People who are good at reading have different brains: study

https://theconversation.com/people-who-are-good-at-reading-have-different-brains-244786

by pseudolus • 2 years ago

158 162 2 years ago

erehweb• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

I was thinking of the same example for this article. Nature vs nurture arguments often need much more evidence than many can provide.

philipov• 2 years ago

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.

WalterBright3• 2 years ago

I know that 4 years of college rewired my brain.

smeej2• 2 years ago

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!

feoren3• 2 years ago

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.

hollandheese• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

ruthmarx6• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

amenhotep• 2 years ago

Your wife's right.

em-bee• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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)

ruthmarx6• 2 years ago

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.

disambiguation2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Vivid hallucination, or dreaming. It is a way to vicariously experience something through the lens of the author's narrative.

shadowerm• 2 years ago

This sounds right from my experience.

I read words all day, everyday on a computer. I have read hundreds if not thousands of non-fiction books but for fiction in the last 30 years, have only read 1984.

It is like a club that I am not dressed for to gain admission. I am just not able to get into the story. 1984 was different though because I think I was half in the story, half comparing things to actual reality.

It really sucks because works like The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace are just completely impossible for me and I know how much I am missing out.

All the great classic science fiction...tried many times, failed many times, know how much I am missing out.

parasti• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

The linked article doesn't make this distinction and only talks about reading comprehension in general.

i_love_retros• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

WalterBright3• 2 years ago

I can go several pages before realizing I haven't really been reading.

You're not alone there.

mxuribe• 2 years ago

Oh wow, i thought you were describing me for a moment there!

feoren3• 2 years ago

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.

WalterBright3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

My case exactly, except I'm still in denial.

OJFord• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

graemep2• 2 years ago

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.

bsenftner5• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

BenjiWiebe2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

lproven7• 2 years ago

I myself struggle with reading and am left handed.

I am a natural speedreader -- I never studied it -- and I have read accounts of several other natural speedreaders in this thread and agree with them.

I'm left-handed too.

I doubt there's any correlation, TBH.

btilly19• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Can you read technical text at that speed and understand it?

BenjiWiebe2• 2 years ago

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.

Xelbair• 2 years ago

i my case yes, but i experience severe slowdowns when reading anything written in verse or legalese.

btilly19• 2 years ago

Not on a consistent level. For example when I do a lot of programming, or when I'm studying advanced math, my reading speed will slow down. Just knowing what was intended is not enough - a single letter can really matter.

But if I'm just reading an average programming book, then basically yes. 700+ WPM is comfortable, and I don't try to measure exactly how much + it is.

prisenco3• 2 years ago

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.

btilly19• 2 years ago

No.

Speed reading is explicitly trading off speed and comprehension. It takes advantage of the fact that we need to see a lot less of the text to pull out certain ideas than we think we do.

I'm simply reading. In full.

mandelbrotwurst• 2 years ago

Do you find that your comprehension is as high at this rate as at a lower rate?

btilly19• 2 years ago

For everything except looking for debugging errors, yes.

treetalker• 2 years ago

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.

TrainedMonkey2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

I'd say you only read to assimilate info and not for entertainment then.

minihat• 2 years ago

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.

ACow_Adonis2• 2 years ago

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...

bitwize2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

autoexec• 2 years ago

To me it isn't just about comprehension either. When I read I think about what I'm reading. I'll often stop mid-page or even mid-sentence to think about related subjects or past experiences that have some connection to what I've just read. It takes me longer than other people I know to read something, but I'm far from the slowest at it, and to me, reading is (or at least can be) a deeper experience than just an info dump into my brain.

I'm sure some of it is ADHD or something but to me, reading is about ideas and I can't wait until the end of a book or even the end of a long article without playing around with them. Especially if it's a topic I'm interested in.

Even if speed readers can fully comprehend and retain what they've sped over, I can't help but feel that they're probably missing something.

btilly19• 2 years ago

What answer do you wants?

I can answer comprehension questions and get a good score. For example I got a perfect score on the verbal section of the GRE when I took it in the early 1990s, and this is the speed that I did the reading comprehension tests. I can read whole books, and come away able to find any passage after reading just a few paragraphs. For all intents and purposes, it's read.

