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Books on Audio CD - does it counting as "reading"? (1 Viewer)

larry mac

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larry mac

Dave GTP,

Please do not take this the wrong way, I mean no disrespect, but what does that mean exactly? Are you some kind of superhuman? Some product of gene selection? What - you don't shop at Walmart? I feel inferior all of the sudden; I actually have to read the words! Do you have to open the book or just put your hands on the cover?

Chevy Chase, from Caddyshack, "feel the book, be the book"!

[forum administrator - this post is just an attempt at humor, please don't close the thread on my account]
 

DaveGTP

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Very funny. No need for hostility/intense sarcasm. It's hard to explain. I was hoping another heavy reader would chime in with something similiar that could explain it better. Let's put it this way: when I'm reading, it's somewhere between watching a movie of the story and being in the story. I don't read the individual sentences so much as absorb the story from the words. That's why I enjoy reading so much more than watching a show (heresy on HTF, I know :) )


This doesn't apply to stuff like Shakespeare or older literature, or like poetry. I kind of bounce off of material like that - I have to sit and read the words/sentences for that kind of stuff. Takes me about 3 or 4 times longer to read stuff like that.
 

Leila Dougan

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Dave, it sounds like you do what a lot of speedreaders do. Instead of reading and analyzing each individual word, your brain takes a snapshot of the paragraph and then processes it very quickly. You may not see every word, but you see enough words to know what they mean.
 

DaveGTP

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Probably. I'd guess it's probably about half a page or so. Too much reading as a kid (not that there's any such thing).

That's why it seems different to me - but I know my POV is a little different.
 

andrew markworthy

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Because you are doing the reading and the talking, so the talking reinforces the talking. Plus it enables the teacher to be sure that you are reading the words correctly. On the other hand, if you're listening to something being read by someone else whilst reading the text, you'll be spending a lot of your time checking that what's being said matches what you're reading, and trying to keep your reading speed in tandem with the voice. In doing this, you'll be attending to relatively superficial aspects of the text (basically, what it sounds like) rather than its deeper structure (e.g. semantic, pragmatic implicature, etc). There is a well-established psychological phenomenon called depth of processing, which essentially argues that the deeper the level of processing, the greater the memory. Thus, reading whilst listening to someone reading out is likely to be badly remembered because the method encourages relatively shallow cognitive processing.
 

Ryan Wishton

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Dave,

You absorb half a page at a time???

Thats a gift and you are lucky to be able to do such a thing naturally... The normal person does not absorb a half a page at a time... Thats like some special Xmen power to most people...

The normal person reads in a zombie like pattern, left to right across rows until our eyes just pop out of our head... Some people say this is why certain people hate to read... It's more of a boring chore to them...

It has nothing to do with how much you read as a child... I was a reader younger and I still read left to right... You somehow were just able to avoid this dreadful way of reading that most people are taught and learn to do...

Schools teach left to right reading... They should probably try the peripheral up/down/left/right approach first... Studies show that children have excellent peripheral vision and could possibly learn to read in chunks as you do...

Some people I think probably are just born with a gift for it... For example, this one 7 year old boy that could read 14,000 words a minute with 90% comprehension... Thats freaky... How I would love to be able to that...

School reading would be nothing more than a laughable 5 minute exercise...
 

Mike Voigt

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Dave, another heavy reader here. My parents encouraged a high level of interaction with books by asking us about what we had read - not just the words, but any significance to what we read, including our own thoughts, random as they may be. By doing that, I believe they encouraged us not just to read what was written, but to also process and integrate it. Sometimes we would get into why use this word instead of that word, once we had a reasonably decent vocabulary and could think of synonyms.

I have a terrible time with books in general, because I tend to remember the storylines fairly well, and I read pretty fast (I can finish a 300 page book in about 2-3 hours, depending on material - it ain't gonna be a math book!). I may have to wait a few months or even a year to reread it, because otherwise I get bored with it - I already know what's up ahead. This makes it a very expensive habit...

One thing reading aloud helps with is "anchoring" the sound of words in your brain. In other words, it will build up your mental "auditory pattern library" and aid with recognition of the same word (or, really, expression of thought) at a later time, while at the same time building your mental "visual recognition library" of words as they are printed on the page.

It gets really funky when you start throwing in multiple languages (and partial recognition of terms from one language to another, as if viewing a different facet of a jewel), fonts including printed vs various forms of handwriting, and various ways of enunciating the same word - in the same language! - that are radicaly different.

To me, fascinating stuff. If I ever win in the lottery, I will get into linguistics, probably neurolinguistics... the few classes I attended whetted my appetite, but I was too far along on my engineering degree by then...
 

DaveGTP

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Aha! I knew there'd be another reader like me.

The mention of math does bring me around to this:

I am totally incapable of learning math from a book. I always say, it's like math skills are on the opposite side of my brain that reading is. I MUST have a good teacher to learn math or other heavy computational stuff - I can't learn it from a book. Everyone's got their weaknesses. Math from a book is like cryptonite for me.


[offtopic]
Realization of this has led me to changing my major from Electrical Engineering to working on a degree in both History and Computer Science instead. I struggle through semesters with engineering and math in them, and breeze through semesters of soft stuff like History, English, etc. I can learn practical stuff by doing it (thus my competency with computers).
[/offtopic]
 

Patrick Sun

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Just as an experiment, in the next few days I'll be surfing/foruming and listing to a book on CD just to see if my brain can handle it with little impact to reading/listening comprehension having to deal with both streams of input.
 

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