Speaker 1: Of course, our supermarket has a cheesemonger. Our sells the
Speaker 1: milk of nineteen different mammals. What does yours of an
Speaker 1: entire aisle dedicated to venison feel my curtains? Guess where
Speaker 1: they're from. Our supermarket has a granola launch. Ours has
Speaker 1: a sorbe changer, Molly and soul to library. We're having
Speaker 1: our honeymoon and ours have another feel of my curtains. Oh,
Speaker 1: has your supermarket got notions? If so, switch to Aldi,
Speaker 1: where you'll get all the quality with none of the
Speaker 1: madness the prices. You'll love Aldi. It's not complicated. Oh hey,
Speaker 1: it's that book on your bedside table. Just just wondering
Speaker 1: how you been Ali Ward. And here we are. We're
Speaker 1: listening to words about reading words. Let's get into the
Speaker 1: science of reading. It exists, and our expert wrote a
Speaker 1: book titled The Science of Reading. So here we go.
Speaker 1: Now this guest is a professor of history at the
Speaker 1: University of Chicago and a Department Chair of Conceptual and
Speaker 1: Historical Studies of science, and their book is the Science
Speaker 1: of Reading, Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America. But
Speaker 1: we'll chat about times and places in other parts of
Speaker 1: the globe. As well, and also even how reading things
Speaker 1: like smut can improve your life. But before we get
Speaker 1: into it, quick, thank you to folks who submitted questions
Speaker 1: for this via Patreon. At patreon dot com Slashmologies where
Speaker 1: you can join for one dollar a month. And also
Speaker 1: if you need a shirt if you're not wearing one
Speaker 1: right now, or you need a bathing suit or hat
Speaker 1: ologiesmirch dot com is linked write in the show notes. Also,
Speaker 1: thank you to everyone who leaves reviews of this show
Speaker 1: on their podcast apps, which helps so much and it
Speaker 1: costs you nothing and I read them all, such as
Speaker 1: this freshly penned one from Liz sixty forty six, who writes,
Speaker 1: I work at a factory for eight to twelve hours
Speaker 1: and you make it so much better. I love learning
Speaker 1: new and random things. Well, hey, thank you for taking
Speaker 1: your internet dad to work, Liz sixty four eighty six. Also,
Speaker 1: there was one review left by Muglitz, who wrote, beeped.
Speaker 1: No teacher is going to play bleeped episodes in a classroom.
Speaker 1: That's risky and imo inappropriate. Three stars. Well, good news, Mouglitz.
Speaker 1: A arsmologies episodes aren't even bleeped, they are carefully trimmed
Speaker 1: to avoid anything kid in appropse, and they have their
Speaker 1: own show with their own feed. We just launched it
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago. So if anyone wants episodes
Speaker 1: of oologies that are totally safe for classrooms and a
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Speaker 1: podcast app and click on the show's smologies. It has
Speaker 1: a colorful new logo with a fish and a frog
Speaker 1: and a bird. Subscribe there to get those as well.
Speaker 1: So Muglitz check ausmologies. You'll love them. I give them
Speaker 1: five stars. Okay. Anagnosology I have found exactly one time
Speaker 1: in the literature, but it's legit enough and it comes
Speaker 1: from the Greek for reading, so there you go. And
Speaker 1: anagnosology is not to be confused with a previous episode
Speaker 1: we did on agnetology, which is about ignorance, which is
Speaker 1: also excellent. It's linked in the show notes. But this
Speaker 1: here term anagnosology. It appears in the nineteen seventy six
Speaker 1: book The Rustle of Language by this French literary theorist
Speaker 1: Roland Bartes. Roland Barth know how to say his name,
Speaker 1: but I do know how to say anagnosology. Reading where
Speaker 1: did it come from? How long have humans been doing it?
Speaker 1: How do our eyes move across a page? Our e books? Books?
Speaker 1: Is listening to an audiobook reading? How do we focus
Speaker 1: on books better? Is bead reading real? What about font choices?
Speaker 1: Why was printing illegal? And what is he reading these days?
Speaker 2: So poor?
Speaker 1: A cup of tea at the perfect temperature. Sit back
Speaker 1: in a wing back chair to crack open this convo
Speaker 1: with professor, author and an agnosologist, doctor Adrian.
Speaker 2: John's Adrian Jones, he his so.
Speaker 1: Right before we started, Adrian mentioned that he lives in
Speaker 1: this historic home once owned by a famed Chicago journalist
Speaker 1: and screenwriter. But I cut that part out because I
Speaker 1: didn't want you to know exactly where Adrian lived. I
Speaker 1: thought that'd be creepy. But the person who used to
Speaker 1: own his house described himself as a youth who quote
Speaker 1: haunted streets, brothels, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots,
Speaker 1: banquet halls, and bookshops. This was a former owner, and
Speaker 1: Adrian and his wife bought the Victorian home years ago
Speaker 1: and they fixed it up. What a life do you
Speaker 1: ever feel like?
Speaker 3: His?
Speaker 1: Ghost is there when you have writer's block urging you.
Speaker 3: To I wish for it. I mean, the man could
Speaker 3: write like a machine, so you know, I wish, I
Speaker 3: wish I could do with it sometimes, you know.
Speaker 1: I interviewed a quantum ontologist who wrote a book about
Speaker 1: what is real when it comes to theoretical physics, and
Speaker 1: he was a cosmologist, and he said that in writing
Speaker 1: his book, he had to use a Pomodoro method, and
Speaker 1: he had to write, and then he had to go
Speaker 1: sit and read fiction, any kind of fiction, and then
Speaker 1: you'd go right, he said, Without reading fiction, without input,
Speaker 1: he had no output. And do you find that as
Speaker 1: a writer? Is there a word for that when it
Speaker 1: comes to your research?
Speaker 3: Well, I actually don't find it. I find that when
Speaker 3: I'm doing the writing part of what I do, I
Speaker 3: basically have to stop reading anything that isn't directly related
Speaker 3: to what I'm doing because I get distracted and if
Speaker 3: I'm not sort of completely immersed in it, then it
Speaker 3: takes me a long time to get back immersed into it.
Speaker 3: And the other thing is that what I'm trying to do,
Speaker 3: I basically I'm a sucker for telling stories. So what
Speaker 3: I tend to do is I probably shouldn't confess this,
Speaker 3: but I get really interested in these kind of weird
Speaker 3: dead people and try to follow them in a kind
Speaker 3: of detective story manner, and then all of the kind
Speaker 3: of rationale for why I'm doing it gets tacked on
Speaker 3: it at the end.
Speaker 1: Is there a word for those rabbit holes that because
Speaker 1: I did that to a recent you found out that
Speaker 1: Amelia Earhart's dad lived around my neighborhood, and before I
Speaker 1: knew it, I was absolutely sucked down a knemonic tube
Speaker 1: of research. Are there brain chemicals that do that to us?
Speaker 3: I'm sure that neuroscientists settle this down, but I don't know.
Speaker 3: But I find personally that if I don't keep myself
Speaker 3: immersed in it, then I lose the thread and it
Speaker 3: takes me a long time to get the thread back.
Speaker 3: And you know, what can I say? I mean, I'm
Speaker 3: lucky enough that I have tenure at the University of Chicago,
Speaker 3: so I can do what I actually want to do,
Speaker 3: and so I can do this kind of slightly self
Speaker 3: indulgence saying of following weird dead people around.
Speaker 1: It's one of my favorite things to do, because you really,
Speaker 1: because they're dead too, you can't infringe too much on
Speaker 1: their privacy. You can just find out where they left behind.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a tolerable thing to say, but it's much
Speaker 3: better to work on dead people than it is to
Speaker 3: work on living people.
Speaker 1: Doctor Adrian Johns, however, is an alive person chatting with
Speaker 1: me from his book lined study. Tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about your history. Were you a library kid. I
Speaker 1: know you have a bookshelf right behind you full of
Speaker 1: like amazing ancient looking books.
Speaker 3: So I come from the UK, as you can tell
Speaker 3: from the accent. And when I went to university, which
Speaker 3: was at Cambridge.
Speaker 2: Oh fancy fancy.
Speaker 3: In the nineteen eighties. I was originally going to be
Speaker 3: a scientist, physicist and then chemist. But in Cambridge, when
Speaker 3: you do sciences as an undergraduate, you don't do a
Speaker 3: degree in physics or chemistry or something. You do a
Speaker 3: degree in this field called natural sciences. One of the
Speaker 3: options within natural sciences is history of science, and I
Speaker 3: got obsessed with that and so that ended up being
Speaker 3: a PhD, which is about the relationship between the printing
Speaker 3: revolution and the scientific revolution.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me a little bit about the process
Speaker 1: of when you set out to write your book, what
Speaker 1: were some things that you really felt like you wanted
Speaker 1: to convey to the public. How did you narrow down
Speaker 1: when you're talking about the science of reading, where do
Speaker 1: you even start to narrow down what you include.
Speaker 3: That's a good question, because it's in principle, like an
Speaker 3: awfully large, rather amorphous subject, because so pretty widespread acceptance,
Speaker 3: at least in principle that reading experiences are themselves historical,
Speaker 3: that they change over time. So what it is to
Speaker 3: read a heavy hardback Bible in sixteen hundred is different
Speaker 3: from what it is to read an ebook Bible net.
Speaker 3: And the way that we get to understand what it
Speaker 3: was to be alive in the culture of say sixteen
Speaker 3: fifty or fifteen fifty is to go and read the
Speaker 3: newspapers of sixteen fifty. The effort was to try to
Speaker 3: really come to grips in a serious way with the
Speaker 3: historical disconnects and connects in the trajectories of reading practices
Speaker 3: over the years, and how they've been thought of and
Speaker 3: manipulated actually by people like teachers, research scientists, propagandists, people
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to do my job here. I'm going
Speaker 1: to ask this very smart person a possibly not smart question.
Speaker 1: Can you give me a very brief timeline of when
Speaker 1: did people start reading? How long have we been reading?
Speaker 1: And I imagine there was a giant jump at the
Speaker 1: advent of the printing press. But how long have human
Speaker 1: beings been looking at symbols and saying that's what that means?
Speaker 3: Well, that's not a dumb question at all. That's a
Speaker 3: very hard question. But it goes back, you know, thousands
Speaker 3: of years, and it partly depends on what you mean
Speaker 3: by reading, of course, on what you mean by symbols.
