Seeing the letters is just the start of the reading process. Although our eyes are focused on the letters, we learn to ignore them. Instead, we perceive whole words, chunks of meaning. Once we become proficient at reading, the precise shape of the letters — not to mention the arbitrariness of the spelling — doesn’t even matter, which is why we read word, WORD, and WoRd the same way.
Until now most assumed that when we read both eyes look at the same letter of a word concurrently. But it was found that our eyes look at different letters in the same word and then combine the different images through a process known as fusion. We were able to clearly show that we experience a single, very clear and crisp visual representation due to the merging of the two different images from each eye.
Language tends to be stored in the brain to be processed in audio format, so besides reading the text we automatically convert it to speech in our own heads. After that the process of making sense takes place.
Studies have shown that when a word is checked against the storehouse of words in the brain – whether it is a written word or a word-sound – only the main part of the word is checked first, and then the ending is processed separately. For example, ‘sing’, ‘singing’ and ‘singer’ would all be checked against the base word ‘sing’.
Once we recognized the printed words we need to make sense out of them. Understanding how meaning arises from those words is of the most challenging tasks in cognitive sciences.
More on making sense and meanings can be found here and here.
There is an ongoing debate whether the new kind of reading experience provided by internet is beneficial or not. Some interesting articles are worth exploring: Is Google making us stupid and How is Google making us smarter. It would be interesting to incorporate the last scientific findings about how or brain reads in order to draw new and more accurate conclusions.
“Deep Attention” is characterized by the ability to concentrate on a single object for long periods of time. While “Hyper Attention” is the ability to focus on multiple tasks switching between each with relative ease and speed. Each style is considered a cognitive mode and is fostered and afforded by the media which gave rise to its birth. “Deep attention” can be attributed to the book while “Hyper Attention” is equated with the internet. These cognitive modes are looked at as being diabolically opposed similarly to the discussion that a rises around print vs screen technologies. However what if these cognitive modes could be gaped? How could hyper attention assist deep attention and vice versa? What would this media start to look like?
I believe that cognitive modes of attention should be versatile like that of Leonardo device as a Renaissance man. The educational and pedagogical stance should embrace the two parts of cognition and build services and tools that enable the ability and affordance of each. When knowledge is not valued over its ability to be fast or slow what does is become?
Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods
The Fortune Article ” the Future of Reading” poses some relevant questions?
Question 1: Will anyone be willing to pay for content delivered to a tablet when they can get information for free on the web?
Question 2: But aren’t tablets just a better way to browse the web?
Question 3: Reading? Reading is dead.
Question 4: How will tablet-based ads work better than the web?
Question 5: Can traditional publishing companies reorganize and move fast enough to embrace and serve new platforms?
these questions all poise the options as if the book and the screen are binary. Print media is looked as a being obsolete due to the advancement of screen based tablets. Granted the pervasive nature of digitized content will have a large impact on printed materials. This effect has already stated to take its toll when it comes to newspaper media. How ever like Red heads in America, their kind is not going to dissappear. Book and printed material might start to diminish but then is begs the question just as the question poised above, what is a book when it can exist on a screen?
This question requires going back to the nuanced history of printed material in bound and sequenced form and taking note of its ability to become ubiquitous and why? The screen and the book will never be the same thing as one is fundamentally material based ie pages and ink while the other is silicon driven ie the screen. Each of these forms is a media delivery device and technology. (Although many might not consider books a technology when compared to a computer) Each media format has its own place, use factors, acceptance, penetration into society, and distribution. Each is equally unique to its time and space and each is locked in a continuum that links the two in weave of consumerism, knowledge, and social contextuality. The screen experience would not be capable without the book, and the book would not be producible in contemporary terms with out a computer.
I have asked my self through out this process, why do we consider physical books and digital book and being so different. Why when you buy a physical book do you not receive the digital part also? It seems to me that if you could link the physical with the digital it would allow each of there forms strenghts and affordances to work together rather then in opposition. The simplicity of sequential pages bound together has a unique experience that can only be mimicked by the screen and the social and networking capabilities of a screen require the dynamics of that different system. What are the implications of making print and screen work together, well hopefully it will lead to more productive use of materials and a platform for a larger connection of information directed at specific context.
Isaac Asimov in 1988 spoke with Bill Moyer and starts to discuss the importance of learning and the power the internet and networked computers can have on the ability to impact learning. At 1:23 sec of the conversation video from youtube.com.
“through this machine, for the first time we can have a one to one relationship between information source and information consumer.” – Issac Asimov
This ability opens up the curious mind to explore its own path and suggests that the separation between knowledge and consumption is null. Learning becomes less about the hoops that are jumped through and more about the enjoying of discovering truths on an individual achievement. The machine (computer) and its networking ability has fundamentally challenged the pedagogical structure. Therefore is education really just they ability to engage enticement? a place where you learn to be curious? Or can it continue to establish the carrot and stick mentality of achievement via grades?
