Pages vs. Screens: The Debate Continues

Whether printed books are superior to, or merely precursors to, screen-transmitted words continues to be controversial.

A subset of that wide-ranging debate is the argument about the physiological differences (?) in the brain when a reader uses a book vs. when a reader uses a screen. This was touched on recently in the form of a survey of some recent books on this (and related) subjects; the survey was written by Thomas Larson and posted at The Rumpus.

Read Larson’s article (and the interesting readers’ comments).

 

The Love of Reading…and the Limits of Memory

If the pleasures of reading books depended on how much we readers are able to remember what we’ve read…well, there’d probably be a lot less reading going on.

Still, most of us regret how much we forget about what we, um, remember reading.

Hence the frequency of readers deciding to re-read certain fondly (if vaguely) remembered books.

All of which is delightfully discussed in Michael Rowe’s essay, Good Luck, Memory, recently posted at The Millions. As is often the case with biblioblogposts, most of the readers’ comments are equally thought-provoking.

First “Slow Food,” Then “Slow Travel,” Now ‘Slow Reading’

Read the blurbs for – and a chapter from – this March 2009 book that examines the pleasures and advantages of “slow reading” here.

The author’s blog, partially devoted to the “slow reading movement,” is here.

Additional blogs extoling “slow reading” are here and here.

This past week’s Guardian article, “The Art of Slow Reading,” is here.

A biblioblogger’s review of Slow Reading is here.

Found via the New York Times’ Book Bench

Your Brain, Reading

A neuroscientist has discovered that a particular area of the brain is active when a person is reading. The reason this is an unexpected finding: many scientists believe that the human brain evolved long before people learned how to read. Since reading was invented only around 5,000 years ago, the finding is evidence that the brain can apparently learn new ways to adapt to new human activities, and transmit those adaptations to future generations. Details of the research are posted at the New Scientist’s blog Culture Lab.

Found at LISNews