Cal Newport

Second message is from Brom.

Brom says, in some of your recent episodes, you talked about a pattern of read, think, write.

I was wondering if you could elaborate on the think part.

Well, read, think, write is a sort of a classic mode of, this is like a classic mode of information intake that scholars have been using since, you know, the codex was first invented.

But we're not used to it today.

In our current world of algorithmic digital information, we are consuming information more and more in a different mode that I call dopamine surfing.

And the way I think about it is our brain has been trained to be getting this like really positive feedback.

stimulus from whatever we're engaging with content wise.

And as soon as that positive stimulus starts to go down a little bit, we have to make drastic changes to get it back up again.

We skim, we swipe, we jump around to try to find something that gets us back up again.

We got to keep that level of that, that sort of like stimulation level high.

And so reading becomes incredibly erratic and very little information is actually stored.

And we've been trained to do that with our devices.

I think this carries over to almost any of the content consumption we do.

It's why like I'm trying to watch a documentary and you're going to see people having to jump on their phone because there's like a slightly boring part of the documentary.

They have to keep that stimuli high.

It's like a very distracted way of engaging with information and you don't actually pull nearly as much insight out of text or other types of media content.

when you're dopamine surfing, but it's what we've been trying to do.

Read, think, write is a different way of consuming, an older way that's different than dopamine surfing.

I think it's useful to point out exactly how it works so that people know what used to be just second nature, we can remember and practice a better way to consume it.