Speaker 3: There was a report like six months a year ago
Speaker 3: of somebody who claims to deciphered marks in cave paintings
Speaker 3: that they actually mark things like the reproductive cycles of
Speaker 3: animals that these cave dwellers were living around and hunting
Speaker 3: and so forth. There you have something that maybe counts
Speaker 3: as reading. And there's a bit of competition here actually
Speaker 3: between Egyptologists and experts in the Fertile Crescent that where
Speaker 3: in fact you start to see writing as such, depending
Speaker 3: on which done you believe, it's either in Egypt or
Speaker 3: in you know, roughly Syria, Iraq area in you know,
Speaker 3: three four thousand BC.
Speaker 1: So human beings started being around three hundred thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: and historians debate but have landed on reading being roughly
Speaker 1: six thousand years old.
Speaker 3: The earliest things, as I understand it, that we have
Speaker 3: are often actually very mundane documents. They're things like records
Speaker 3: of grain transactions, things like accountancy. Yeah. Basic, they're pretty
Speaker 3: much yeah yeah, So it's not it's not like the
Speaker 3: first Book is written as the Bible or something. It's
Speaker 3: it's pretty basic stuff, which means that there was something
Speaker 3: like a cadre of people who were skilled at producing
Speaker 3: and interpreting these documents. And the early documents are often
Speaker 3: they're not sort of paper, they're you know, clay tablets
Speaker 3: and things like this. If you ever see them in museums,
Speaker 3: I mean, obviously I don't understand cano form or something,
Speaker 3: but you look at them and you wonder how somebody
Speaker 3: can possibly have made sense of them because they're tiny
Speaker 3: and they're very close packed the inscriptions on them. So.
Speaker 1: Cuniform is a style of written language developed by Samerians
Speaker 1: and was now south central Iraq at least thirty five
Speaker 1: hundred years BC. It's thought to be the oldest form
Speaker 1: of writing and surviving tablets, and there's a lot of them.
Speaker 1: Actually they resemble clay slabs indented with a tiny wedge
Speaker 1: shaped impressions. They kind of look like patterned geometric tattoos.
Speaker 1: They're just dazzling and really beautiful, even though they're just
Speaker 1: a femera from someone's day job, like five thousand years ago.
Speaker 3: The other place where you see this incidantly is on seals,
Speaker 3: so things that mark out property, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: You know, in ancient Iraq and ancient Suberia, you have
Speaker 3: these cylinder seals that in a certain sense are writing
Speaker 3: their inscriptions and they carry meaning. Then it's not so
Speaker 3: clear that they're characters as such. They're more like emblems
Speaker 3: something like that. So it goes back an awful long way.
Speaker 3: And actually one of the reasons why that's an interesting
Speaker 3: question for my people in the twentieth century is that
Speaker 3: when they were trying to figure out what reading was
Speaker 3: and what it had been in the past, they asked
Speaker 3: that question and they go back and they start worrying
Speaker 3: about things like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Speaker 1: So those cylinder seals imagine an empty toilet paper roll
Speaker 1: but made of carved stone, and then when rolled onto clay,
Speaker 1: it makes this cool picture so those date back potentially
Speaker 1: nine thousand years but Egyptian hieroglyphics and Caineiform are closer
Speaker 1: to five thousand years old, and hieroglyphics Adrian told me
Speaker 1: have language experts all upside down, wondering is it better
Speaker 1: for our brains to learn from pictures? And for more
Speaker 1: on that, you can enjoy the Egyptology episode or for
Speaker 1: a modern take, the two part Curiology episodes on emoji,
Speaker 1: which are linked in the show notes. But yeah, in
Speaker 1: terms of writing systems, you've got alphabetic symbols that represent
Speaker 1: phonics or sounds. There's also abjab writing systems like Arabic
Speaker 1: and Aramaic and Hebrew, and those emit nearly all vowels
Speaker 1: and they let the reader figured out like a little puzzle.
Speaker 1: There's also syllabigraphic language, and those symbols represent syllables. And
Speaker 1: then there's logographic, which is when a character or shape
Speaker 1: has already a specific meaning. And according to studies like
Speaker 1: universal brain systems for recognizing word shapes and handwriting gestures
Speaker 1: during reading and reading at the speed of speech, the
Speaker 1: rate of eye movements aligns with auditory language processing. All
Speaker 1: of those types of reading use three parts of the
Speaker 1: brain in tandem to assign meaning to shapes.
Speaker 3: It's a question that's been asked repeatedly over the decades,
Speaker 3: and particularly with reference to Japanese and Chinese, and also
Speaker 3: with reference to Hebrew. Also Braille is the other thing
Speaker 3: that people have picked up on. And the thing about
Speaker 3: those character sets is that they're not aphonumeric. They're more
Speaker 3: like no words per character than phonological characters. And you
Speaker 3: also read them in different directions.
Speaker 1: Yes, I was going to ask about that. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: way are you going?
Speaker 3: So one of the questions that these scientists had have
Speaker 3: is is it more efficient faster to read horizontally left
Speaker 3: to right, or to read right to left, or to
Speaker 3: read down to apple upt to down, Yeah, or even
Speaker 3: to do this thing that in some ancient descriptions you
Speaker 3: see where you read horizontally, but you read as if
Speaker 3: you're an ox and plowing a field. So you go
Speaker 3: left to right and then turn around and go right
Speaker 3: to left, left to right.
Speaker 1: What is there a name for that. I've never heard
Speaker 1: of that in my life. But yeah, you just keep
Speaker 1: going like you're in a queue at Disneyland or something,
Speaker 1: just winding right. And so, yes, the word booster feed
Speaker 1: on actually does come from the Greek meaning ox turn,
Speaker 1: and when you flip around and you're reading from right
Speaker 1: to left, the opposite that English usually goes. The letters
Speaker 1: are also in backward order. And I tried reading a
Speaker 1: sample of this just to see what it was like,
Speaker 1: and for so reason, it just instantly churned my stomach,
Speaker 1: like being on a vessel in the Drake passage in
Speaker 1: the middle of a typhoon. Just waves of ick. But
Speaker 1: I have no sea legs when it comes to the
Speaker 1: ox and field of the written word. So English is
Speaker 1: written left to right, top to bottom, and that is
Speaker 1: called sinstra dextyl from left to right, and languages run
Speaker 1: the opposite way, like Arabic alphabet languages are dextro sinistra
Speaker 1: going the other way. But there are of course other
Speaker 1: forms of reading that go top to bottom in vertical rows,
Speaker 1: like Mongolian and Vietnamese and Chinese, Japanese, Korean. And there
Speaker 1: are some theories of why languages tend to literally go
Speaker 1: one way or the other, like left to right, if
Speaker 1: you were chiseling in stone versus top to bottom, if
Speaker 1: maybe there was a factor of ink strokes drying on
Speaker 1: bamboo again, people still debate that. I think it's interesting,
Speaker 1: But yeah, ancient Greek they looped back and forth like
Speaker 1: beasts of burden, boostrophodonically.
Speaker 3: In which case you can you could imagine an argument
Speaker 3: for that being like an incredibly efficient way of reading,
Speaker 3: because you don't have to kind of track back each
Speaker 3: time you start a new line of fresh These are
Speaker 3: certainly questions that have been asked. As far as I know,
Speaker 3: there isn't much in the way of completely definitive answers
Speaker 3: to them.
Speaker 1: When the printing press came into history, was there just
Speaker 1: an exponential jump in terms of who was reading and
Speaker 1: who was given access essentially to knowledge and language.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. I think that's a fair thing
Speaker 3: to say. You know, the quantitative increase in the amount
Speaker 3: of paper with words on it that circulates is enormous,
Speaker 3: because you can print roughly a thousand impressions a day
Speaker 3: on an early pan press, and if you imagine what
Speaker 3: it took to just write out that in a scriptorium,
Speaker 3: the difference is a lot.
Speaker 1: So a thousand copies a day versus handwriting like ten
Speaker 1: by a flickering candle and no headphones, no podcasts to
Speaker 1: keep you company, just misery. So the popularization of movable
Speaker 1: type in the printing press gave quite a boost to reading,
Speaker 1: starting in around the mid fourteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: And the other thing is that because you can produce
Speaker 3: much more, things are much cheaper by and large, so
Speaker 3: it's also accessible in that sense. So yes, there's that.
Speaker 3: But the other thing is that this is something that
Speaker 3: we tend to forget because of accidents of survival. Most
Speaker 3: of the stuff that early printers produce is not books
Speaker 3: like this.
Speaker 1: Right Adrian casually holds up in nearby hardcover book.
Speaker 3: It's like individual, small, ephemeral sheets of things like indulgences,
Speaker 3: bills of lading for ships, tickets, proclamations, things like that,
Speaker 3: almost all of which vanish, so we don't have those,
Speaker 3: and books are in a certain sense parasitic on that.
Speaker 1: So printing really started to take off in the mid
Speaker 1: to late fourteen hundreds, and it was great for the
Speaker 1: Bible business. But interestingly enough, some governments did not love this,
Speaker 1: and by fifteen sixty three any printing in France without
Speaker 1: royal permission was not only illegal, but it was punishable
Speaker 1: by death. So your your zene could cost you your life.
Speaker 1: Monomie and Spain in the sixteen hundreds, colonizing spree forbid
Speaker 1: paper making in any of its new territories. They were
Speaker 1: like reading, don't worry about that, now, what is the
Speaker 1: most banned book of all time? I was so curious,
Speaker 1: and I'm glad that you are too. So it's nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four by George Orwell. And this is a futuristic
Speaker 1: dystopian novel was published in nineteen forty nine about, of course,
Speaker 1: a governmental big Brother exercising totalitarian control via the thought police.
Speaker 1: And it's so banned. This book has been banned up
Speaker 1: and down. Interesting, all right? And here in the US,
Speaker 1: the list of banned books you may have been hearing
Speaker 1: in schools and public libraries is growing, and according to
Speaker 1: the American Library Association, from twenty twenty two to twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, there was a sixty five percent surge of
Speaker 1: challenged or banned books, and the number of titles censored
Speaker 1: at public libraries increased by ninety two percent over the
Speaker 1: previous year. Most of the top challenged or banned books
Speaker 1: wound up on lists because of LGBTQIA plus content, and
Speaker 1: as the late professor and sci fi writer Isaac Asimov
Speaker 1: famously said, any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
Speaker 1: So reading what they don't want you to read. It's
Speaker 1: not just a nice way to enjoy an afternoon. It's
Speaker 1: also an active protest, very quiet, very mellow, chill protest.
