are truly one-of-a-kind (or one-of-maybe-a-
| dozen people on Earth). Anyone claiming such speeds is
| going to be under a lot of scrutiny the same way I'd be
| skeptical of anyone else claiming to be in the top 0.01%
| of anything. If someone tells me they're a Top 10
| Challenger ranked League of Legends player I'm not just
| going to take their word for it without some solid
| evidence.
|
| [0] https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/01/19/speed-
| reading-re...
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| It's not that I've decided based on no evidence, it's
| that I've never met someone in the flesh able to do it
| where observations are consistent with claims.
|
| Ignoring five minute Reddit or hacker News messages where
| people say "oh I'm so fast at reading" once you actually
| have to put them to the test: i.e. oh cool you're a fast
| reader: so here's a thing we've both not seen but are
| required to read and we'll discuss and analyse them in
| the morning. And you can judge how fast they are based on
| their understanding of the text and how far they've
| gotten compared to you.
|
| Eventually you start to realise that there's a mysterious
| absence of observations to the right of what appears imo
| to be an almost biological barrier.
|
| Then you start to look into their history: well I presume
| you've read a lot? And you try to talk to them about
| things... And they're generally not that well-read.
|
| Then you correlate it with other high-performers: PhDs,
| professors, learned people, people who read all the time
| and have a history of reading. And you see that these
| best readers who read a lot also tend to read at a
| maximum speed of about 300-600 wpm with any
| comprehension.
|
| So you come to balance these two hypothesese: there's
| speed readers out there, but they're generally not well
| read people and don't have a history of reading and they
| can't discuss much and they don't tend to turn up to
| discuss things when there's actual reading involved...
| But they can read really fast I swear!
|
| And you compare them to the people who professionally
| read, read all the time, are verifiable strong readers...
| And you clock them between 300-600 wpm.
|
| Beyond the whole "proving a negative" what's a rational
| person supposed to conclude?
|
| /This is making some minor possible exceptions for people
| like Kim peek, but aside from having never met him, of
| such people exist, my understanding is there's also
| genuine philosophical questions as to whether what those
| people are doing can neurologically be considered the
| same act of reading as what the average human being is
| doing in terms of whether they can then discuss the
| themes, contents and implications of what they read.
|
| Edit: and this is in context of people like me LOVE
| reading, so of course we've looked into methods and
| communities that propose they can increase reading speed,
| make people read faster, and are filled with fast readers
| bitwize wrote:
| I've been doing some anti-ADHD training on my own by reading
| a difficult book -- _The Left Hand of Darkness_ by Ursula K.
| LeGuin -- slowly.
|
| Sure I could bro down those words in a straight beginning-to-
| end readthrough and get a _sense_ of what 's going on. But I
| find that going back over the past few paragraphs is
| rewarding, as subtle turns of phrase reveal details I hadn't
| noticed.
|
| You could probably be trained to comprehend text
| electronically read to you at 900 wpm. Blind people using
| screenreaders, for instance, train themselves to understand
| text read aloud very fast.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Agreed. Like I can probably read these comments at 900 wpm if
| I wanted but if you put Kant in front of me I'm reading at
| like 10 wpm.
| jdougan wrote:
| Kant at 10 wpm?! Look at the speed reader!
| malux85 wrote:
| Do you think it could be a mutation that allows your eye
| muscles to move faster?
|
| My reading speed is limited by how fast I can move my eyes, if
| I use one of those apps that just flashes the words in the same
| spot my reading speed at least increases by at least 4x
| teunispeters wrote:
| I've been wondering if my own speedreading is a beneficial form
| of dyslexia.
| xandrius wrote:
| Then I can glance at words in succession at 900+ wpm.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| Speed reading is a skill you can learn; it just takes practice.
| I can't imagine doing this with any book I'm trying to enjoy,
| though--successfully interpreting the semantics correctly isn't
| the same as letting it "hit you", if that makes sense. For
| highly dense texts (think e.g. Kant) I can't imagine actually
| understanding anything at that kind of speed--at best maybe you
| could memorize it and process it later.
