Hamish Macdonald

I'm enjoying the sanctuary of having a book.

just a safe physical space for me to engage with a different narrative, fact or fiction.

And, um, it takes me away from screens and I think that's healthy.

I think something.

I think is worth kind of adding to this.

And this goes to Marianne Wolfe's research in the United States.

When you read a book, you know, if you think about the way you might do that on your Kindle or a physical book, you might read a chapter or two at night before you go to bed and you put it down and then you go to sleep and then you go about your day and you may not come back to it until the next night or even a couple of nights later.

In between those times, you're sitting with the information that you read.

you're thinking about it and maybe you're coming at it from different angles.

Maybe you don't think about it at all until you come back to it, but you're allowing those ideas, those thoughts, those emotions to kind of gestate.

And she says that by reading in this far more rapid, fragmented way where you're jumping between different articles and different screens and different platforms,

You're not actually giving yourself that time and that space to digest the information.

And so that means that we're consuming the information and not allowing ourselves to have empathy, to have a rational, emotional consideration of it.

You're not digesting the ideas.

You're not challenging the ideas.

You might just read it and go, well, that's the thing.

You know, sometimes if you really have a bit of time, you might read something and then the next day think, oh, I kind of liked that at first, but I'm just coming at it again and I'm thinking or feeling a little bit differently about it.

I don't know if I agree with that.

And then maybe you come back and you read a bit more and it takes you –

Like I think as humans, we kind of need that journey and we need the space and the time as well as the concentration to go on a journey like that.