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Opinion | Is Listening to a Book the Same Thing as Reading It? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eading-cheating-listening.html listening reading book psychology Education
shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Writing is less than 6,000 years old, insufficient time for the evolution of specialized mental processes devoted to reading. We use the mental mechanism that evolved to understand oral language to support the comprehension of written language. Indeed, research shows that adults get nearly identical scores on a reading test if they listen to the passages instead of reading them.
  • Nevertheless, there are differences between print and audio, notably prosody. That’s the pitch, tempo and stress of spoken words. “What a great party” can be a sincere compliment or sarcastic put-down, but they look identical on the page.
  • It sounds as if comprehension should be easier when listening than reading, but that’s not always true. For example, one study compared how well students learned about a scientific subject from a 22-minute podcast versus a printed article. Although students spent equivalent time with each format, on a written quiz two days later the readers scored 81 percent and the listeners 59 percent.
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  • What happened? Note that the subject matter was difficult, and the goal wasn’t pleasure but learning. Both factors make us read differently. When we focus, we slow down. We reread the hard bits. We stop and think. Each is easier with print than with a podcast.
  • Print also supports readers through difficult content via signals to organization like paragraphs and headings, conventions missing from audio.
  • although one core process of comprehension serves both listening and reading, difficult texts demand additional mental strategies. Print makes those strategies easier to use
  • But even with those changes, audiobooks won’t replace print because we use them differently
  • Eighty-one percent of audiobook listeners say they like to drive, work out or otherwise multitask while they listen. The human mind is not designed for doing two things simultaneously, so if we multitask, we’ll get gist, not subtleties.
  • Print may be best for lingering over words or ideas, but audiobooks add literacy to moments where there would otherwise be none
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Audiobooks and the Return of Storytelling - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-return-of-storytelling.html reading audio story audiobooks storytelling
shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • for most of human history literature has been spoken out loud.
  • in Europe, silent private reading became widespread only in the second half of the 19th century.
  • What happens when you hear a text rather than read it? The obvious thing is that you can do something else with your eyes. That is why I can listen to books when I garden. My hands and eyes can work. And so listening to a book is a different sensory experience than reading it. The inner imagining of the story becomes commingled with the outer senses
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  • when I listen to a story, instead of reading it on a page, my memory of the book does change. I remember more of the action and less of the language
  • You don’t check back on previous paragraphs or read the last page first when you listen. You move forward, and what you carry with you is person and event.
  • I listen the way I read books as a child, as if I were there watching. The author becomes more transparent, the characters more real.
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The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ce-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic pandemic profit economic response opportunity financial
shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “You don’t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have,” he said over the phone. No argument here. He wouldn’t specify an amount, but reckoned that he was up almost two thousand per cent on the year.
  • He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech, one of the few North American manufacturers of N95 surgical masks, with the expectation that when the virus made it across the Pacific the company would get government contracts to produce more. The stock was trading at about three dollars and fifty cents a share, and so, for cents on the dollar, he bought options to purchase the shares at a future date for ten dollars: he was betting that it would go up much more than that. By the end of February, the stock was trading at twenty-five dollars a share
  • He quickly put some money to work
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  • He shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.
  • Last October, he listened to an audiobook by the Hardcore History podcaster, Dan Carlin, called “The End Is Always Near.” “So I had pandemics and plagues in my head,” the Australian said. “In December, I started seeing the first articles about this wet-market thing going on in China, and then in early January there was a lot on Twitter about the shit in Wuhan.” He was in Switzerland on a ski holiday with his family, and he bought all the surgical masks and gloves he could find.
  • The Australian, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, is a voluble redhead just shy of fifty.
  • The problem, he said, was that, perhaps more now than ever, Americans lack what he called “social cohesion,” and thus the collective will, to commit to such a path.
  • perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would burn out after four weeks,” he said. The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months, if not years, of total isolation from the world. “If you don’t trade with China, they’re screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war. Let the rest of the world burn.
  • I’d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues (he called them the Fokkers, for an acronym involving his name), all of them men, most of them expensively educated financial professionals, some of them very rich, a few with connections in high places. The general disposition of the participants, with exceptions, was the opposite of the Australian’s
  • they expressed the belief, with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery, that the media, the modellers, and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus
  • They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program “Mad Money,” on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.
  • it’s hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings.
  • This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the virus’s victims, the economy had a preëxisting condition—debt, instead of pulmonary disease.
  • “It’s as if the virus is almost beside the point,” a trader I know told me. “This was all set up to happen.”
  • the “smart money,” like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by March’s end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit lines
  • In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down “just” $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.
