Abdullah Shihipar
Appearances
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
Watching something on TV doesn't necessarily require much of your brain. I find there's a bigger, I call it, quote unquote, like a mental load when you're starting a new book or you're approaching a new book. And it just feels like this insurmountable mountain, whereas with Scrolling, you just kind of like scroll, you see the news, scroll, scroll, scroll.
It's Been a Minute
Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
But there's actually studies that show that reading a book, reading physical media is, for lack of a better term, superior than reading on a screen. Why this is, I'm not really sure. But there's some hypotheses. I think there was one UCLA researcher, I think her name's Marianne Wolfe. Her hypothesis is that a lot of the reading we do on screen, implicitly, we are skimming.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
People retain information a lot better when they've read it on a physical medium than when they read it on a screen-based medium. So it's not even just like television and movies. Screens can have an impact even in terms of reading articles and whatever we may be reading on the computer or the iPad.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
I grew up on a diet of PBS kids. So we grew up with, what, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, Arthur, Reading Rainbow, and... The hits. Exactly, and they were all tied to reading in some way. I mean, Arthur had that, like, whole song about, like, having a library card.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
Reading Rainbow, obviously, was in the title, and it was literally just reading a book, but it also encouraged people to go to your local library. Public television, I think, is molded in the public interest. There are people with doctorates in education and stuff who are involved in crafting those episodes, partially due to online stuff, partially due to the vast array of
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
junk on YouTube and content that children can access. It feels like public television, and therefore the promotion of reading through the entertainment children consume has declined. Governments and societies need to take an active role in encouraging reading and investing the money to do so in encouraging reading.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
If you really don't make an active effort to promote it, to encourage children to do it, it will inevitably decline, especially as more things compete for people's attention.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
Yeah, I think if reading is going to go the way of sewing in society, then we are in big, big trouble. At the end of the day, you could pay a tailor. But reading is a fundamental way of how we think and how we interact with the world. And the idea that it's changing has scary implications for just how we think.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
I was looking up this study from Duke, and they actually gave people three tasks—reading tasks, writing tasks— They then presented them with reading comprehension questions later.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
They found that when they were using an AI tool to do the reading task or do the writing task, they found that the reading-assisted task, when they used AI, it was down 12%, meaning that there was like a 12% decline in people's comprehension. It was even more dramatic with writing.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
Yeah, so that's what I worry about with artificial intelligence, specifically for reading and writing tasks, is that When people get used to not writing their emails or using it to summarize certain large pieces of information, I worry that we're entering a phase where you have even less comprehension, even in terms of, forget reading books, but just not engaging with the written word at all.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
You know, American public education has been underinvested. And to really tackle that problem, to tackle the problem of illiteracy, we need to invest in it. It will take a real effort, a real governmental-wide effort to not just encourage reading, but to get people's literacy rates up. And to me, that should be seen as sort of like putting a man on the moon or a cancer moonshot.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
Like, people should aim, we should aim for the highest literacy rate possible. And not just highest literacy rate, but the highest level of reading possible.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
People who read books had a 20% decrease in mortality compared to people who did not read books. Stick around.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
Yeah. So one study that I found looked at people's engagement with reading and it looked at their longevity, how long they lived. And it found that people who read books had a 20% decrease in mortality compared to people who did not read books. Whoa. I remember when I mentioned that I was working on a piece at the time, and I mentioned that to one of my editors.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
She was like, there could be confounding factors, right? There could be people who are more wealthy, have more time to read, and what have you. And I think certainly that is the case. But this study actually controlled for those factors. It controlled for factors like wealth and age and certain things. they found an independent association between longevity and time spent reading.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
And this kind of works off the other sort of studies that have been done that showed that reading is protective of cognitive decline and is protective of, for children who spend a lot of time reading as children, it's associated with reduced mental health issues as adolescence.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
Granted, these are studies here and there, but they all sort of come together to make this broader picture that reading is good for your brain. And therefore, what is good for your brain is good for your body.
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Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
What I've been doing, because I like to read, I find it a pleasure in it, but I also think they're so busy. You find before the day ends, you just don't have enough time. So I've set a goal for myself this year, and it's been working, to at least do a minimum of 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the evening, and that way... You can just fit it in here and there.
It's Been a Minute
Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read
And my strict requirement right now, maybe it'll change later, is not to do a page limit. Don't get caught up in how much you've read necessarily, just that you've, you know, you've checked it off. So that's what's, I don't, there's no, there's no necessarily science or anything behind that. That's just like something that's helping me right now.