| robocat wrote:
| I suspect you can lose the skill too.
|
| I used to be a fast reader.
|
| I tried improving my Spanish by reading Spanish books and I
| would subvocalize the words.
|
| After that I lost my fast reading skill in English.
| phaedrus wrote:
| When I was still in school I scored over 900 on a reading speed
| test. For those skeptical how this is possible, I don't read
| linearly my eyes make saccades and groups of words come piling
| into my brain like someone dumped a bucket of Scrabble tiles.
| There seems to be a long "pipeline" wherein the words from
| different lines and different order in the sentences get
| reassembled into meaning. After reading something very quickly
| if I look away the information is sort of still "digesting" for
| some time.
|
| (I seem to have a good size memory buffer for this which no
| doubt has to do with enabling the speed reading. I remember in
| typing class classmates were amazed that the way I transcribed
| assigned text was to read a half a page or more and type it all
| out verbatim before going back for another chunk. Until they
| pointed it out I didn't think that was anything special.)
|
| I will admit that at 900 WPM I wasn't getting 100% of the
| material (albeit enough to get 90% on the comprehension test -
| which is less than 90% of the source material, just enough
| source material to reconstruct 90% of the gist). I was really
| trying to see how fast I could go, since it was computer graded
| and I could gamify it. (I did get a different text to read and
| questions to answer about it each time; I wasn't re-reading the
| same text.) Through this same exercise I learned my comfortable
| reading speed was 200 - 300 WPM and speed reading without loss
| of comprehension (just requiring effortful concentration and/or
| impatience) was around 500.
|
| As an adult I'm certain my reading speed is NOT that fast
| anymore, and I often find myself re-reading text I just read.
| retskrad wrote:
| Speaking of reading, if we simulate a theoretical person (who
| hasn't read a book in their life and has poor reading
| comprehension and speed) and that person has the goal of reaching
| a 700 score on the SAT verbal, how many hundreds of hours of
| passive reading (opinion pieces, fiction, nonfiction) would the
| person need to develop the necessary reading speed and
| comprehension base before progressing to the next stage which is
| actively practicing SAT verbal questions?
| feoren wrote:
| 0 hours of "passive reading". If you want to get better at the
| SAT verbal, you should start practicing SAT verbal questions
| immediately.
|
| If I want to get better at the piano, how many hours of music
| should I passively listen to before I start practicing the
| piano? None: start right now.
| abathur wrote:
| I'm not sure this is quite what GP is fishing for.
|
| While I haven't taken a modern SAT test, I'm pretty sure the
| ~verbal score covers a fair amount of comprehension and
| ~usage that isn't as easy to cram/prep. Since the GP is
| setting aside vocabulary prep as a separate phase, I think
| they're specifically wondering about how to build up those
| more nebulous skills.
|
| (Is your hypothesis here that just running over a lot of
| these questions is sufficient to develop reading
| comprehension at a level necessary to handle novel questions
| at exam time? Is it that just reading enough of these
| questions will teach you the comprehension? Is it that these
| questions aren't a great proxy for comprehension in the first
| place and hence it's easier to game them than to develop
| comprehension? Some of these might tick the GP's boxes, but
| others probably won't.
|
| To get really to the point: one of the GP's concerns is
| reading speed, and I suspect it's going to be really hard to
| crack 700 under pressure if you're having trouble even
| reading all of the questions/answers in the allotted time.)
| underlipton wrote:
| I don't know that the latter is even necessary, save to simply
| familiarize oneself with the format. A good verbal score
| probably just requires being rather an*l about grammar, logical
| argument, and the retention of information from the question
| passages and sentences. My 800 came well after I'd transitioned
| from filling my spare time with reading YA novels (Dune and
| Shogun would have been the top end of my experience, and I
| didn't even finish the latter) to filling it with sketching,
| and I believe that I took the test around the same time that I
| was copping Bs and Cs in English because I couldn't keep up
| with the class' pace on Huckleberry Finn. Lawyers in the family
| (and the many, many arguments with them) was probably my
| advantage.
| amelius wrote:
| Does this brain difference somehow translate to other aspects of
| life than reading?
