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

One of the things I thought was interesting about what he was talking about when you look at sort of literate versus illiterate people is that the illiterate people tend to be sort of... It's almost like they're living more in the here and now and that they're often connecting things very much to... matched

sort of concrete things in the sort of real, often visual environment. matched

And he's done work on this himself. matched

And he was talking about, say, if you draw a circle, an illiterate person might say, oh, that's a plate or that's the moon. matched

And say, if you asked people to point out what the similarities are between, say, a fish and a bird, matched

A literate person might say, well, you know, they're both animals. matched

Because we're used to sort of abstract labels. matched

We're used to categorizing. matched

But a literate person might say, well, you know, a fish lives in water. matched

And if a bird was thirsty, it might want some water. matched

So that is the connection there. matched

And so there is this sense that without the sort of literacy, you're constantly bringing things back to the world in front of you, which actually sounds really valuable. matched

But I think... matched

you're not doing so much of this ability where you can have these more abstract thoughts. matched

There's certainly some evidence out there that people are reading less, but it's a little bit mixed, right? matched

I mean, in 2025, there was a YouGov poll, and it was quite staggering. matched

It was a YouGov poll of Britons, and it found that 40% of Britons had not read a single book in the past 12 months. matched

A month or so ago, there was a US survey out which said that a third of those people who took part were reading less than they were a decade ago. matched

There's some other data pointing in the other direction. matched

I mean, another survey of kids in the UK found that about one in five kids in their spare time would turn to reading. matched

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