Speaker 1: But yes, back in the Renaissance era.
Speaker 3: So people are doing probably a lot more reading. But
Speaker 3: we also need to remember that a lot of manuscript
Speaker 3: stuff has been lost. I think that there's a kind
Speaker 3: of myths about how scarce manuscript writing was pre printing.
Speaker 3: It was actually probably more common than we think. But
Speaker 3: still I think there is a big jump, and you
Speaker 3: find by quite early, like fifteen twenties, fifteen thirties, that
Speaker 3: knowledge of what one might think of is fairly arcane.
Speaker 3: Issues about say, scriptural meaning, scriptural quotes, things like that
Speaker 3: goes quite far down the social scale.
Speaker 1: Arcane is one of those words that's always a mystery
Speaker 1: to me, and I feel like very few people use
Speaker 1: it or know it. So I looked it up and
Speaker 1: it means something that is a mystery and known to
Speaker 1: very few people. So there you go. Arcane is arcane.
Speaker 1: But his point is that by the sixteen forties, according
Speaker 1: to records of troops in the English Civil War.
Speaker 3: We find that quite ordinary buff coated soldiers, as Scrumber
Speaker 3: would have said, are able to bandy quote about scripture
Speaker 3: around with quite a lot of facility. So they're at
Speaker 3: home with a world of print by then. Certainly it's
Speaker 3: not that there's one jump and then you're into modernity,
Speaker 3: because you're still dealing with a world of hand craftsmanship.
Speaker 3: So you go from no handprinting to handprinting, which takes
Speaker 3: you up to roughly one thousand impressions a day, vaguely right.
Speaker 3: But then there's another big shift in the nineteenth century
Speaker 3: when you get industrial printing in and that takes you
Speaker 3: up by maybe another couple of orders of magnitude. So
Speaker 3: The Times, which is the first paper to be printed
Speaker 3: using steam in the early nineteenth century, they start printing
Speaker 3: something like ten thousand copies an hour. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 3: that's a big that's a really big difference.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So yes, The Times was founded in London on
Speaker 1: January first, seventeen eighty five, and then we just careened
Speaker 1: toward modems and monitors when the digital giant of the
Speaker 1: net was officially birthed on Newary first, nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: and we went from reading on wet clay, to thatched
Speaker 1: flax fibers, to stretched animal skin, to shoot up woodpulp,
Speaker 1: to now reading each other's daily journals via pixels from
Speaker 1: across the world on our toilets. And then do you
Speaker 1: have to track also how the internet then is another
Speaker 1: big jump?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean what happens with the Internet, with digital
Speaker 3: culture at all, of course, is that to a certain extent,
Speaker 3: the very idea of something like a print run just
Speaker 3: ceases to have any meaning. And this is true even
Speaker 3: for books nowadays. You know, when I started out in
Speaker 3: the nineteen nineties, one of the first things you would
Speaker 3: ask a publisher if you were talking about producing book
Speaker 3: with them was how much their print run would be.
Speaker 3: And now you just don't. It just doesn't matter because
Speaker 3: they're circulating digital copies, and even if they're printed copies,
Speaker 3: they're often short run digital printing. So you know, it's
Speaker 3: that idea of a run an impression size has kind
Speaker 3: of dropped away a.
Speaker 1: Bit, and digital printing means is printed with a type
Speaker 1: of ink jet or toner, and it's more affordable for
Speaker 1: short runs and small batches or even just printing on demand.
Speaker 1: But offset printing refers to printing presses stamping pages with ink,
Speaker 1: and usually you'd need a print run of at least
Speaker 1: a thousand books to make that worth the cost. Or
Speaker 1: you could also read books on a flip phone. Around
Speaker 1: two thousand and three, the cell phone novel genre. This
Speaker 1: is an actual genre. I did not know about this.
Speaker 1: Cell phone novels. They erupted on the scene in Japan,
Speaker 1: and they let readers subscribe and download chapters at a time,
Speaker 1: usually kind of saucy romance or sci fi, to read
Speaker 1: on their tiny screens. And I know you're like, cell
Speaker 1: phone's on a screen. We've all heard cautionary tales that
Speaker 1: staring at screens as bad for our sleep, and centuries ago,
Speaker 1: reading in bed was also verboten because people I didn't
Speaker 1: even think about this. People just sometimes drift off reading
Speaker 1: by candlelight and then they'd set their bed curtains on fire. Also,
Speaker 1: a few hun years ago, reading novels, long form novels was
Speaker 1: looked upon as kind of scandalous and rude because it
Speaker 1: wasn't as social as like gathering around to hear a tale.
Speaker 1: So yeah, staring at a book a few hundred years back,
Speaker 1: it was like old timey scrolling but if you don't
Speaker 1: have open flames next to paper and fabric and you
Speaker 1: like reading in bed, there is a word for you,
Speaker 1: and it's a liebro cubicularist is Adrian one? What about you?
Speaker 1: What are you reading right now? What book is on
Speaker 1: your nightstand?
Speaker 3: Because of my nightstand? God?
Speaker 1: Fifty shades freed or something? Just fuck terrible.
Speaker 3: It's not quite to that terrible degree. But like a
Speaker 3: couple of weeks ago, on a whim, I was rereading
Speaker 3: Hindlines The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Speaker 1: Oh, I've never read it.
Speaker 3: No, it's actually amazing because Highline was this kind of
Speaker 3: ultra libertarian right wing of military kind of authority and
Speaker 3: turned right wing of the nineteen fifties. And The Moon
Speaker 3: Is a Harsh Mistress is a rerunning of seventeen seventy
Speaker 3: six on the Moon, when the Moon declares independent from Earth.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: The reason why I went back to it, there's this
Speaker 3: slogan that what he calls the loonies, the Lula systems
Speaker 3: have tan staffle, which stands for there ain't no such
Speaker 3: thing as a free lunch.
Speaker 1: Ha. That's where that comes from.
Speaker 3: Well, no, I mean he picked it up from you know,
Speaker 3: the Chicago School Economics people, you know that school of Economics.
Speaker 1: And this I just found this out originally comes from
Speaker 1: saloons offering free victuals to their drinkers. And the food, haha,
Speaker 1: was usually very salty and hammy and salty foods. What
Speaker 1: do they do? They make thirsty customers so free lunch? Yeah,
Speaker 1: just fur the coast at thirteen beers. What else is
Speaker 1: on the nights down menu?
Speaker 3: I've been going back and rereading Samuel Peep's diary. Actually, oh,
Speaker 3: I don't know him, which when you get into it
Speaker 3: is actually hard to put down. I mean, because you
Speaker 3: find yourself drawn into this man's life, and he's such
Speaker 3: a sort of appealing personality in a certain way. He's
Speaker 3: curious about everything, which I think is a very appealing trait.
Speaker 1: Okay, I had to look this up, of course. And
Speaker 1: Samuel Peeps was a guy who kept a journal for
Speaker 1: nine years in the mid sixteen hundreds. He was a
Speaker 1: naval administrator even though he had no nautical experience, and
Speaker 1: over his journal keeping era, he wrote over a million
Speaker 1: words that's equivalent to thirteen novels, most of it in tacography,
Speaker 1: which is a nearly indecipherable shorthand, which is decipherable as
Speaker 1: suppose to people who can read shorthand, but it looks
Speaker 1: like squiggles and dots to me. And one of the
Speaker 1: reasons he used it was it was fast, but also
Speaker 1: it vexed any snoopers. Not everyone knows how to read it.
Speaker 1: So he started his journaling practice in the fresh new
Speaker 1: year's morning of January first, sixteen sixty and during his
Speaker 1: nine years of jotting down his days, he covered things
Speaker 1: like the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire
Speaker 1: of London, neither of which sounded very great to experience.
Speaker 1: And I want to know so much how he started off.
Speaker 1: So I went all the way back in an online
Speaker 1: archive and found the entry for one one, sixteen sixty
Speaker 1: and it reads Blessed be God. At the end of
Speaker 1: last year, I was in very good health. My wife Jane,
Speaker 1: after the absence of her terms for seven weeks, gave
Speaker 1: me hopes of her being with child, but on the
Speaker 1: last day of the year she hath them again. So
Speaker 1: his very first entry starts out of the gate about
Speaker 1: his wife being on the rag, and then later in
Speaker 1: the day she burns her hand cooking at Turkey. Honestly,
Speaker 1: I want to see Jane's take on all this, because
Speaker 1: I bet they're more emotionally riveting. But feel free to
Speaker 1: snoop through peppi'sdiary dot com if you're in the market
Speaker 1: for like a blogger in a wig, do you read
Speaker 1: a few books at a time? You go from one
Speaker 1: to the other, one to the other.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Usually I don't have time to read fiction because
Speaker 3: the reality of working at a place like the Unvest
Speaker 3: of Chicago is that during the teaching courses you have
Speaker 3: to keep reading stuff just to keep up at an
Speaker 3: enormous rate. I think this is actually interesting. I'm going
Speaker 3: to give away what what I'm afraid is a kind
Speaker 3: of trade secret that at the height of a teaching courtum,
Speaker 3: it's not unusual to be claiming to be reading something
Speaker 3: like three or five hundred pages a day or shit,
Speaker 3: which I actually think is impossible.
Speaker 1: And then it's cavat that's vy part.
Speaker 3: So what's happening is something very I think sociologically interesting,
Speaker 3: which is we have this notion of reading as being
Speaker 3: in some sense incredibly individualistic, that it's something that we
Speaker 3: all do and we're all independent at doing it. But
Speaker 3: it's actually, especially in this setting where I think it's
Speaker 3: actually impossible that we're doing what we're claiming to be doing.
Speaker 3: What it actually is is collectively constituted.
Speaker 1: So sometimes reading scholars just hear each other talk about
Speaker 1: a book and then they think they've read it, like
Speaker 1: watching a trailer and being like, oh, yeah, I saw
Speaker 1: the new mission. Impossible he'd ends up doing the mission, yeah,
Speaker 1: because you can't possibly keep up with that much. But
Speaker 1: you know, a big question I feel like that's on
Speaker 1: a lot of people's minds is audiobooks and e readers?
