Use it or lose it, your choice
‘Son,’ I said for the nth time to my thirteen year old who was intent on revising all the subjects for his oncoming exams in his mind rather than on the paper, ‘Maths can’t be done in the mind alone, you need to write it out.’
‘Hmm,’ he said.
‘You must revise on the paper,’ I reiterated but the message just bounced off his mental shield as he continued doing what he was doing.
As far as biology goes, our bodies and their functions are not unique when compared with other species. What differentiates us are our abilities of language reading and writing which are our own creations. My occupational wellbeing depends on my writing and your reading, so this piece is kind of personal to me. However, let me try to convince you that reading and writing are something you need to be doing too.
In addition to writing, I have been teaching English over the last three odd years to college going kids and am not surprised in the least that most of the students are not keen on reading and writing. In the era of video book summaries, summarised news and everything else shortened to meet our dismally low attention spans and so-called ‘reading is so yesterday’ syndrome this can hardly be news to anyone. The statistics given on this page are quite revealing.
Reading and reading comprehension are big problems for most of my students. I have always thought that this is due to their lack of practice from the early stage of their lives and then they had the misfortune of being born in the internet era where books have translated into movies, thoughts translated into quotable quotes, and now movies compressed into reels and one-liner stories.
There is no reason today for the brain to work, to think and develop ideas, there is no need for contemplation, no need to chew our thoughts; today’s is a generation being fed pre-digested food and the results are evident in the reduced quality of debates.
The arguments witnessed on social media are based on half baked information, often biased, quoted-but-unread articles, conclusions that are not based on first principles and the deluded conviction that emotions trump the truth. What such data mining leads to is confirmation bias and endless nonsense. These are all external manifestations of not reading enough and not reading widely enough, but there is also an internal manifestation that is happening with this generation that it is unaware of, that of the degradation of their reading circuit.
I was not way off track while thinking that lack of practice is the reason for poor comprehension skills. The development of writing created a new circuit in our brain, the reading circuit, that developed primarily to enable us to process this new skill, perhaps the most important skill that we would ever acquire. This circuit works like a muscle and degenerates if not utilised. It is evident that students are now not comfortable with longer, denser and more difficult texts due to a reduction in the time they do deep-reading, the act of thoughtful and deliberate reading. If this was not enough, the disruptive changeover to the digital reading medium also affects our deep reading and comprehension negatively. On a side note, all my work is on the digital medium and I’ve seen a fair amount of readership, maybe because I write fast-moving fiction stories instead of denser literature. :-)
Writing, that too with our hands, is as important as reading. Writing with a pen and paper than on a keyboard and screen is more therapeutic and in my personal experience, more effective. My default language since birth has been English, thanks to the colonial mindset, but of late, I have taken to Gujarati and written a few books in a short span of time mostly because writing on a paper helped me analyse and learn faster. It’s not just me, it’s also science that says so.
Scientific experiments have proven that those who write have increased neural activity as compared to those who type. The results of mathematics test with his in-the-head-practice did not add up well for my son, but if they aren’t enough proof, in one experiment, Karin James at Indiana University asked young kids who were yet to learn to read to reproduce a letter after seeing it, some by hand and some by typing it on a screen and the results were amazing. Freehand showed much more activity in the brain. Even college students who take notes using their hands learn more effectively than those who use a keyboard. If that’s not enough, writing has yet another advantage worth noting.
I’ve already spoken about keyboard warriors and their arguments. Having a ‘delete’ button has made us more insensitive and this unnecessary bravado has increased the vileness on social media. The delete button is similar to what has happened to photography. When we had the negative film roll with a limited number of shots, the photographs were taken with a lot more care than today when my mobile can handle millions of pictures. We had a lot more restraint and thought that went into writing something earlier. Now, who cares?
I do, you should too. Have you thought how an elevator has made us more obese as we do not like to climb even one flight of stairs now? It is vital, as we keep on finding newer and more disruptive ways to make life easier for us and in the process end up with newer and never thought before problems, that we hold on to what is good and necessary.
Deep reading and writing aid our development in a way that few other things can; the earlier we begin the better we get. Yes, these may be modern times and everything may be moving to its digital avatar, but these are skills worth preserving for posterity. And the good news is, that they can be; if you use it, you won’t lose it. So, what are you waiting for? Get a good book or pick up that pen!
Keep reading and writing.
