Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the modern tendency to read many books quickly but without deep understanding, prioritizing quantity over quality.
Joshua Foer points out a significant shift in how we engage with reading in contemporary society. He argues that while we have access to a vast array of books and often read many, we do so without the deep focus and critical analysis that true understanding requires. This trend stems from a cultural pressure to keep pace with the overwhelming amount of information available, leading to a superficial approach to literature that emphasizes the number of books read rather than the richness of the experience with each one.
In practice
In a presentation on the importance of focused reading, this quote can illustrate the need for deep engagement with texts.
We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear.
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.
To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
It's very important for the parents of young autistic children to encourage them to talk, or for those that don't talk, to give them a way of communicating, like a picture board, where they can point to a glass of milk, or a jacket if they're cold, or the bathroom. If they want something, then they need to learn to request that thing.
You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.
Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.
I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.
People who earn the label "creative" are really just people who_x000D_ _x000D_ come up with more combinations of ideas, find interesting ones faster,_x000D_ _x000D_ and are willing to try them out. The problem is that most schools_x000D_ _x000D_ and organizations train us out of those habits.
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