Speaker 1: Is it reading? People get a lot of flak for
Speaker 1: you didn't read that book it was an audiobook, and
Speaker 1: others even feel guilty for reading ebooks instead of on paper,
Speaker 1: or they have trouble with ebooks because it's not on paper.
Speaker 1: Where does that factor in in terms of technology, like
Speaker 1: what is reading? What counts? And how do we absorb it?
Speaker 3: It's actually interesting that ebooks or actually audiobooks more the
Speaker 3: idea that you could, as it well, read a novel
Speaker 3: or something by having it read to you by a machine.
Speaker 3: There are schemes for those going back as far as
Speaker 3: the pretty much the origin of recording, so the late
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty twentieth century, there were visionary schemes for having
Speaker 3: things like, oh, you know, vending machines where you could
Speaker 3: put your money in and there would be a speaker,
Speaker 3: like a speaking trumpet that would speak a book. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there was a French artist who drew these things in
Speaker 3: It's like eighteen nineties or so. I forget exactly when
Speaker 3: this notion that we might have books read to us
Speaker 3: really tracks with the emergence of a true mass print culture,
Speaker 3: which is really again an eighteen eighties or onwards thing.
Speaker 3: So it's always been there. It's not like there's something
Speaker 3: that is that radically new about audiobooks per se. Having
Speaker 3: said that, I mean my own sense of it kind
Speaker 3: of crudely is that I think with audiobooks it's really
Speaker 3: that you're having something read to you rather than reading.
Speaker 3: And part of that has to do with the control
Speaker 3: of the pace of it, you know, so you can
Speaker 3: slow down recordings, you can pause it, and all of
Speaker 3: that kind of thing. But it's not the same as
Speaker 3: doing what mone does with one's mind's eye all the
Speaker 3: time in reading a page, where you're constantly shifting the
Speaker 3: speed and considering things and going back you know, without
Speaker 3: necessarily thinking about it. You don't have to press a
Speaker 3: button or something. Ebooks, on the other hand, I think,
Speaker 3: are just reading. I mean I don't have any issue
Speaker 3: with those at all. And in fact, for what it's worth,
Speaker 3: the Science of Reading book that's overwhelmingly based on text
Speaker 3: that I found digitally through Hearty Trust Library and things
Speaker 3: like that, which I have to say was a revelation
Speaker 3: to me about how much you can actually do.
Speaker 1: And during the COVID lockdowns of twenty twenty through twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, libraries like the Collaborative Archives of the Happy Trust,
Speaker 1: which has over eighteen million library items in its digital pockets,
Speaker 1: they opened their online archives because in person visits weren't possible.
Speaker 1: And this was right when Adrian was writing The Science
Speaker 1: of Reading. And if you are a person who enters
Speaker 1: a library or a bookstore, it immediately has to find
Speaker 1: a bathroom. At least during lockdowns there was always one nearby.
Speaker 1: It's just in your house a few feet away. When
Speaker 1: it comes to literacy programs in the past, how are
Speaker 1: literacy programs orchestrated to get as many people reading as
Speaker 1: possible and what benefit and what harm has that done
Speaker 1: in the past?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, to a large extent, public education when it
Speaker 3: was introduced in the Western world was to generate literacy.
Speaker 3: That was the point of it in countries like France
Speaker 3: and the UK and the US in the late ninety century.
Speaker 3: And it is the case that the proportion of the
Speaker 3: population that went through schools have thus learned to read
Speaker 3: in some systematic way goes up by leaps and bounds
Speaker 3: between you know, eighteen sixty and nineteen thirty. And originally
Speaker 3: that has a clear motivation, which is that you want
Speaker 3: to create an informed citizen read because on the one hand,
Speaker 3: you have industries that need intelligent people working the machines
Speaker 3: or you know, telegraphy operators or train drivers and this
Speaker 3: kind of thing. And on the other hand, if you
Speaker 3: were in the United States or increasingly the UK or France,
Speaker 3: you have a democratic system and so you want the
Speaker 3: people to be informed enough that they can actually be
Speaker 3: trusted to vote.
Speaker 1: So this again was the olden days of the US
Speaker 1: when having informed voters was something that all political parties wanted.
Speaker 3: So starting really that period, you see big not least
Speaker 3: publishing programs to produce textbooks, you know what I called readers.
Speaker 3: Often in this period by use of whichildren can be
Speaker 3: brought up to be readers. And right from the beginning
Speaker 3: there are huge fights about how you do this and
Speaker 3: complaints that poorly produced you know McGuffey readers or something
Speaker 3: like that, are not only not teaching children to read well,
Speaker 3: but they're turning children into you know, whatever you don't
Speaker 3: want them to be, like a moral or super moral
Speaker 3: or puritanical, or they're not generating proper citizens in other words.
Speaker 1: So these readers were little novels used as textbooks, and
Speaker 1: they sold over one hundred million copies. They were up
Speaker 1: there in sales with the Bible and the Dictionary also
Speaker 1: in terms of popularity and mcguffey's they were like the
Speaker 1: Beatles of the book world, but also kind of with
Speaker 1: a biblical slant, so like of the Beatles made Christian rock,
Speaker 1: so their popularity. It was also a way at the
Speaker 1: time of spreading these Protestant values of the era not
Speaker 1: a lot of room for diversity of thought there, so there.
Speaker 3: Are big fights over that. But this is one of
Speaker 3: the things that the scientists of reading really wanted to
Speaker 3: intervene in. They wanted to create on the basis of
Speaker 3: a science of how reading happened, a kind of objectively
Speaker 3: better standard of early reading book to produce children who
Speaker 3: would be then adult readers who would then be the
Speaker 3: model democratic citizens of the future, and things like Dick
Speaker 3: and Jane books which were completely a product of this.
Speaker 3: They are produced by a University of Chicago psychologist in
Speaker 3: collaboration with a poem called Serna Sharp, who was an
Speaker 3: official in a publishing house.
Speaker 1: So Zerna Sharp was a book editor who came up
Speaker 1: with these illustrated and simple books for kids, with kind
Speaker 1: of Norman Rockwell like watercolor illustrations and words like look, Jane, look, Look,
Speaker 1: see Dick. And they used what is called the look
Speaker 1: say method or site words, which means repeatedly seeing and
Speaker 1: recognizing familiar words, but not using the phonic approach to
Speaker 1: know what sound each letter makes to break it down
Speaker 1: into a word. So you see the word look a bunch,
Speaker 1: you go, oh, that's what looking is. You see the
Speaker 1: word dick a bunch and you go, that's that guy.
Speaker 1: But you're not going look or dig or Jane anyway,
Speaker 1: that's phonics. They didn't do that. And site words, you know,
Speaker 1: just memorizing the meaning of words without sounding them out
Speaker 1: can be an absolutely terrible way for some people to
Speaker 1: learn to read, and it's come in and out of
Speaker 1: favor over the phonics approach, and the phonics approach again
Speaker 1: is learning what sounds letters make, which makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: Phonics makes sense to me.
Speaker 3: And one of the things about these books, things like
Speaker 3: the Dick and Jane books and rivals that existed at
Speaker 3: that time, is that the physical layout on the page
Speaker 3: of the sentence his characters' words is done to guide
Speaker 3: the child's eyes across the page at certain speeds and
Speaker 3: with certain pauses.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: And the idea is to train the movements of the
Speaker 3: eye to be almost like dancing, so you jump from
Speaker 3: thing to thing. I do is to create a certain
Speaker 3: kind of facility of eye movement, and the thought is
Speaker 3: that the mind will sort of go with that, and
Speaker 3: you'll create people who are not just able to read,
Speaker 3: but actual readers, which is a bit different, right, people
Speaker 3: who read for pleasure and are fluent at it. Because
Speaker 3: by the twenties and thirties, there's really kind of two
Speaker 3: panics in America.
Speaker 1: She's freaking out, I'm freaking out.
Speaker 3: There's a panic over literacy per se, that not enough
Speaker 3: people literate that's one thing, but there's also a panic
Speaker 3: that people are what comes to be called a literate,
Speaker 3: That is, they can read in a mechanical sense, and
Speaker 3: they do actually read, they buy newspapers and things like that,
Speaker 3: but they don't habitually read, and they're not regarded as
Speaker 3: good comprehending info citizens in a certain way. And that's
Speaker 3: actually to something same. The harder problem is how you
Speaker 3: make people who are habitual pleasure of getting readers.
Speaker 1: And of course reading habits and skills start pretty early,
Speaker 1: and in the US at least, most kids were once
Speaker 1: just taught by their caregivers with this intention of learning
Speaker 1: to read the Bible or other religious texts. And Adrian
Speaker 1: says that public schools in the American South didn't really
Speaker 1: come along until the very late eighteen hundreds. And even
Speaker 1: in this modern era in ours, things like the pandemic
Speaker 1: lockdowns meant a bunch of kiddo's skipped kindergarten, which may
Speaker 1: see lasting impacts on a relationship with reading. Well, how
Speaker 1: are literacy rates now, or rather reading rates, Like, where
Speaker 1: are we in terms of how much we read?
Speaker 3: I would want to say it's about eighty percent across
Speaker 3: America and it's been that way for quite a long time.
Speaker 3: But it depends on again, what degree of fluency you're
Speaker 3: looking for in terms of being able to read at all.
Speaker 3: It's very high, ninety something.
Speaker 1: I would think, and globally, according to the United Nations
Speaker 1: Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization or UNESCO, literacy rates for
Speaker 1: adults vary by country, with many in the ninety seven
Speaker 1: to ninety nine percent range, but others like South Sudan
Speaker 1: and Chad and Sierra Leone and Afghanistan and hover lower,
Speaker 1: some in the twenty to thirty percent for adult populations.
Speaker 1: And I was poking through some stats and I saw
Speaker 1: one country has a one hundred percent literacy rate across
Speaker 1: the board for youth, adult, and elderly populations, and I
Speaker 1: was like, boy, howdy hot, damn nice. And then I
Speaker 1: saw that it was North Korea, and I was like, hmmm,
Speaker 1: one hundred percent for everyone. Okay, all right, North Curatia.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it varies for many reasons, mainly accessibility to
Speaker 1: education and infrastructure, gendered access to literacy programs, socioeconomic access,
Speaker 1: and in certain countries cases just lying just not true stuff.
