Why Your Brain Learns Better than Paper (a critique)

a YouTube video analysed

I compared this video Why Your Brain Learns Better than Paper to my own experience of reading a lot of ebooks and a lot of traditional books.

https://youtu.be/SEu0tx1_Zwk?si=ZbPkL33JbJ9UpjeI

And then I tried to compare whether the books were poetry, lit crit, social sciences or physics.

The results don't fit the patterns this guy is describing, and I tend to think therefore that he's talking about a certain genre of book (fiction and certain kinds of informational book) that I don't read but that are all that many or most readers read.

I feel he was good at describing the pleasure of reading real books, but he had to do so by denigrating reading eBooks. Obviously books have a tactile feel and a smell, and yes you can go back to something you've read by flicking back and forth and remembering where the sentence was, recto or verso, top or middle or bottom.

But you can also do word searches on ebooks, and I for one use these all the time, with very satisfying results. Because I'm interested in ambiguous and layered texts, with subconscious meanings, I find that word searching flushes things out. I find the eye makes a SUMMARY, and then on several occasions has told me that such and such a page, in total, means only the SUMMARY. I am then quite surprised, by changing the font or the text size, or coming at a text via search, by something very specific that I have been overlooking – but which is now impossible to overlook when it's distorted or magnified or sticking out like a sore thumb by these "linear and scrolling" ebook habits.

Above all, I would point to James Joyce's Ulysses. Because it was written by a professional singer and lover of music, and also a lover of signage and words in visual designs, on buildings and in newspapers, it is in some ways a collage and in other ways a symphony. The collage and symphony aspects tend, as all good paintings and music do, to feel different on different hearings and hung differently in different light with different neighbours. Ebook reading of Ulysses offered me this. It took away from the literally awe inspiring look that printers (guided by Joyce) gave the novel on the page. Awe can blind us, and create fetishism. Ebooks give a flow back, and resist certain stuck habits.

And a book like Ulysses, like a poem, is about much more than the rational business world, or the creation of a world and drama in average fiction. A poem can be much more spiritual, about life lived on many levels. And poets often write to aficionados (either other poets or the trained reader) for a reason, the same reason that a composer writes a chamber piece; or you shouldn't attend Wimbledon hoping for test cricket. There are expectations, there is fancy footwork to be admired, as well as a certain metronome (but not a rhythm as such, not merely more of the same, in the same rhythm, as we got in the venue the previous day).

All of this needs a camera that tracks and zooms in, but also interprets. I've attended football matches in my youth that were hideously boring because so much of the action on so much of the pitch is boring from a distance. And yet I am not, and should not be, able to run over the pitch. Instead, I join in a group consumption, knowing that the match will also be interesting to watch on Match of the Day in an edit later that day.

So the A is better than B drive of this video leads me to question what data were gathered with a view to what goals of proof and what ideals of the benefit of books. I can see why real books are good for kids. I can also see what kind of a childhood home has books, and what other boons come from the likely makeup of such a household: what cultural capital, in short. I'd like to see the Comprehension Tests they're setting and know how they're evaluated, too. I'd also like to know if they see the person with a book primarily as a reader or a writer. By this, I don't mean career choices (I have both careers, the former better paid than the latter). I mean to describe which activities and uses of books more resemble that of a writer and which that of a businessperson mastering a brief, or making sales projections. Writers imagine how they would make the piece in front of them, and they analyse for fancy footwork that doesn't come naturally to them that they might try, for a character, or a style for a new project. And by analogy, this is what good human resources managers do, seeing the potential and possible repositioning of some staff. Or trying on a new product line, or way of working.

And I'd also like to know who among their samples also listen to longform music like symphonies, or visit art galleries or make paintings. Or pray and meditate. Or work in nursing or a hospice guiding other humans in need of particularly tailored wisdom and interaction.

In conclusion, this video is a hymn to book reading, and uses of books to help children learn and grow (although it seriously lacks for discussing being read to at home). It's a bit ableist (see the comments on, heaven forfend, an ebook reader resembling someone with ADHD). And it doesn't seduce me into book reading. It scares and smugs me into it.

But I am going to consider, when I've next had a good night's sleep, what I remember from books and what from ebooks, and make a data analysis of that. I will add, though, that I have literally myself made Kindle versions of existing print books because I LOATHE the font and leading that the publisher used. But this is nearly all poetry, and, as with so much, poetry is the exception not that proves the rule but looks askance and with dismay at the world of self-satisfied book readers who have no feel for poetry. It looks to me like they're pop music fans telling me how best to experience (the very dead) Beethoven, abounding with shallow arrogance.