Ian Sample

speaker

2,123 appearances 29 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 2d ago

Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.

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Science Weekly · We’re reading less. And it’s making us stupid · 11 Aug 2026 podcast

But chiefly, education. matched

Education has been a massive thing over the past 100 years. matched

And if you think, well, okay, but what is it about education? matched

Well, matched

The core, I guess, of education is literacy and at the core of literacy is learning to read. matched

And so that is like maybe a pretty good starting point to look at as to what literacy has been doing for our brains. matched

So I put this question to a guy called Falk Hertig and he's an experimental psychologist and he's at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. matched

He's done a lot of research into literacy and cognition and he particularly works in India where there's actually quite a high rate of illiteracy, about sort of one in five. matched

He was really interesting because he was saying actually if you look at the English language matched

there's quite a lot of things where you have to pay very close attention to these symbols. matched

And in particular, there are mirror symbols. matched

So, you know, B and D, obviously, are mirror symbols. matched

And so when you're learning to read, you have to be able to unpick and distinguish between these two. matched

And at first, we're really bad at that. matched

You know, one argument might be that we haven't really evolved the kinds of brains to be able to sort a B from a D. Like, why on earth would we have? matched

So then the question becomes, well... matched

How are we doing it? matched

What bits of our brain are we recruiting to do this job, which isn't something that we've been evolved to do over hundreds of thousands of years? matched

Yeah, and Falk thinks that memory is really where the main effect of reading lies. matched

And if you think through, OK, well, why would that be? matched

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