Speaker 3: In terms of habitual readers, it depends on sort of
Speaker 3: how you measured how you ask the question. I mean
Speaker 3: it should be fair for all the doom and gloom
Speaker 3: about you know, well, nobody had does everything these days
Speaker 3: except play video games. So one of the things that
Speaker 3: the neuroscientists bring up is that there's a question about attention.
Speaker 3: So it's not so much are we able to read,
Speaker 3: And it's not really even are we able to make
Speaker 3: sense of what we read because we are, it's how
Speaker 3: long do we read at one time? For yeah, because
Speaker 3: we all have this sense now, I certainly have it,
Speaker 3: and probably you do, because you know, we're like average
Speaker 3: people that maybe fifteen years ago one could sit down
Speaker 3: and read a whole chapter of a novel. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 3: but now it's actually hard to do. And it's not
Speaker 3: just that you're constantly being distracted by things. It's that
Speaker 3: you've become habituated to being distracted by things, and so
Speaker 3: when you sit down and you start reading lines, after
Speaker 3: a while, your mind is off doing other things, even
Speaker 3: if there's something else going on around you. And there's
Speaker 3: a sense that this kind of magpie mode is it's
Speaker 3: not just that we lack intellectual discipline. It's that at
Speaker 3: some neuronal level that our brains are actually changing and
Speaker 3: we're becoming less kind of evolutionarily attuned to paying attention
Speaker 3: to things like texts for longer periods of time. So
Speaker 3: that's not, as I say, it's not a question about
Speaker 3: the ability to read. It's a question about what the
Speaker 3: character of the reading practice is, and it's coherency over
Speaker 3: time and things like that. So it's a change, and
Speaker 3: we're always tempted to give it a big moral valance
Speaker 3: and say it's a decay. We're not as good as
Speaker 3: we used to be. But I kind of feel that
Speaker 3: we're on our way to something and we don't know
Speaker 3: what the.
Speaker 1: Endpoint is, in a bad way or a good way.
Speaker 3: I think it's too early to say.
Speaker 1: Like, are we fucked? Like are we are? We? Are
Speaker 1: we downward slope?
Speaker 3: That's analytic. Yeah, we've had it in so many ways.
Speaker 3: I mean, never mind, the reading is a small puddy, right.
Speaker 3: If all we got to worry about is reading, then
Speaker 3: we're then we're fine.
Speaker 1: Because you mentioned those see Dick and Jane books and
Speaker 1: that cadence of Da Dad turning people into readers. If
Speaker 1: we're getting habituated to our cadence being da interruption, interruption
Speaker 1: then is there something about that that we can unlearn
Speaker 1: if we sit and turn off our phone, set a
Speaker 1: timer for one hour, and we're going to sit and
Speaker 1: read for an hour, can we kind of get back
Speaker 1: that ability to pay attention? Because so many people who
Speaker 1: are listeners of the show submitted questions, and a lot
Speaker 1: of them were about how do I not zone out?
Speaker 1: Or what do I need to do to stop from
Speaker 1: reading the same sentence four times because I'm off thinking
Speaker 1: about something else? All right, So this is kind of
Speaker 1: a bigger topic than we can adequately dive into here,
Speaker 1: which is why we have a three part ADHD episode
Speaker 1: which is linked in the show notes, and it's with
Speaker 1: world renown expert doctor Russell Barkley. But the reality is
Speaker 1: not all of us have ADHD, but most of us
Speaker 1: are seeing a decline in our attention spans. And doctor
Speaker 1: Gloria Mark, speaking to the American Psychological Association, reports that
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four, which was incidentally right before
Speaker 1: my Space took off in popularity, the average two thousand
Speaker 1: and four attention span was about two and a half minutes. Now,
Speaker 1: eight years later, in twenty twelve, it was half of
Speaker 1: that one minute and fifteen seconds. Nowadays it's about four
Speaker 1: five seconds, So in twenty years we went from two
Speaker 1: and a half minutes to forty five seconds. So no,
Speaker 1: it's not you. Also, it might just be you. You
Speaker 1: might just be getting older. And in fact I guarantee
Speaker 1: that you're getting older because all of us are. By
Speaker 1: the second. I'm so sorry, But according to the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three paper quantifying attention span across the life span,
Speaker 1: attention span is longer in young adults than in children
Speaker 1: and in older adults. So don't freak out or try
Speaker 1: to correct yourself too much. Your brain may just be
Speaker 1: being a brain. Also, as discussed in our ADHD episode,
Speaker 1: hormones and their decline can also play it or all.
Speaker 1: But if you suspect that you might have ADHD, listener
Speaker 1: an episode with doctor Russell Barkley and see a doctor
Speaker 1: to get a proper evaluation. If you don't have it,
Speaker 1: you can start trying to pay attention to your attention
Speaker 1: by eliminating distractions to kind of retrain your new baseline.
Speaker 3: Adrian says, I don't think that's an impossible thing, and
Speaker 3: you don't have to kind of go off and do
Speaker 3: a retreat in a monastery. You know people do, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, but I don't think it's really essential.
Speaker 1: Well, I have some questions from listeners. Can I do
Speaker 1: a lightning ground with you?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 1: Hey, yay, But before we do, we'll take a quick
Speaker 1: brain and break for sponsors of the show who make
Speaker 1: it possible to donate to a cause of theologists choosing,
Speaker 1: and this week will donate to a literacy nonprofit, eight
Speaker 1: to six LA, which is dedicated to supporting students ages
Speaker 1: six to eighteen with their creative and expository writing skills
Speaker 1: and helping teachers inspire their students to write. And you
Speaker 1: can learn more at eight two six LA dot org.
Speaker 1: But we're splitting the donation as well to send some
Speaker 1: love and some money to the Glioblastoma Research Organization, which
Speaker 1: is raising awareness and funds for new global, cutting edge
Speaker 1: research to find a cure for glioblastoma. Adrian's beloved wife
Speaker 1: of twenty five years, doctor Alison Winter, was a professor
Speaker 1: of history and historical studies of science and authored the
Speaker 1: book Memory Fragments of a Modern History, and Adrian spoke
Speaker 1: so fondly of her off like and in her obituary
Speaker 1: he notes that their connection was instant and that Allison
Speaker 1: quote had a creative audacity that was just relentless. And
Speaker 1: doctor Allison Winter passed away in twenty sixteen of a
Speaker 1: rare glioblastoma brain tumor, and this episode is dedicated to
Speaker 1: her memory and will link the Glioblastoma Research Organization in
Speaker 1: the show notes. And thanks to sponsors of the show
Speaker 1: for making that possible. Okay, let's read your questions on reading.
Speaker 1: Many of you had queries about sounding it out via phonics,
Speaker 1: such as first time question asker Stephanie Bloom, Shirley Luzonombo,
Speaker 1: Brendan O'Donnell, laser interligator, Lynn Rowicky Sleepy John, Bethlon, Matthew
Speaker 1: Wynn Janey Lewis, Brina Dez, Mattzicado, and Gina Ann asked
Speaker 1: there used to be a lot of infomercials in the
Speaker 1: nineties about speed reading programs and hooked on phonics. Do
Speaker 1: they work or is that why we don't see them anymore?
Speaker 3: Well, they actually still exist. These programs may be that
Speaker 3: they're advertising different venues. So even if you go back
Speaker 3: into the nineties, what's our target in time late twentieth century,
Speaker 3: the main place where hooked on Phonics advertised, for example,
Speaker 3: was AM Radio. This is the moment when when AM
Speaker 3: radio really took off and Hooked on Phonics was a
Speaker 3: huge AM radio financer.
Speaker 1: Oh I didn't know that. Yeah, it did not.
Speaker 3: Becoming a bit of a scandal because they were claiming
Speaker 3: that they had scientific proof that their technique worked. And
Speaker 3: in the end, I think it was the Federal Trade Commission,
Speaker 3: certainly a federal agency moved in on the basis that
Speaker 3: this scientific evidence didn't actually exist. It may actually work
Speaker 3: or not, but there wasn't the kind of scientific confirmation
Speaker 3: that there was, and in the end they got put
Speaker 3: out of business. But that generated a huge public backlash
Speaker 3: by supporters of the Hooked on Phonics program who believed
Speaker 3: that what was going on was a kind of a
Speaker 3: suppression of a system by essentially the teaching industry, by
Speaker 3: the public teaching unions and so forth.
Speaker 1: The short story here is that Hooked on Phonics didn't
Speaker 1: have the appropriate scientific literature to back up up some
Speaker 1: kind of exaggerated claims, so they had to pay a
Speaker 1: lot of advertisers back. Also, I just want to take
Speaker 1: this opportunity to give a shout out to teachers out there.
Speaker 1: Teachers huh man, you deserve so much more than you're getting.
Speaker 1: First of all, you shouldn't have to buy your own supplies,
Speaker 1: but you already know that. What would we do without
Speaker 1: any of you? Teachers? We love you. But the phonics
Speaker 1: methods of learning the sound that letters represent instead of
Speaker 1: just cite words or whole word learning does have a
Speaker 1: lot of scientific support, and it also relies less on
Speaker 1: a child's home life to give advantages of like memorizing
Speaker 1: words in different contexts. Now, what about racing through reading?
Speaker 1: Just book and through books? So many patrons had questions
Speaker 1: and I will say them quickly, such as Christina Khan,
Speaker 1: Katie Noble, Frank d Colin Croft, Chelsea Rabble, Annie Nanny,
Speaker 1: nick A, Karnie Perils, and Cass Fresca, who said, I
Speaker 1: wish I could formulate a question, but all I've got
Speaker 1: to say is speed reading all caps. Karen h wanted
Speaker 1: to know if it's witchcrafts up? We do have an
Speaker 1: episode on witchcraft, and yeah, I will link in the
Speaker 1: show notes. But speed reading, let's get into it.
Speaker 3: But the speed reading programs, those are a bit different.
Speaker 3: Those go back to probably the thirties, but they really
Speaker 3: flourished in the fifties and sixties when they were really
Speaker 3: a big deal, and pretty much every American citizen would
Speaker 3: have encountered them to some extent. So if you work
Speaker 3: for GE, for example, at GM and at the Air Force,
Speaker 3: there were internal operations designed to teach their management speed
Speaker 3: reading techniques that it's not entirely clear that they don't
Speaker 3: work at all. The problem I think that hit these
Speaker 3: programs in the end was that if they did work,
Speaker 3: the benefits didn't last. Oh okay, so you could train
Speaker 3: people to read quickly while they were in the program,
Speaker 3: but it seemed that you could measure increased reading rates
Speaker 3: and comprehension rates through these programs, but then six months
Speaker 3: later they'd be back to where they started. But you
Speaker 3: can still take these things up now if you so wish.
