It can be hard to know what’s true. Is it because of what we read, or how we read? Join me for 2.5 minutes and 3 takeaways.
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I’m sure you’ve had this experience: in a casual conversation, you share something you’ve been really interested in lately, and one of your friends or colleagues says oh! that reminds me! have you seen this?
I’m always interested in the ways in which we lose touch with truth. How and why does it happen? So a brilliant friend recommended me the podcast: “this is your brain on deep reading” which is Ezra Klein in conversation with Maryanne Wolf.
The main subject of the podcast was reading, but I had 3 takeaways on the subject of our slippery relationship with reality:
First, we are increasingly susceptible to non-truth, and to constructing our realities in narrow and self-reinforcing ways. Why? Because we are engaging in more “shallow” ways with what we see and read, just constantly scrolling and skimming, AND we are facing a very high volume of information, there is more stuff coming at us than we could possible consume. So, lack of deep engagement plus high volume of information leads to our susceptibility to non truth, and our tendency to constructing our realities in narrow and self reinforcing ways.
Now takeaway #2, double clicking on this idea of shallow vs deep engagement: It turns out, when you’re skimming vs deep reading, your eyes do different things. Your brain does different things. And you actually relate differently to how you sequence and digest the ideas, where in skimming you are absorbing things more linearly, in deep reading you’re going back and forth, connecting ideas differently in space and time. And those differences become even more visible and obvious if you look at reading on paper vs digitally.
Which takes us to 3, and brings it all together with a question that Ezra Klein actually asked: Is it the information that we are consuming that actually matters? Or is it HOW we engage with information that informs whether we develop a flawed conception of truth? That’s the dramatic question I was left with.
In a world where we are deeply engaging less and less, are we actually ABLE to maintain connection with reality?
I think we are, and I think we’ll continue to be able to. And also, I think the behaviors and relationships and tools that used to keep us grounded don’t seem to be quite enough anymore.
Just some of my recent food for thought. Thanks for listening!
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_NFSDaMj-A (and any other podcasting platform)