  • It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapses—haircuts for baldheads—leading to more defaults.
  • In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.
  • As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didn’t have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions
  • On March 20th, Goldman Sachs spooked the world, by predicting a twenty-four-per-cent decline in G.D.P. in the second quarter, a falloff in activity that seemed at once both unthinkable and inevitable. Subsequent predictions grew even more disma
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Pandemic-Proof Your Habits - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...emic-habits-routine-brain.html
shared by anonymous on 04 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The good news is that much of what we miss about our routines and customs, and what makes them beneficial to us as a species, has more to do with their comforting regularity than the actual behaviors
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      Our brains have that much power over our emotions, and can change how we feel about the world when they experience a change in routine.
  • The key to coping during this, or any, time of upheaval is to quickly establish new routines so that, even if the world is uncertain, there are still things you can count on.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I haven't really thought of this, since I'm so set on getting back to old routines.
  • Human beings are prediction machines.
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  • Our brains are statistical organs that are built simply to predict what will happen next
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I don't know if we've talked about this specifically, more that we like and tend to make up patterns to "predict" the future and reassure ourselves. However, it's not real.
  • This makes sense because, in prehistoric times, faulty predictions could lead to some very unpleasant surprises — like a tiger eating you or sinking in quicksand.
  • So-called prediction errors (like finding salmon instead of turkey on your plate on Thanksgiving) send us into a tizzy because our brains interpret them as a potential threat.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      We have talked about this- the survival aspect of this reaction to change.
  • Keep doing what you’ve been doing, because you did it before, and you didn’t die.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      A good way of putting it.
  • all essentially subconscious efforts to make your world more predictable, orderly and safe.
  • Routines and rituals also conserve precious brainpower
  • It turns out our brains are incredibly greedy when it comes to energy consumption, sucking up 20 percent of calories while accounting for only 2 percent of overall body weight.
  • Our brains are literally overburdened with all the uncertainty caused by the pandemic.
  • Not only is there the seeming capriciousness of the virus, but we no longer have the routines that served as the familiar scaffolding of our lives
  • “It’s counterintuitive because we think of meaning in life as coming from these grandiose experiences
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      I've definitely felt this way.
  • grandiose
  • grandiose
  • Of course, you can always take routines and rituals too far, such as the extremely controlled and repetitive behaviors indicative of addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder and various eating disorders.
  • it’s mundane routines that give us structure to help us pare things down and better navigate the world, which helps us make sense of things and feel that life has meaning.”
  • In the coronavirus era, people may resort to obsessive cleaning, hoarding toilet paper, stockpiling food or neurotically wearing masks when driving alone in their cars. On the other end of the spectrum are those who stubbornly adhere to their old routines because stopping feels more threatening than the virus.
  • You’re much better off establishing a new routine within the limited environment that we find ourselves in
  • Luckily, there is a vast repertoire of habits you can adopt and routines you can establish to structure your days no matter what crises are unfolding around you
  • The point is to find what works for you. It just needs to be regular and help you achieve your goals, whether intellectually, emotionally, socially or professionally. The best habits not only provide structure and order but also give you a sense of pleasure, accomplishment or confidence upon completion.
  • It could be as simple as making your bed as soon as you get up in the morning or committing to working the same hours in the same spot.
  • Pandemic-proof routines might include weekly phone or video calls with friends, Taco Tuesdays with the family, hiking with your spouse on weekends, regularly filling a bird feeder, set times for prayer or meditation, front yard happy hours with the neighbors or listening to an audiobook every night before bed.
  • The truth is that you cannot control what happens in life. But you can create a routine that gives your life a predictable rhythm and secure mooring.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Jan 21
       
      It's all about changing your thoughts and not tricking exactly but helping your brain.
  • This frees your brain to develop perspective so you’re better able to take life’s surprises in stride.
  • I attended a Thanksgiving dinner several years ago where the hostess, without warning family and friends, broke with tradition and served salmon instead of turkey, roasted potatoes instead of mashed, raspberry coulis instead of cranberry sauce and … you get the idea.
  • Too many people are still longing for their old routines. Get some new ones instead.
  • It wasn’t that the meal itself was bad. In fact, the meal was outstanding. The problem was that it wasn’t the meal everyone was expecting.
  • When there are discrepancies between expectations and reality, all kinds of distress signals go off in the brain.
  • It doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday ritual or more mundane habit like how you tie your shoes; if you can’t do it the way you normally do it, you’re biologically engineered to get upset.
  • This in part explains people’s grief and longing for the routines that were the background melodies of their lives before the pandemic
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