If the computer opens up a one to one relationship, what is the responsibility of the objects and services that provide that communication space? the idea that questions lead not to answers but a path of inquiry. A location space to which an individual can challenge a system and explore the possibilities. Is the level of conversation then the metric for which to judge success? The ability to broadcast and engage inquiry and learning beyond the carrot and stick look at my grades, my merits, my achievements but rather look at my connections, my influence, my conversations. Knowledge is contained in groups, societies, and social structures and ways at which to engage communication about knowledge could become the new metric for advancement, innovation or achievement.
Computation seems to be in a second stage of evolution. As we move into a world where computation power is compact and millions of people are carrying super computers in there pockets, the computer has started to remove us from behind a desk. The potential of mobile computing has started to engage the user and the physical world in exciting possibilities. If the purpose of computation at our fingertips is to allow us connection to the information cloud, then what is the form that that connection should take? Mark Weiser famously quoted in his essay : The Computer For the 21st Century
“the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
The interesting part is technologies start to change everyday life. Cell phones are no longer just phones but their ability to be that mode of communication has allowed the access of other interventions and introductions of computers into the hand and away from behind a desk.
A computer can’t be a piece of paper but that doesn’t mean a computer can’t incorporate paper. If books and print material could be used in the same fashion with their simplicity of interaction ie the turning of pages but have the advantage of a social counterpart, then computing would have the ability to become indistinguishable in everyday use by making the use of the book fit with the use of the computer.
he most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
It has been 5 years now, since the fire that took everything from me and I wonder if a day will pass in which I don’t long for the past. Some days are better than others but days like today where the rain spits on my concrete block of a home leave me wanting my old life back. But “those days are gone” like the last thing the FBI officer said to me after I was informed I am being put into Protective Housing. (HA! They really meant Isolated Housing) FBI Special Investigator Milo Kilowski made it very clear to me that the fire was a decisive message and that the firebomb that destroyed my former life had been linked to 3000 others all at the same time. Who would do such a thing? Its been 5 years and they still haven’t figured it out, and frankly I gave up trying to understand too. So I have been sequestered in this freedom jail ever since because I happened to be the only one of the 3000 who wasn’t burned to a crisp. Lucky? On days like today I think not.
My wall talks to me about my schedule for the day and the smell of the automated coffee dispenser singes my nose hairs but the rain has clouded my ambitions even how meager they might have been. When I was smuggled here five years ago the over polished, glossy brochure Officer Kilowski handed me about this place made it sound impressive.
“A place where technology and living are linked.”
Milo was a very candid stocky man who rarely minced his words. When I gave him a puzzled look upon the examination of the brochure he said
“What did you expect us to put you in a Mansion?”
which was followed up with,
“You will be safe here, I give you my word.”
Protective Housing works on the premise of eminent danger. You accept blindly because there is the illusion that at any moment you could be killed and a person in that circumstance rarely denies the help being offered. But 5 years in I don’t feel so scared and I mostly just agonize over the ridiculous shit box that government has provided. I really just want my stuff back my wife, my dog, my books, my records, my paintings, my drawings, my paintbrushes, my tools, my house. I don’t even know if any thing survived the fire. Upon asking Kilowski just says,
“All items have been logged as evidence and evidence will be
returned to the rightful owner upon completion of the
investigation.”
He sounds like such a robot. I’m surprised he doesn’t list the rule ID number along with his canned answer. At first I pressed for answers but now I just go day to day attempting to forget my memories.
They say memories fade with time, but some memories you never want to forget. My wife had such beautiful handwriting the kind that has those cute little curly cues at the end of some words and she made tiny little circles over her i’s and j’s. It was such a reflection of her patience and style. She use to leave me such beautiful hand written notes for groceries or tasks around the house. On valentines day she would write on the mirror with red lipstick. I loved reading her books because I could get into her head from the margin. The Incident took all that from me except for the last book we read together. As a technology blogger, in my former life, I was always being inundated with waves of technology most of it crap but I usually only was given one to review. However this young rep at Hybrid Plus Pens gave me two pens and said,
“Try it with your wife. it will save all your notes to the cloud for
sharing just get a book that has the hybrid logo”
The drizzle is like salt on a paper cut today. I request the wall to bring up the Hybrid Plus Portal, stats automatically flash about my frequency to the site and ads are directed to my temperament flash in the corners. Lately mostly antidepressants show up and have been for the past 5 years when I think about it. The wall now glows with the last remnants of my wife’s writing. Her questions and sarcasm about my insistence she use the pen. She even hassled me in her notes poking fun at my techy job and rubbing in that this book was her choice. I sit at the edge of my bed and move through the pages like I have hundreds of time before. I close my eyes and flop back on the bed hoping that is this might all be a horrible twisted dream. The door speaks up and announces to my concrete block,
“FBI Special Investigator – is approaching.”
I open my eyes right as he knocks on the door.
I open the door and Kilowski is standing holding a small tattered cardboard box with a tag that says evidence in bright yellow and black tape.
“Evidence? “ I say,
“Does this mean the investigation is over?”
Kilowski gets a slight smile out of the corner of his over stoic face and hands me the box. He turns around and upon exit says,
“Go back to your old life and find someone who you can use that
pen with!”
I just stand in the doorway overlooking the other concrete blocks and get rained on as the premise of my “old life” rings in my ears.