I can't debug code at this speed though. Doesn't matter how fast I can read, I can't think for myself at the same speed.

lproven7• 2 years ago

I'm skeptical of claims like this. How do the claimants define reading?

There are many. I just did this one, the first hit on Google:

https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test

It said:

« Reading speed: 861 Words per Minute (WPM)

Comprehension: 100% of questions answered correctly

How your reading speed compares

Slow 150 WPM Average 250 WPM Fast 400 WPM Speed reader 600 WPM

You can read pretty fast! Remember that reading fast is only valuable if you're able to maintain good enough comprehension for your goals. »

I took my time and paid attention in order to be able to give dates and things.

I can go considerably faster. I read about 1000wpm or so for work, a bit slower if I am taking time for pleasure, and when I was a teenager, about 2-3 times faster than that when under pressure.

For instance, I read Joseph Conrad's _Victory_ -- 432 dense pages -- in 2 hours for homework, then wrote an essay on it and went to bed. I got a B+. :-)

Shorter lighter SF novels I read in half an hour, back then.

malux852• 2 years ago

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

freedomben3• 2 years ago

I'm a normal to slow reader so take this with a grain of salt, but I've noticed that speed readers tend to turn their heads, whereas normal speed readers just move their eyes and not their head. Would be interesting to hear if you try moving your head if it helps your speed.

btilly19• 2 years ago

No. My eyes pull in several words at a glance, and I just have a series of glances per line.

I've seen advice about continuous eye movement for fast reading. That is BS in my experience.

teunispeters• 2 years ago

I've been wondering if my own speedreading is a beneficial form of dyslexia.

xandrius• 2 years ago

Then I can glance at words in succession at 900+ wpm.

PittleyDunkin• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

freedomben3• 2 years ago

How do you go about practicing? Do you just try to push yourself faster?

I notice that my error rate (reading words that aren't there) goes way up if I push myself to go faster. If I'm reading something that is easy to guess at then it might feel like I'm blazing through it with good retention, but if the words aren't what I expect then it ends up being quite counter-productive

phaedrus• 2 years ago

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.

btilly19• 2 years ago

This all sounds very familiar, except that my coordination is not enough for typing quickly. That's because of an unrelated neurological problem though.

I'm limited to something like 40-45 WPM.

And the 900 wpm minute is simply about what I find comfortable for a story where I want to know what happens next.

prisenco3• 2 years ago

| my eyes make saccades and groups of words come piling into my brain

That's similar to a tactic speed readers: looking at spaces between words instead of the words themselves, which allows your brain to pull in multiple words at once. There's a pile of approaches and not all are useful, but that one is. Another I've found is quieting my inner voice.

Without doing any practice or any other speed reading methods, just doing those two things boosted my wpm to 500+ at 100% comprehension when I was younger. I was a good reader to begin with but not a particularly fast one. I stuck with those methods because they're effortless and I didn't want to lose comprehension by pushing faster.

And importantly most of what I read is fiction, and a faster speed feels as though it would ruin the feeling of stories that are more ponderous. I prefer the speed of the thoughts on the page to feel like they're real time with the characters thinking them.

jgalt212• 2 years ago

JFK allegedly read at 1200 wpm.

yodon• 2 years ago

Citation:

[0]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K7y2xPucnAo

btilly19• 2 years ago

What he did is classic speed reading - trading off speed for comprehension.

m463• 2 years ago

I think there are a lot of parts to the fast reading pipeline.

I know someone who had undiagnosed vision problems when young which harmed the ability to read fast/fluently.

I suspect that vision is pretty critical. To read fast you have to be able to visually capture quickly, chunk things together and feed them to further stages of the comprehension pipeline.

I suspect poor vision, poor lighting and contrast, bad fonts, flickering displays, distractions from other senses all slow you down. I also think there might be an age window to learning reading fluency that could be missed.

I read fairly fast (haven't tested it in a while) but I learned reading books, which have good contrast, a large high-resolution font and reflective lighting. I wonder if this makes my visual pipeline attuned to reading different than new readers who have learned on glowy screens, with small pixelated fonts, and competing with other non-reading distractions.

Might be interesting to give your kids physical books or reflective e-ink/e-paper readers to read in a well-lit environment and see if it helps.

bubaumba• 2 years ago

My brother and I both read around 900 wpm.

