There’s No Stays Like Tome
The third point about the brain-enhancing effects of reading from my “Take Me to Your Reader” blog asserted that reading paper books had more benefit than reading e-books. This statement was based on a Time article by Maria Szalavitz titled “Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?” Maria writes about how she received a Kindle for her birthday and “soon found that I had difficulty recalling the names of characters from chapter to chapter.” She thought, nervously, that she was just getting old but then “discovered that I didn’t have this problem when I read paperbacks.”
Not many scientists have studied this phenomenon yet, but one who has found that, in some cases, it took more repetition in digital media versus paper to impart the same information and that paper books helped readers “digest the material more fully.” In other words, they knew the material without having to first “cue themselves” and remember where and how they learned it. The “knowing” promoted by paper-book reading helps you “recall the important facts faster and seemingly effortlessly.”
One neuroscientist thinks this happens because “up until the rise of the web, the mechanisms for information storage were largely spatial and could be navigated, thereby tapping into our innate navigation capabilities. Our libraries and books — the real ones, not today’s electronic variety — were supremely navigable.” E-books provide few spatial reference points like the location of a word on a page or the page numbers of physical books.
Another commentator on this issue pointed to studies that show “that smaller screens also make material less memorable.” If you read on your smartphone, for example, you “lose almost all content.” Flipping through physical pages “is also less mentally taxing.”
What Maria and her stable of experts fail to mention, however, is the physical strain involved in holding a book in reading position for extended periods, especially if you happen to check out a book of 500+ pages from the library, as I did last week. I think I’m getting forearm splints from this, shooting pains down my lower arms that interfere with other critical activities like raising my coffee cup to my lips. Devices exist, of course, to remove this burden from your life, but most of them seem to involve inviting some version of a bulky, awkward table or stand into bed with you. No thank you.
I think I have a solution for this. Since larger reading formats supposedly enhance comprehension and recall, why not take advantage of technology I already have on hand: the 55″ flatscreen hanging on our bedroom wall. I’m sure there are apps to connect Kindles to smart TVs. Once I figure out how to do this, I will no longer have to punish my upper extremities with weighty tomes. All the words will be right there in front of me in HD. I won’t have to risk paper cuts by turning pages either, since I can just set the Kindle TV to scroll at a comfortable reading pace. I can set the TV lighting to nightshade to avoid eye stress, and, should my eyes get tired anyway, I can close them after asking the Kindle to read to me. And even better, being read to before going to sleep also has brain benefits such as improved logic skills and lower stress levels. These mostly apply to infants, but I’m regressing rapidly in that direction anyway, so what the heck. I’ll just put on “Big Fat Hen” or “Pass the Celery, Ellery!” tonight and see what happens. If I remember who and where I am immediately upon waking tomorrow, something that happens less and less often, I’ll consider the experiment a success.
Image: Burgundian author and scribe Jean Miélot, from his Miracles de Notre Dame, 15th century. Public Domain.
