I don't remember much about Moby Dick. a. "Call me Ishmael" = The First Three Words b. Queequeg's Coffin = The Last Bit. c. there was a chapter called Cetology. d. Ambergris is (I think) Whale Sperm, e. At some point in the novel, I'm PRETTY sure someone puts on a whale penis and runs around. They're huge, whale penii, like 6 feet, easy. That's about it, and I'm sure Herman Melville (I guess I remember that too) woul…
The list that the OP read: - Checklist Manifesto - Made to Stick - Confessions of a Public Speaker - Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite - The Power of Habit I think the fact that he's questioning the value of reading such books is fair (and I find it ironic that he's applying such rigor to try and extract value from such books), but these are hardly the books of great literature. Self-improvement and self-motivation bo…
Unsurprisingly, this vacuous "argument" comes from someone not much committed to hard thinking, deep reading, or any of the other virtues of the humanities. At least I won't be bumping in to him in any section of the bookstore that I would be enjoying.
It is futile to ask if reading a book helps us, it obviously does .... only problem being ordinary human beings lack the ability reproduce the knowledge with 100% accuracy in the post reading stage. The question nonetheless is interesting because it makes you think which part of the communication channel (author to reader) is the reponsible for the information loss. Let's say the author has a good command over the language and accordingly can encode the X% of the information. thankfully the medium is not lossy, so the loss again happens at the reader end of the communication. Depending on the reader, this end can result from 0(throw away the book after a few paras) to X%. The reader end of the communication can be fixed only by the reader itself, solely by sticking to negotiating the protocols with multiple authors... i.e. read more to retain more.
Makes you wonder is the platform (written text) broken? now it's really really old, and if you pick up a paper book - how much different it is than picking up an Indus valley clay tablet as far the intelligence of the medium is concerned. Shouldn't the reading medium work in the background to understand the reader's distance from the text and try to embellish the reading experience by making connections of the book with the reader's reading history?
I think even if you cannot explicitly remember what you read, that's very far from them having no effects on you. (An analogy: you can understand scores of thousands of English words, even if you could only spontaneously use half or less of them.)
Ever since I began switching to electronic reading with the attendant clipping and searchability, I've been surprised how many "things I know" turn out to stem from books or articles I otherwise do not recall at all. If I had tried to estimate what I know just based on what factoids I could specifically remember learning from a specific book, I would grossly underestimate the value of my reading.
This applies to many things - isn't it even a common science fiction trope (e.g., Total Recall).
I'm at home. I go on a trip and have experiences which change the arrangement of molecules in my brain. Now I'm home again - the same except for some rearrangements. Why actually go on the trip if I could, instead, have the rearrangement implemented?
IIRC, electricity is used to activate the release of neurotransmitters (intercellular communication is actually chemical, not electrical); the more interesting things are what governs the activation potential, the weights of the inputs and the connections between neurons. assuming that you can modify the activation potential across an axon, you still won't change the relative weights of its inputs or the neuron's con…
>(intercellular communication is actually chemical, not electrical) Passing sodium ions around still sort of counts as electrical though doesn't it, because you're transferring charge? Or have I misunderstood?
it's definitely an electro-chemical gradient of sorts. at the cellular junction i believe the messages being transmitted are mostly receptor based (neurotransmitters) but there possibly some external ionic messages as well. I believe what you're referring to is when an action potential of ionic charge moves up a neuron and triggers the release of neurotransmitters. The message inside the neuron is due to the behavior of ions, and the message externally by receptor-binding neurotransmitters.
Instead of debating the merits of reading due to the fact that you can't remember what you read, why not improve how you read to drastically increase how much you remember. Why not (re-)learn how to really read. Of course, I'm talking of Adler's How to Read a Book . Admittedly, it's intention was to help in absorbing and analysing The Great Books [2], but I have found it of unbounded usefulness when reading any non-f…
I seem to recall he even has a brief section on fiction. Of course I may have an older edition, or simply be misremembering it... probably time to read it again.
"Of course, there’s nothing wrong with those things, and ephemeral delight might be good enough for some people, but I’m usually looking for something more out of my reading (in fact, I don’t read fiction at all any more)." I find this comment slightly arrogant and condescending. By choosing not to read fiction the author deprives himself of experiencing not only "ephemeral delight", but also removes the possibility…
When I hear someone say "I don't read fiction" I almost always think to myself, "You don't have any imagination."
Often it's the opposite - they have enough imagination to not need someone else to imagine for them.
I rarely read fiction simply because I don't have the time to. I've got too many hobbies that I enjoy, and there's always something about them that I can learn about them, so my reading is almost always hobby related.