That's a great speed. I'll never reach because I have to read some paragraphs several times before I understand the article. Some times using pen a paper...

Anyway, you can still improve you speed with the same level of understanding by asking chatgpt for summary.

sandspar• 2 years ago

Do you read a lot? I mean, do you read the book quickly then rest, or do you use your extra time to read three books? There's the old story of how some taxi drivers will drive longer hours during busy rainfall periods to make extra money, whereas other drivers just hit their quota early then stop.

btilly19• 2 years ago

I do.

For example I'm currently following around 50 actively updating stories on Royal Roads.

retskrad• 2 years ago

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?

feoren3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Does this brain difference somehow translate to other aspects of life than reading?

anothertroll123• 2 years ago

Exactly my question. As somebody who reads a book every two weeks... I wouldn't say I have a particularly "better" brain...

lentil• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

neom5• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Is that because people who enjoy reading develop brains that are adapted to it?

neom5• 2 years ago

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).

dijit2• 2 years ago

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.

neom5• 2 years ago

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)

bsenftner5• 2 years ago

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.

dsclough• 2 years ago

After all that reading, got any favorite books / authors you’d like to share? Curious to hear

bsenftner5• 2 years ago

My favorite book is Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (the Glass Bead Game), my favorite authors are tied at Mark Twain and Philip K. Dick, and the book that I've read the largest number of times is Clockwork Orange, the UK edition with the added chapter of Alex being a senior politician. I also have an antique copy of Grimm's Fairy Tails that is not the one that got widely published, an earlier version from that 1800's that would be banned today, and that is very interesting, I'd call it psycho-sexual horror. My mother is 88, was a child prodigy, and has quite the antique library. These days I read a lot of memoirs and biographies, not nearly as enjoyable.

o_____________o2• 2 years ago

What kind of stutter, blocks/valsalva or repetition?

bsenftner5• 2 years ago

Words that begin with a consonant cause me to repeat that initial "ka". If I try to suppress that, it just gets worse. Due to that, I try to find words that say the same without a starting consonant, resulting in odd word usage that distracts from my points. Something kind of bad, if I'm angry, I do not stutter, so if I really need to express something I generate an anger to say it; not at my audience, but just will an angry state of mind and then I can speak without the stutter. People that know I stutter, but not my angry means of not stuttering, get surprised.

codeproject• 2 years ago

We are at the dawn of a new age of AI, where everything is set to change significantly. You read a lot, do you have any insights into what society might look like in the next 5 to 10 years? What kinds of jobs might emerge? What major changes can we expect? Will we even have countries as we know them? Essentially, with your wealth of knowledge, can you tell us what the future might hold?

bsenftner5• 2 years ago

The drive to perform independent work with AI will fail, too many easy means of triggering backlash, and too easy to create a stagnant rent collecting automation that leaves those automated in an aged rotting infrastructure too complex and too interdependent to replace. The path forward is integrated interactive AI that co-authors, co-works, and is simultaneously verified while collaborating rather independent work requiring verification that will not be performed with integrity after the fact.

TMWNN• 2 years ago

I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and I was able to go through War and Peace in 20 minutes. It's about Russia.

—Woody Allen

freedomben3• 2 years ago

Like all great humor, it's hilarious because it's true and points out an absurdity

Iwan-Zotow• 2 years ago

Tastier brains?

cbracketdash• 2 years ago

Reading is still the most efficient and quickest ways of obtaining a deep understanding of a subject. The emphasis on visual cues (namely movies and videos) in the new generations are quite alarming. I wouldn't be surprised if a partial reason why America ranks relatively low for standardized testing in younger children is the decline in reading

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

It is embarrassing how bad my younger colleagues are at reading; they have to have audio/video for everything and get it spoon fed otherwise they 'don't get it'. And it is fairly universal; what used to be managers and sales guys 'jumping on a call' is now everyone about everything.

nis0s• 2 years ago

I am left wondering if the differences in brain anatomy happen because these people read more and thus become good at reading, i.e., the brain is plastic, or these people have a proclivity to be better at reading because their brain is structured differently.

Unless I missed it, there isn’t much mentioned on plasticity in the original paper.

People who are good at reading have different brains: study

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