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Comment by brutus1213 | Hacker News Reader

As a teenager and young adult, I was an extremely good textual learner. I could gobble down book chapters and retain all of it. Then grad school happened. I had an extremely hard time reading scientific papers (where generally bad writers encode text in a crazy way for readers of that sub-field to be able to efficiently grok). Now in my 40s (and a professional scientist), I find it very hard to learn from any text. Videos and interactive conversations is my comfort zone. So I'd say Youtube is my biggest source of learning.

That said, I have wondered if my switch from being a great textual learner to someone unable to comprehend is due to lack of practice and my brain being lazy? I recently picked up a work of fiction from my kids' room and I was surprised at how hard it was for me to grok it (it was an old english book - Robinson Crusoe - so maybe it is the book and not me). I wish I was good at learning from all modalities again.

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Reading is definitely a skill that atrophies without use. We're all reading more than ever - but short chunks, or dense but linear technical work (like scientific papers or business texts). Reading fiction or dense non fiction (philosophy, heavier sense textbooks) requires the kind of sustained relaxed attention that does seem intuitively to be diminished by both lack of practice, and social media use. I'm trying to build the habit again, as I find my own capacity to follow through with creative ideas and work are pretty directly linearly correlated with how much deep reading I'm doing.

I relate to this, a lot. I used to be quite an avid book reader. These days, I find it very hard to focus when reading books. The allure of hypertext is just so tempting.

This seems like a quote that would be pulled into an article 40 years from now about how quaint we all were in the past.

Not sure what you mean. I don’t know if we where morally superior in the past. But our media consumption sure was different. For better or worse.

Also, I am definitely not the same person today that I was at 25. Perhaps I had a greater thirst for knowledge when I was younger…? At least the thirst was different than it is today. I also didn’t have three kids, and because of that fact I had a lot more spare time than I have today (:

Poetry and philosophy seem to be good at snapping my mind back out of web reader mode. The Bible too, but that’s sort of philosophy-poetry (or poetry-philosophy if you prefer).

Same. I used to read a lot when younger, then grad school happened.

I think it made me burnt out of reading.

I think practice and keeping up with reading is part of it. But I think a larger part of it is now that I associate reading with time management and stress. The brain is active.

I've had this conversation with others that went to grad school. It's like the brain can't read or learn something without constant pressure and stress to understand everything about it.

Personally I think so. Reading requires a high level of concentration and immersion of the brain, as well as a low level of noise signaling. Modern video, on the other hand, does whatever it takes to destroy that ability. Think of their pacing, music, manner of speaking, and occasional insertion of canned clips or memes that habituate the brain to strong stimuli rather than low noise. I think watching these videos subconsciously destroys people's ability to read - you can hold it for shorter periods of time and understand less.

I think the period that a text was written does have a big impact on how digestible it is.

Recently I've been reading William Gibsons sprawl trilogy and switching to that from things released in the past couple of years is jarring - the turns of phrase and general perspective is different.

What I find interesting is that if you persevere through the first few chapters you quickly adapt to the writers voice. Had a similar experience reading the wheel of time recently despite it being published comparatively recently

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