Speaker 1: So not exactly a get lit quick scheme, but perhaps
Speaker 1: it just requires some patience and keeping up with now
Speaker 1: a few of you wanted to know how machines can
Speaker 1: help our goopy little brains, including patron Olivia Eliason, who asked,
Speaker 1: why haven't we all gone to using speed reading tools
Speaker 1: like rapid serial visualization presentation URSVP. That's when a word
Speaker 1: at a time flashes on the screen kind of like
Speaker 1: a caffeinated teleprompter. Speaking of uppers, James Eva, first time
Speaker 1: question asker, would like to know bionic reading. What's the
Speaker 1: crack my ADHD mind loves how certain letters in each
Speaker 1: word are bolded and seems to be able to read
Speaker 1: a lot faster while actually retaining the content. A few
Speaker 1: people asked about other programs like bionic reading, and there
Speaker 1: are programs like Accelerator or Velocity that will show you
Speaker 1: one word at a time or might change the font
Speaker 1: so that you're skimming differently. Do those increase readings? Reading comprehension?
Speaker 1: How does that work? Yeah?
Speaker 3: These went through a moment of fame racket about I
Speaker 3: would say about ten years ago, and the ones that
Speaker 3: I remember, like you say, they would show up one
Speaker 3: word at a time and at a certain rate, and
Speaker 3: then the idea is that you kind of have to
Speaker 3: keep up with them because the next word is up
Speaker 3: on the screen. Yeah, you know, they're actually uncannily similar
Speaker 3: that they're basically the modern descendant of techniques that were
Speaker 3: invented in the twenties and thirties as part of this
Speaker 3: moment of speed reading. So it used to be, for example,
Speaker 3: that you could get reading accelerators, which were devices that
Speaker 3: you could put on the page of a book and
Speaker 3: by a mechanical kind of clockwork or spring mechanism, this
Speaker 3: little window would move down the page.
Speaker 1: Oh, she has read it in one minute, twenty seven
Speaker 1: pages of this book.
Speaker 3: So you had to read as fast as the window moved.
Speaker 1: It's so stressful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's incredibly stressful. My sense of that is it similar.
Speaker 3: I mean, you can probably accelerate your reading to a
Speaker 3: certain extent. The question is whether it really takes I
Speaker 3: think that in my own case, I could see that
Speaker 3: working for things like reading novels mm, where part of
Speaker 3: the point of it almost is to kind of get
Speaker 3: lost in it and to be drawn in, so that
Speaker 3: reading and thinking sort of become one. You read at
Speaker 3: the speed of thought. It's different if what you're supposed
Speaker 3: to be reading is something like professional reports or scientific papers.
Speaker 3: But they've been businesses since probably the earliest ones of
Speaker 3: the thirties, But like I said, it was really the
Speaker 3: fifties that they really took off. If you're curious, you
Speaker 3: can get ald ones from eBay.
Speaker 1: Okay, Oh I bet you can. Yeah, so yes, I
Speaker 1: look this up and there are many reading Pacer speed
Speaker 1: Reading trainers by Book of the Month Club for sale
Speaker 1: on eBay. And it's kind of like a device that
Speaker 1: scrolls text passed a cutout window, so you're seeing only
Speaker 1: a few lines at a time that leave quickly. You
Speaker 1: better kind of keep it up like an assembly line.
Speaker 1: And according to the twenty nineteen paper how many words
Speaker 1: do we Read per minute? A review and meta analysis
Speaker 1: of reading rate for English readers, it's about two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty words per minute, but if you're reading out loud,
Speaker 1: it drops to about one hundred and eighty four. But
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties was this woman named Evelyn Wood
Speaker 1: who coined the term speed reading and taught courses called
Speaker 1: reading dynamics, And it involves this process of scanning a
Speaker 1: chapter or a chunk of pages, just scanning them first
Speaker 1: real quick four seconds of page, making notes, and then
Speaker 1: going back and doing a longer scan, maybe fifteen seconds
Speaker 1: of page, and then making notes again. And Evelyn apparently
Speaker 1: had an average speed of twenty five hundred words per minute,
Speaker 1: ten times you or me. And apparently JFK was said
Speaker 1: to read twelve hundred words a minute. What were they
Speaker 1: the fastest? Oh no, of course not the world's fastest reader.
Speaker 1: Some guy named Howard stephen Berg has a Guinness Book
Speaker 1: World Record for reading twenty five thousand words per minute,
Speaker 1: one hundred times more than you or I can do,
Speaker 1: and he uses his fingers to guide him down the text,
Speaker 1: kind of swishing back and forth. And one riveting news
Speaker 1: clip I watched showed him getting through half of a
Speaker 1: law textbook about check fraud in less time than it
Speaker 1: takes me to put on mascara. Now, he could get
Speaker 1: through his own two hundred and fifty eight page book
Speaker 1: Super Reading Secrets in less than five minutes, not that
Speaker 1: he needs it. Also, if you ever have to give
Speaker 1: a presentation, this is just a hot tip for me,
Speaker 1: or you have to make a speech for something, factor
Speaker 1: about one hundred words per minute because speech naturally has pauses,
Speaker 1: little quips, maybe audience reactions. So if you have to
Speaker 1: give a speech, like for someone's wedding, don't freak out.
Speaker 1: Let's say you wrote it out and the word count
Speaker 1: is like twelve hundred words, you're going to be up
Speaker 1: there for a while. So if you're stressing about a speech,
Speaker 1: just factor like, okay, I got five six minutes, you
Speaker 1: can write five hundred words just start from there. Also,
Speaker 1: when it comes to that RSVP method, that one we
Speaker 1: talked about words one word on the screen at a time,
Speaker 1: I was joked about that, but sadly a twenty seventeen
Speaker 1: study debunked it as flim flam, and the American Journal
Speaker 1: of Psychologies paper modern speed reading apps do not foster
Speaker 1: reading comprehension kind of says it all. It reports that
Speaker 1: static text was associated with superior performance bummer. But when
Speaker 1: it comes to bionic with some parts of words in
Speaker 1: a thicker font, it's inventors, one of whom is a
Speaker 1: typography designer, cite decades old research on text comprehension models
Speaker 1: and eye movement tracking, and they claim that over fifteen
Speaker 1: percent of the population has great difficulty reading and understanding
Speaker 1: texts due to factors like ADHD and dyslexia. And the
Speaker 1: feedback that they've gotten is that some of those people
Speaker 1: immediately understood the context of various texts the first time
Speaker 1: they read them, which was impossible without biotic readings ding.
Speaker 1: And then they have a registered trademark. So with all
Speaker 1: of these things, your brain is unique. Your mileage may vary,
Speaker 1: which kind of makes a boulder font out of certain
Speaker 1: parts of the word and lets you kind of like
Speaker 1: get the gist of which words are which. And I
Speaker 1: think it's so interesting too when you see sentences written
Speaker 1: without vowels, how easy you can decipher, how quickly you
Speaker 1: can work that out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there have been several kinds of experiments about that
Speaker 3: kind of thing. Going back again quite a long time,
Speaker 3: the question of fonts goes back, oh at least for
Speaker 3: the nineteenth century, the question of whether there are certain
Speaker 3: fonts that are more efficient, less fatiguing, and the idea
Speaker 3: of that you can get rid of certain characters. One
Speaker 3: of the first people who invented a scientific approach to
Speaker 3: readings a guy called James McKean Cattel in the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 3: He thought we should ditch the letter E. Yeah, because
Speaker 3: he thought he was completely pointless and so you were
Speaker 3: just you know, expending energy literally for no reason in
Speaker 3: having it. I mean, this is very much of the
Speaker 3: first age of factories, right. This is for the generation
Speaker 3: of people for whom the question of efficiency and fatigue
Speaker 3: is really a kind of central question. So they extended
Speaker 3: to reading and they think, well, you know, we don't
Speaker 3: need a letter read let's ditch that one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was like an original tech bro trying to biohack.
Speaker 3: And there have been Vario, let's say, other experiments with
Speaker 3: these kinds of things, and the extent of these experiments
Speaker 3: is really kind of heroic in a certain sense. The
Speaker 3: psychologists of typography would sit readers into these machines and
Speaker 3: see how fast they could read things, and they would
Speaker 3: do it for like ten thousand people one after another.
Speaker 1: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: It's like kind of taking years over it. It's really
Speaker 3: a kind of heroic endeavor in a certain sense. And
Speaker 3: the other thing you get is efforts to produce spelling
Speaker 3: reforms that are going to be closer to things like phonics,
Speaker 3: so phonological spelling systems, which I can remember being in
Speaker 3: my elementary school in England in the late very late
Speaker 3: sixties early seventies. I can remember that being a rack
Speaker 3: of these books done with this kind of bizarre spelling regime.
Speaker 3: Why are we doing this? And I remember the rack
Speaker 3: partly because nobody used them. It's fat in the corner room.
Speaker 3: Everybody thought it was just bizarre and nobody did anything
Speaker 3: with them.
Speaker 1: So you know how if you look at a dictionary,
Speaker 1: there's a phonetic spelling of a word that's right before
Speaker 1: the definition. So yeah, these were books spelled out like
Speaker 1: that for kids, which is beyond phonics into just a
Speaker 1: whole new type of phonetic alphabet. And yeah, kids were
Speaker 1: not into those, or adults. Let's be honest. Now, I
Speaker 1: want to preface this next question with the fact that
Speaker 1: the topic deserves its whole own episode one day with
Speaker 1: like a dedicated expert, but many many of you, including
Speaker 1: Madison Piper, Julia Fisher, Scott Nichols, Hope, Neil Sorenson, Ris Alad,
Speaker 1: Jennifer Piacente, Qustian Schroder and Chewett, Catherine Wood, Leanne McAvoy,
Speaker 1: Faith Stein, Jo Hummingbird, Ali Brown, Lovely Bites, Emily Burns,
Speaker 1: Emily rossmar Archie, George, Nat Schaeffer, Kelsey Law, Paige van Horn,
Speaker 1: Sarah Avala, Sonia Kermichl San Juan, Josie kat Kessler, and
Speaker 1: Wild Pack of Dogs, as well as Maya, who kindly
Speaker 1: requested that we address the topic without any value judgment,
Speaker 1: which Maya I got you all brains welcome. We love
Speaker 1: all operating systems around here, and first time question asker
Speaker 1: ab who asked one listener wrote in to say, love
Speaker 1: this subject. How do we help kids with dyslexia earlier?
