On Reading (or "Feed Your Head")

I woke up this morning thinking about the books that I donated from my basement cleaning last night. As I was putting them into the donation bin, I thought of the cost of those books, many purchased new from a retail bookstore. When I awoke this morning, I started thinking about the time and effort that we put into “feeding our heads.” It is truly significant how much of our lives we spend reading long documents of text, and the efficiency (or lack thereof) with which we actually transfer some of that information to regions of our brains where it can be recalled and used if ever needed.

Is there a better way for humans to expand their knowledge? I’m sure that there are more time-efficient modes of learning. Especially if you believe that after reading a long book, or even attending a semester-long class, your retained knowledge boils down to a few concepts. I do believe this myself at some level. For example, most of the courses in my Engineering education, detailed and grueling as most of there were, can be boiled down to three or less equations. For example, one of my most difficult courses, Dynamics, may be summed up with one equation, Newton’s second law, which simply states F=ma. Another full semester course, Statics, is even a simplification of this! Since in Statics the structures being analyzed are at rest (acceleration equals zero), the Dynamics equation simplifies to F=0!

But, how well would I understand these concepts if I only got the equations, and not the context and experience of analyzing many structures and examples in order to see these truths from many different perspectives? Wouldn’t I oversimplify the world, and therefore my experience of it, if I had never learned to systematically find the forces in every beam of a complex bridge truss, or calculated how much energy is contained in a spinning flywheel? I probably wouldn’t really understand what a flywheel was for without this experience. I guess that I believe that the context and experience of learning affects specifically how information is stored in memory, and how rich that memory is, how useful it will truly be if and when it is ever needed.

I am currently reading To Kill a Mockingbird to my nine year old daughter. When we’re through, will she really only have the “Cliffs Notes” version of the story in her memory? Will she only remember Southern racism, and how negative it was? I think not. She will remember Scout, Jem, Dill, and Atticus. She will remember sitting with me, as I read the story, with its extremely rich vocabulary and complex levels of thought being transferred in the language of Scout as a young, motherless girl. She’ll remember how I hesitate when forced to say the “n” word in reading it to her, how I stop to explain just how bad that word is. In the end, these experiences are far more valuable than the central lesson. So, I say, carry on! Feed your head the old-fashioned, inefficient way!