Cal Newport

Now they're working on it, but I don't know, I don't know how that's going to work, basically.

So I don't know what they're working on, but it's not something that you hear a lot in computer science circles yet.

So maybe they'll have some breakthroughs.

It's worth looking at, but I don't know how that's going to work.

Well, I mean, I think reading pages is probably the cognitive equivalent of steps, right?

So if you're a 10,000 steps a day person, it's like this is just like a baseline to make sure that at least my physical systems are being used.

You should have a page count, 25 pages a day, 20 pages a day of reading a book.

It just is like getting those cognitive steps in because I think we recognize more and more reading it.

I would say it's the cheat code, but it's better to think about it as like reading is the thing that formed the modern brain.

And I'm like, I'm more and more convinced about this.

I have a book idea I'm working on now where I'm sort of exploring this idea.

The brain before we had the Neolithic revolution, it was the same neurons, right, 15,000 years ago that we have right now.

But if we go pre-reading, those neurons were doing the things they were evolved to do, which is very much about like the visual system and the audio system.

And we could communicate through spoken language and that's fine.

And then we invent reading.

And this is not something that our brain has evolved for.

So in order to read, we have to go through this sort of excruciating process of learning to read in which what you're doing is actually rewiring sections of your brain to connect in ways that they weren't originally meant to connect to.

So we're reforming our brain when we learn how to read.

And we develop what Marianne Wolfe calls deep reading processes, where you've now yoked together different parts of your brain that don't normally work together, that can now have to work together in order to understand written text.

Once your brain is wired to do that, if you reverse this and write, you can generate much, much more sophisticated thoughts than you can if you haven't done this wiring.