| anothertroll123 wrote:
| Exactly my question. As somebody who reads a book every two
| weeks... I wouldn't say I have a particularly "better" brain...
| lentil wrote:
| I struggle with reading speed, and concentration in general when
| reading. No idea why. However, I love listening to podcasts,
| audiobooks, videos etc. at 3x speed.
|
| Using text to speech has also helped. No longer do I delay
| reading long messages from coworkers, or dread reading boring
| documentation. I just use text to speech. It works really well on
| Windows (my current work laptop), but unfortunately not so much
| on Linux (personal laptop) or mobile (too fiddly).
| mediumsmart wrote:
| I just realized that I immediately close a site when a popup
| comes - doesnt matter when that happens. Popup > cmd w done. _I
| do this at an absurd speed so maybe evolumutation is in play_
| thunkingdeep wrote:
| Aren't people who are good at anything in possession of different
| brains?
|
| I know a guy that plays chess around the 2000 level, but cannot
| read. I have a cousin who can memorize a deck of cards, in any
| order, in just a few minutes. Everybody has different talents,
| but who gets to decide which brains are worth understanding?
|
| We should be trying to combine and analyze all of the different
| ways that different brains have capacity for incredible feats of
| human accomplishment.
| neom wrote:
| I couldn't agree with your last sentence more. I'm, I guess,
| "quite obviously neurodivergent" (so I'm told), I have all
| these comobribities, like apparently I'm brilliant and xyz, but
| literally cannot do these other things other humans can do
| (read at 0.25wph, but audio books can't go fast enough). We'd
| really be great at building "society teams" if we could figure
| this stuff out at a more philosophical AND scientific level.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I dont think anyone is suggesting otherwise. The quest is to
| understand how brains work- full stop. This means what you said
| is true, as well as the exact inverse. There is interest in
| knowing why people cant do things. Why are some people face
| blind, suffer from amnesia, or incapable of complex thought.
|
| It all boils down to understanding a complex system.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| It's something so complex and yet so simple, the brain is
| just an FPGA. it creates the wiring for a task and the more
| you do said task the more it optimizes it, perhaps the
| difference for some people is just the ability to create or
| optimize the connections in a faster or easier way.
| cgh wrote:
| The article mentions brain plasticity, but I wonder how much of
| this is also genetic. Using myself as an example, I started
| reading novels relatively early, mostly skipping the entire YA
| genre. I clearly remember reading "Jaws", which is definitely not
| meant for children, when I was eight years old.
|
| Does precocious reading mean the left anterior part of the
| temporal lobe and the Heschl's gyrus are already larger/thicker
| to begin with in some people? Or do they develop rapidly in
| response to reading as a stimulus?
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Is that because people who enjoy reading develop brains that are
| adapted to it?
| neom wrote:
| I have pretty damn sever dyslexia and dyscalculia, I've followed
| the research over the years because of how very clearly
| "different" my brain is from the typical, my thinking style is
| all audio/visual (funny because spelling is linked to phonics yet
| I think heavily in voice). I've read everything from cortical
| thickness to neuroplasticity to processing regions, but I believe
| the best correlation they found so far is around the depth of
| mini columns (interestingly also associated with autism
| research).
| dijit wrote:
| My father once referenced the "voice in your head" and I had to
| clearly articulate that I don't hear a voice, and such
| insinuations are sort of weird.
|
| I see words, as if written gliding through my mind as I think
| my internal thoughts.
|
| My father didn't believe me, and probably still doesn't; but it
| is interesting to me how our brains can be so different as to
| not even be able to understand another persons easy to define
| alternative internal experiences.
|
| I also always wondered if we all perceive colours the same or
| if colours are different to us but we just give them the same
| words- since colour could, in theory, be completely subjective.
