Becca

Okay, the longest novel in the world. I still think 13 million words sounds too many, so I'm going to go with B, 1.3 million. All right, we'll find out at the end of the program. Now, we might think of reading as like speaking. We're born with the potential to do it, and then we learn. It's natural. If something is natural, it's something you were born with or that comes from nature.

We think of language as natural, and reading is written language, so it must be natural. But it isn't. It isn't natural at all. Scientific studies suggest that when we are born, our brains already have the networks that allow our eyes to see and our vocal cords to produce sounds, but not with the pathways we need to read. Let's hear more from psychologist and neuroscientist Rebecca Gottlieb, speaking to the BBC World Service.

Deep reading is really fundamental to our humanity. When we read deeply, we change our brains and we change who we are. Rebecca says that our brains haven't evolved to include a dedicated reading brain. Dedicated here means designed and used for one particular purpose.

and the language we read also shapes our brain. Chinese characters, for example, use symbols instead of letters of the alphabet to represent words and ideas. Research suggests that learning to read these symbols activates different areas of the brain to reading an alphabet-based system.

And something which also has lots of detail or certainly lots of words. I asked you, Georgie, how many words are in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past? I said 1.3 million. And you were correct! The book also contains lots of very long sentences, including one with over 900 words. One sentence with 900 words, that is a lot.

Okay, it's time to recap the language we learned during this program, starting with natural, which describes something you were born with or that comes from nature. Dedicated can describe something that is designed and used for one particular purpose. If you co-opt someone or something, you involve them, sometimes against their will. A circuit is a system of connections, for example in the brain. Inevitably means in a way that cannot be stopped or avoided.

Halo, NMO.

I'm coming to you with a live rant about passwords.

Since when did passwords get so fricking difficult?

I know we have hackers and scams and all that shit, but why do I need to make a password that's 20 characters long?

Who the hell is going to remember a password that's got 20 characters in when it's got to have an uppercase, a lowercase, a special character, numbers and all the other shit.

It's absolutely ridiculous.

And it's really pissing me off because my first problem is that I don't know what to write that's 20 characters long.

And the second thing is when I think of something...

I'm not going to remember it.

I'm going to then come to use it again next week or in a month, whenever it's going to be, and I'm going to have forgotten it.

And then I'm going to have to think of a new one that's another 20 characters long.

What the fuck?

Anyway, rant over.

I've never sent a voice note before, but I love the podcast.