Speaker 1: How do we help them succeed in the K through
Speaker 1: twelve system better? You know, they're bright kids who are
Speaker 1: awesome problem solvers, but are at a disadvantage of the
Speaker 1: way the school system currently works. So when it comes
Speaker 1: to dyslexia, are there any anything historically or anything in
Speaker 1: the science about the best way to approach that with
Speaker 1: reading to make it so that life is easier, school
Speaker 1: is easier. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Dyslexia has been a pressing problem, both at the level
Speaker 3: of teaching reading and at the level of thinking about
Speaker 3: what reading is. Going back to the pre nineteen hundred era,
Speaker 3: we used to be called congenital word blindness. Yeah, because
Speaker 3: the idea was that, like you say, that, people with
Speaker 3: it were completely intelligent, right, there's no sort of mental
Speaker 3: deficiency or anything like that, no disability, and yet the
Speaker 3: one thing they can't do very well is read by
Speaker 3: the measures of the science of reading. So that's actually,
Speaker 3: in the first instance, a challenge to the people who
Speaker 3: think there should even be a science of reading, right,
Speaker 3: because their idea is that what sciences are things like physics,
Speaker 3: where the whole world is organized by laws, and the
Speaker 3: point of the sciences to come up with the laws.
Speaker 1: The brains are not calculations with one correct, black and
Speaker 1: white standard.
Speaker 3: If you find that there aren't actually laws of reading,
Speaker 3: because this is a significant part of the population that
Speaker 3: does it differently or doesn't do it according to the
Speaker 3: laws we think exist, that raises the question of whether
Speaker 3: you can even have the science at all. And so
Speaker 3: in the twenties and thirties there's a lot of angst
Speaker 3: about this among these scientists, and in particular there's two people.
Speaker 3: There's a woman called Clara Schmidt no I think was
Speaker 3: actually one of the first women to get a PhD
Speaker 3: from the University of Chicago in about nineteen twelve or so,
Speaker 3: and she worked for Chicago Public Schools, and she found
Speaker 3: a classroom and got together a small group of children
Speaker 3: with this what was then called congenital word blindness, and
Speaker 3: devoted sustained individual attention to them, and she found that
Speaker 3: she could actually get them to learn to read well,
Speaker 3: but not by the standard techniques of the time, which were, like,
Speaker 3: you know, you teach people by these kinds of Dick
Speaker 3: and Jain readers, where you're trying to train the people
Speaker 3: to look at whole words and whole senses and things
Speaker 3: like that. You really had to go back to phonics
Speaker 3: and you had to sound out individual characters. The other
Speaker 3: things that she found was that you had to connect
Speaker 3: them to the sensory experienced world of the children themselves,
Speaker 3: so it couldn't be kind of abstracted out.
Speaker 1: So she realized that yes, phonics wins again, and you
Speaker 1: had to take the kids' experiences into account, like if
Speaker 1: they grew up in a big city, they'd have different
Speaker 1: touch points for context, and this is known as socio
Speaker 1: cultural theories of learning.
Speaker 3: So you have to relate them to the world that
Speaker 3: they live in. And if you did that, then somewhere
Speaker 3: the connections the associations could be made in the mind.
Speaker 3: And so she found that they could do this, but
Speaker 3: it took dedication and close attention. You couldn't do it
Speaker 3: at the level of whole classes. The other person is
Speaker 3: Michael Samuel Orton, who was a neuroscientist actually in the
Speaker 3: nineteen thirties in Iowa, and what he did was he
Speaker 3: got a mobile clinic and was traveling around Iowa and
Speaker 3: he's the first person to realize that there's actually a
Speaker 3: kind of proportion of children in schools who have this condition.
Speaker 3: He found in Iowa it was about twelve percent. So
Speaker 3: the idea that there's actually something like loosely a syndrome
Speaker 3: really comes from Utan's moving around in this truck.
Speaker 2: Literally, oh wow.
Speaker 1: So if it weren't for rumbling around rural Iowa, the
Speaker 1: issue and the wide prevalence of dyslexia when objects or
Speaker 1: letters can become reversed, may never have come to light.
Speaker 3: So if you see a word like gary, they will
Speaker 3: read it as gray, so that reverse the order of
Speaker 3: letters and things like this orthough even reverse how the
Speaker 3: letter looks. They'll write the letter backwards. And he says
Speaker 3: that basically what's happened is that the brains of these
Speaker 3: children have been habituated to sort of with the left
Speaker 3: and right half of the brains are both taking in
Speaker 3: images of characters, but on one side it's mirror reflected
Speaker 3: because and what's happening is that neither side is dominant.
Speaker 3: So when you start to try and interpret them, what
Speaker 3: you're getting is alternations between where the right way around
Speaker 3: and the wrong way round.
Speaker 1: Remember that oxen Field analogy a little like that.
Speaker 3: So in other words, it's recapitulating this thing that you
Speaker 3: see in ancient inscriptions at the very beginning of writing,
Speaker 3: when you see characters written around the other way and
Speaker 3: the flow of writing the other way. So what you
Speaker 3: have to do and think actually mirrors again. What Clara
Speaker 3: Schmidt found is that you really have to go in
Speaker 3: and teach them individually and rehabituate them, retrain their brains
Speaker 3: to have one half of the brain, one hemisphere of
Speaker 3: the brain be dominant, and so what that image in
Speaker 3: the brain, as it were, will win out, and you
Speaker 3: need for that to be habitual and not just kind
Speaker 3: of reflective. He went on to have a long career
Speaker 3: talking about this question that actually dogs these scientists all
Speaker 3: the way through. They worry about it a lot. But
Speaker 3: that's how dyslexia came to be identified as it were
Speaker 3: a kind of thing that exists out in the world
Speaker 3: rather than just individual people who seem to have problems.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had no idea. One leading expert on dyslexia,
Speaker 1: doctor Jack Fletcher, spoke to the National Institute of Health
Speaker 1: and notes right off the top that reading is not natural.
Speaker 1: He says, to develop reading skills, your brain has to
Speaker 1: reorganize itself and it takes brain areas that are built
Speaker 1: for language and for visual attention and it repurposes them
Speaker 1: for reading. And a lot of kids develop dyslexia because
Speaker 1: they haven't received the instruction that their brain needed to
Speaker 1: learn reading. And dyslexia, he says, is not something you're
Speaker 1: born with. You're born with risk factors like genetic factors
Speaker 1: and environmental factors. And he notes that the goal is
Speaker 1: to screen for it early and that phonics based teaching
Speaker 1: is much more effective than whole word learning for people
Speaker 1: who could develop dyslexia. Also, audio books, so many of
Speaker 1: you said that audio learning and accessibility with text to
Speaker 1: speech are very helpful, and as a hardcore audio book
Speaker 1: consumer myself, I'm right there with you. Wear on headphones personally,
Speaker 1: that is legit reading to me. Now, some of you
Speaker 1: with questions about dyslexia friendly fonts, like Francisca Gubman, Mike Weischel,
Speaker 1: Ellis Sugarman, graphic designer Patrick W. And patron Cyril L.
Speaker 1: Reiz who wrote my question fonts, and I want to
Speaker 1: note that that was in all caps. Okay, So there's
Speaker 1: a twenty eighteen study titled Dyslexia and Fonts is a
Speaker 1: specific font useful, and it looked at one, in particular,
Speaker 1: a dyslexia friendly font called Easy Reading, and it found
Speaker 1: that the crowding of letters can contribute to comprehension issues,
Speaker 1: and that the most helpful fonts are those with a
Speaker 1: bigger size, a simple design, and a special seraph to
Speaker 1: help dyslexic people distinguish between letters and numbers of similar
Speaker 1: shapes like dn B and P and Q and six
Speaker 1: and nine. Wide letter and wide word spacing also pluses. Now.
Speaker 1: Other than this Easy Reading font, though, experts recommend sansera
Speaker 1: fonts like Aeriel and even the once maligned but comeback
Speaker 1: Queen comic Sans as well as my personal working favorite Trebouschet.
Speaker 1: Come because it's named after a medieval catapult, stay because
Speaker 1: it's easy on the ice. And last listener question, Julianne said,
Speaker 1: I've heard it quoted that reading fiction increases empathy. Is
Speaker 1: there any validity to those studies? Have we seen any
Speaker 1: rises in reading correlated to a better society or people
Speaker 1: understanding each other better? Anything to that.
Speaker 3: That's a really interesting question. It's certainly something that's long
Speaker 3: been claimed. It led to a lot of concern over
Speaker 3: the decades about inequalities of access to reading. So if
Speaker 3: you have, for example, in the nineteen thirties, when people
Speaker 3: started to map these things out, you know, northern cities
Speaker 3: like Chicago and New York, where there are plentiful libraries,
Speaker 3: everybody has access to newspapers, all of that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: It's thought that creates a certain kind of social density,
Speaker 3: right and interaction culture, whereas in the Deep South you have,
Speaker 3: you know, like almost a vacuum of this.
Speaker 1: He explains that in the nineteen thirties there are a
Speaker 1: few libraries in the Deep South, and in times of
Speaker 1: racial segregation and Jim Crow laws before the civil rights
Speaker 1: movement of the nineteen sixties, black people didn't have equal
Speaker 1: access to the very limited places that even had newspapers
Speaker 1: and periodicals, you.
Speaker 3: Can't go into them. And the thought is among these
Speaker 3: social scientists that that generates a world of sort of
Speaker 3: almost it's not a society at all, it's like a
Speaker 3: social desert. So yes, there is that conviction that's existed
Speaker 3: for quite a long time, and that's led to real
Speaker 3: kind of social policies expanding library access things like that,
Speaker 3: which of course has its contemporary resonance. You know, and
Speaker 3: should give us pause, right because we're at a moment
Speaker 3: right now where things like library provision around the threat.
Speaker 1: So access to information. It's seemingly democratized, and in many
Speaker 1: ways it is, it's also siloed and under control of
Speaker 1: a few big corporations like Meta owns Facebook and Instagram,
Speaker 1: and a billionaire recently bought Twitter and stripped journalists of
Speaker 1: verified badges instead just putting them up for sale or
Speaker 1: for rent to anyone who wanted to look legit. Bots
Speaker 1: are just improving on their own creepiness all the time.