| neom wrote:
| Yah what you described is really interesting to me, when I'm
| "in thought" I am for sure looking at movies and pictures,
| but the idea of thinking that way is super weird, me typing
| this right now is basically just commanding my fingers to
| punch out the words the voice in my head is telling me to
| punch out, half the time I just close my eyes to do it
| because I'm jut touching typing anyway (I actually like to
| keep my eyes closed generally when thinking), reading it
| looking at the word, making my brain remember what the word
| sounds like, making the word sound using the voice in my
| mind, thinking about the voice in my mind, reading is VERY
| inefficient. On colour, my degree is in digital imaging
| technology and I have studied colour from the perspective of
| gamuts and profiles etc. Certainly we all experience colour
| differently. I suspect much like a real colour profile, there
| is approximation done between (real world light
| frequencies/real "colour") them and mixing them, it would
| make sense there is some compression and "fixing" in the
| "brain gamut" as well. Blue is between about 450 and 495
| nanometers, never mind the neurology, the physiological
| difference between us alone to account for that, nature is
| magic but I'm not sure it's perfect? My totally unsintific
| just from hours of doing colour correction with various
| humans, is maybe a 1%ish difference in shade, and somthing
| about where in the colour range it falls also has a
| variance/tipping point (dress colour thing?)
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-gamut_RGB_color_space)
| dijit wrote:
| > me typing this right now is basically just commanding my
| fingers to punch out the words the voice in my head is
| telling me to punch out.
|
| That sounds really annoying, but I would assume that you
| could transcribe what someone is saying out loud while
| continuing to listen? I would find that extremely
| difficult.
|
| In my mind when I'm typing out letters its a little similar
| to those typing games[0] where you see a word and punch it
| down letter by letter. In my head it goes bolder when I
| wrote a letter of a word I'm putting down. This makes it
| very easy to transcribe documents - an unnecessary skill in
| the age of OCR. I doubt there is any other advantage of
| this quirk, other than it seems that spelling seems to be
| easier for me than others on the internet.
|
| If I had to listen to someone I would have to pause while
| my brain processed it into text and only then could I
| continue.
|
| [0]: https://zty.pe/
| neom wrote:
| I never thought about that but yeah, I can transcribe
| what someone is saying and listening at the same time I
| think I could do a good job of being a "dumb pipe" too
| just taking what they say and very quickly saying it out
| loud. I also sometimes watch the news while listening to
| music my wife finds that totally bonkers.
|
| Your thing seems cool but yeah, I can't imagine it and
| trying to imagine it is, annoying. You would have made a
| good lawyer, if you're not one already. The lawyers I
| know who are world class can both do what you can do +
| are also just intelligent/smart/fast. Oh I guess maybe
| you're a SWE? I guess a "10x" SWE is probably doing this
| too, it's why I never made it in comp sci.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I'm finding this extremely interesting. I'm a reading outlier, I
| have a stutter which makes it difficult to hold conversations
| with fast talkers, so I gave up trying during early elementary
| and started reading novels. I really got into reading, to the
| point by the end of 4th grade I'd read every single Nobel
| Literature winner at that time. By the end of middle school I was
| running out of authors I liked to read. Today, at age 60, I have
| pretty much finished reading every author I like, and of their
| better novels and essays I have read them dozens of times.
|
| The result of all this reading is I have, for lack of a better
| way to describe this to the HN audience, I have a gargantuan
| context. I can hold a huge amount of information in my head at
| once, and work with it dynamically. When I imagine a software
| issue, I see it as parallel implementations in my mind with
| variations between them, and as I evaluate the variations those
| that are not possible or no functionally better than the others
| disappear from the grid in my mind, and when there is only one
| left I start coding.
|
| However, I find explaining my software development process to
| others impossible. They say what I'm doing is not possible, or
| they say I'm lying. I think all this reading gave me an over
| developed sense of secondary consideration insight. I simply see
| further the implications of things, of how their combinations are
| going to affect one another. But as hard as I try, I cannot
| explain these insights in a convincing manner. It's like being
| aware a tower is going to collapse, I can tell people how it will
| happen, and they just deny it, and then it collapses. Sometimes I
| then get blamed for not insisting against their denials.
|
| Due to all this: I've become a student of effective
| communications. I'm continually trying to figure out how to
| explain to those that cannot see these combinations and
| implications of how in the future this thing is going to fail.
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