Speaker 1: AI is tricking people into all sorts of shit. Congress
Speaker 1: is looking for ways to ban TikTok oh in physical
Speaker 1: spaces with books like bookstores are closing, oh, and libraries
Speaker 1: so cool, and not.
Speaker 3: Only the numbers of libraries and the investment libraries, but
Speaker 3: the book selection in libraries. Right this is a time of,
Speaker 3: to my mind, quite extraordinary interventionist censorship. I naively assumed
Speaker 3: that that kind of thing had gone by the wayside
Speaker 3: ages ago too, but apparently not so. This conviction that
Speaker 3: shared reading creates shared culture, and that it's therefore a
Speaker 3: tool of kind of harmony is one that bears repeating
Speaker 3: and it bears you know, holding to I.
Speaker 1: Think, what about your your job or your process of
Speaker 1: writing this book. What was the hardest thing about it?
Speaker 1: What sucked the most?
Speaker 3: If I may, that's sucked. The hardest thing about it
Speaker 3: was actually the part that was also in a certain sense,
Speaker 3: the most exciting for me.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's my next question, what's your favorite.
Speaker 3: Part of it? But yeah, well one of my favorite
Speaker 3: part is different. So the hardest part was doing the
Speaker 3: chapter that's based in the Deep South, that's dealing with
Speaker 3: this man called Horace Mann Bond, who was a social
Speaker 3: scientist African American social scientist who went down and was
Speaker 3: using literacy tests and the like to map out things
Speaker 3: like information and equality in Alabama in the Jim Crow
Speaker 3: era and ends up writing the historical section of the
Speaker 3: NAACP's case in Brown versus Board of Education.
Speaker 1: This was a case in the US that made it
Speaker 1: to the Supreme Court, where in Oliver Brown, a Topeka,
Speaker 1: Kansas pastor and welder, filed alongside neighbors, a class action
Speaker 1: lawsuit against the Board of Education, which at the time
Speaker 1: prohibited his young daughter, Linda Carroll Brown, from attending the
Speaker 1: white elementary school seven blocks from their house and forced
Speaker 1: her instead to walk six blocks to catch a bus
Speaker 1: to a school for black and other non white children.
Speaker 1: And this segregation was still firmly in place in many
Speaker 1: parts of the US. This case took place in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four.
Speaker 3: That was the hardest part of me, just because I've
Speaker 3: never worked on that culture perform because I don't come
Speaker 3: from the United States. Even at school, I never did
Speaker 3: a class on American social history and American racial issues.
Speaker 3: So I was really discovering stuff for the first time.
Speaker 3: And it's such a disquieting story at the same time
Speaker 3: as being in a certain sense, a very heartening story
Speaker 3: because people like Bonda are incredibly brave and venturesome and
Speaker 3: they make a huge difference.
Speaker 1: So of course this was a landmark case because it
Speaker 1: was decided in favor of Brown and was a leap
Speaker 1: toward integration and the civil rights movement. Although don't feel
Speaker 1: too relieved because decades later, in the early nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: Linda Carroll Brown, the child at the center of this case,
Speaker 1: by that time was grown and a mother with children
Speaker 1: in Topeka schools, and she reopened her case against the
Speaker 1: Board of Education because guess what, schools were still so
Speaker 1: divided along racial lines, and she won the case again,
Speaker 1: prompting three new schools to be built in the area.
Speaker 3: So that part of it was both difficult and exciting.
Speaker 3: The favorite part of it actually is the part about
Speaker 3: a character called Samuel Renshaw, who was a psychologist in
Speaker 3: Ohio in the nineteen four forties and fifties. What Reinshaw
Speaker 3: decided to do is, in certain sense, this is the
Speaker 3: beginning of many of these speed reading classes. What he
Speaker 3: thought he could do was to use a tachistoscope, which
Speaker 3: is like a slide projector that blasts up onto a
Speaker 3: screen a set of characters for something like a tenth
Speaker 3: of a second, or a fiftieth of a second, or
Speaker 3: one hundredths of a second. And he thought he could
Speaker 3: use techistoscope to train readers to read really fast by
Speaker 3: getting them to take in these patterns in decreasing intervals
Speaker 3: of time. And he had this kind of extraordinary project
Speaker 3: to produce kind of superhuman thinkers by training them with
Speaker 3: this machine. And it turns out it then ramifies through
Speaker 3: American culture in the mid to late forties and onwards
Speaker 3: in the fifties. So, for example, in the forties, during
Speaker 3: World War Two, he latched onto the problems that if
Speaker 3: you're engaged in air warfare a World War two, you're
Speaker 3: in these planes that travel at like four hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty miles an hour, so you have to decide really
Speaker 3: fast if some plane that you see is a friend
Speaker 3: or foe whether to shoot at it. And the existing
Speaker 3: methods of identifying planes were kind of piecemeal, so you
Speaker 3: looked at like the tail design and the engine design,
Speaker 3: this kind of thing. And what he said was, no,
Speaker 3: if we use to kisso scopes with photographs of planes,
Speaker 3: we can get people to recognize an entire plane as
Speaker 3: one thing in the way that he thought redis recognize
Speaker 3: words as one thing.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: And in the mid forties through the end of World
Speaker 3: War Two, he and his people trained hundreds of thousands
Speaker 3: of soldiers and sailors and airmen in this technique. You know,
Speaker 3: he was hailed as a hero for doing this.
Speaker 1: So way to go, Samuel Renshaw. I hope people got
Speaker 1: you like a beer or flowers every once in a while.
Speaker 1: Good job. Speaking of good jobs, can you tell me
Speaker 1: a little bit about your job in terms of what
Speaker 1: you do and writing and researching this. Can you tell
Speaker 1: me something that you just absolutely adore about it. More
Speaker 1: about reading.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I'm a historian, right, so a lot
Speaker 3: of the joy I get out of that is actually
Speaker 3: it's to do with tracking curious ideas and people from
Speaker 3: the past. It's a sense of the sort of limitless
Speaker 3: potential of human curiosity. I think it's eternally fascinating that
Speaker 3: to go into something like an archive and you don't
Speaker 3: have to look for very long, like an hour or something,
Speaker 3: and you will find something. There will be something there
Speaker 3: about some individual who made a mark in some way,
Speaker 3: and then you're off to the races, you know, so
Speaker 3: you can really just follow the trails wherever.
Speaker 1: They go, which, honestly Adrian same when your job involves
Speaker 1: descending into rabbit holes that turn into whole ass warrens
Speaker 1: of stories in trivia, it's hard to emerge and just chill.
Speaker 1: I love nothing more than a nice book and some
Speaker 1: time not talking, And it seems like such an indulgence,
Speaker 1: likely because our society is built on prestige for overwork,
Speaker 1: which sucks. I have to remind myself that yes, I
Speaker 1: deserve to sit down and read a book like it
Speaker 1: seems unproductive in hustle culture.
Speaker 3: You know that will resonate with a lot of people.
Speaker 3: I would think it certainly does with me, because you know,
Speaker 3: we live in this world now where to a certain extent,
Speaker 3: we're supposed to be on duty twenty four hours a day,
Speaker 3: you know, at least in this country, right. So there
Speaker 3: are other countries in Europe, for example, where there are
Speaker 3: now laws where companies, you know, your employer cannot email
Speaker 3: you in the middle of the night this kind of thing,
Speaker 3: but not so much in the United States, not America
Speaker 3: with the right, the Land of the Free. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: And the downside of that is, as you say this,
Speaker 3: this feeling of like one feels guilty to sit down
Speaker 3: and do something slow like reading, and you know, I
Speaker 3: think it's important to try to overcome that at least.
Speaker 1: Yeah, brings so much joy to people. So ask literary
Speaker 1: people literally questions because they wrote the book on books
Speaker 1: and for more on doctor Adyriant John's The Science of Reading,
Speaker 1: you can see the link to his books in the
Speaker 1: show notes. We also linked to the charities of choice
Speaker 1: for this week. We are at ologies on x and Instagram.
Speaker 1: I'm at Ali Ward on both. We now have kid
Speaker 1: friendly ssmologies episodes available in their own feed. Just find
Speaker 1: the colorful new logo and subscribed Tosmologies wherever you get podcasts,
Speaker 1: or at the link in the show notes. Telling your friends,
Speaker 1: tell your teachers. You can submit questions for ologists, but
Speaker 1: becoming a patron at patroon dot com sash ologies, we
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Speaker 1: Theologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts.
Speaker 1: Kelly R. Dwyerd as a website. Noel Dilworth is our
Speaker 1: scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our managing director. Editing on
Speaker 1: this episode was done by a wonderful trifecta including Jake Chafe,
Speaker 1: Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, and Jarrett Sleeper of the
Speaker 1: Webby Award winning Mindjam Media. Nick Thorburn made theme music.
Speaker 1: And if you stick around till the end of the episode,
Speaker 1: I tell you a secret, and this one is at
Speaker 1: Jared and I have been walking around in nearby lake
Speaker 1: and one day I joined him for for a lap.
Speaker 1: He'd already done one, and he told me about this
Speaker 1: guy who's like a really fast runner who had lapped
Speaker 1: him a few times. And sure enough, like two minutes later,
Speaker 1: the shirtless guy comes around the bend. He's tanned, he's
Speaker 1: got back tattoos, he's like lean as beef, jerky but
Speaker 1: shiny with sunscreen. And we're watching him approach, like, man,
Speaker 1: this guy's a good runner. He must be sustaining like
Speaker 1: a six minute mile. I wonder if he's like training
Speaker 1: for a marathon. That's really impressive. And as he passes us,
Speaker 1: he has next time to take a picture, like he
Speaker 1: was the teenage villain in a John Hughes movie about
Speaker 1: a prom. We're like, what, what are you? A country
Speaker 1: club jock that just tried to haze a couple nerds.
Speaker 1: We were just like, whoa, that guy's a good runner.
Speaker 1: Next time took a picture. Okay, man, we didn't mean to.
Speaker 1: We were literally just like, woh well, that guy's good
Speaker 1: at running anyway. Okay, be nice to you, Okay, bye bye, pacodermatology, homiology,
Speaker 1: ordo zoology, lithology, new technology, meteorology, paratology, ethology, seriology, selenology,
Speaker 1: And I am so excited to read with you today