Comment by docbrown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by docbrown | Hacker News Reader

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>”These deep structures in the thalamus and brainstem help our visual cortex to filter important information from the flood of visual input even before we consciously perceive it.” Interestingly, it seems that the more the signal timings between the two brain regions are aligned, the better the reading capabilities. “We, therefore, believe that these brain systems increasingly fine-tune their communication as learners become more and more proficient in reading,” the neuroscientist explains further. “This could explain why experienced readers navigate more efficiently through a text.”

I read the headline and instantly wondered if the same result occurs as we age and continue to fine tune our reading skills. The above passage seems to confirm the age old saying of reading keeping the mind active. One thing I am wondering though is if there is a certain types of literature that the brains reacts in a more positive or less than observation way. For example, does our brain engage more when we’re reading a technical literature review moreso than if it was a novel? Or vice versa. Is this why professionals—lawyers are the main ones i can think of—who comb through hundreds of dense reading weekly get viewed as achieving such a masters ability in reading?

Anecdotally, I relearned[0] to read and write in Arabic in 2016. When I started I could just recognize some letters off-hand and when I stopped I had the reading ability of a six year old[1]. I excelled quite rapidly and it's coincidentally tied to a time of intense emotional and intellectual development for me.

Even my skills in programming have doubled or tripled during that time. To the point where the then-CTO of the company picked it and brought it up. I went out and doubled my salary and job responsibilities a year later.

I'm not sure if it's related to the reading, or if the reading was a side-effect of it, but I thought I'd share.

[0] I attended a weekly class for several months when I was 8 but we didn't get through half of a first grade book.

[1] Although I can make out the letters and can write pretty good too, it takes me longer than usual and I usually can't make sense of 60% of what I'm reading because written Arabic is in the very formal MSA and I'm only familiar with a regional dialect. A comparison to this would be someone who's only familiar with NY-borough slang trying to make sense of Shakespeare.

how did you re-learn to read? I am ethnically chinese and have long been meaning to (re?)-acquire the mother tongue.

I imagine Chinese would be a lot harder. With Arabic, it's a total of 28 letters with more or less 3 different wants of writing them, giving a total of 84 possible glyphs. On top of this there are various accents that can be placed on every letter. In essence, it's not that much more complicated than some sort of Latin alphabet (i.e Spanish or Italian).

The process I used was to learn a new letter everyday (with its three combinations) then found a local Lebanese church that had Arabic classes and joined up.

I was a lot better than everyone else, because I went in with prior knowledge, so I was always at least several lessons ahead which allowed me to utilise my time with the teacher to ask questions on specific things rather than just trying to keep up with the core coursework.

> does our brain engage more when we’re reading a technical literature review moreso than if it was a novel

I'm sure it does, but moreso I think that it might be more a function of the actual style of language used than it is of the subject matter. For example, if you read any literature from a century ago, you'll likely notice that what we now call run-on sentences are used all over the place. These sentences have a parsing tree that is far deeper and more self-referential than modern authors use, and so in turn likely engages the brain more than a simpler sentence structure would. Of course, this has negative connotations as far as clear communication goes, but it's a good exercise to spend a few weeks reading this kind of material - it definitely becomes noticeably more readable after more exposure.

You'll also likely be familiar with the way that newspaper articles (particularly in tabloids and local rags) have dropped their reading grade-level standards and are using simpler linguistic constructions to help ensure their audience understands. There's probably a bit of a negative feedback loop in there somewhere.

It is also true in older literature that writers were paid by the number of words and naturally you'd get a very descriptive styles, lots and lots and lots of details

No, that's not true everywhere. See Djuna Barnes for example.

As long as you make new neural connections your brain is going to grow[0]. An anecdotal fact which I heard many years ago was that adding a new perspective to look at something is like increasing your IQ by 10-20 points. Simply reading a lot of text within your comfort zone is not going to increase your mental capacity.

[0]https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung

> An anecdotal fact which I heard many years ago was that adding a new perspective to look at something is like increasing your IQ by 10-20 points

I'd be skeptical about that. A few years ago there was this craze about increasing working memory and thus IQ using the dual-n-back game (advertised as the only game that has transference to unrelated tasks). Turned out to be a placebo. People have been dreaming about increasing their IQs and from time to time fall to various fads. Until there is strong scientific evidence, these 'IQ boosters' should not be taken seriously.

I wonder if learning to play music later in life has similar effects. I have read that music, if learned young in life — by age 12 or so, actually produces physical changes in the brain.

That's the first thing I wondered as well since I'm currently trying (and mostly failing) to learn how to play my guitar.

I also wonder what the limits to learning are. At some point, if I learn something new, does pushing that knowledge into my long-term store replace or weaken an existing memory?

I think of it as a time-decay function. There are only so many attentive, focused hours one can give during a day, and a memory only lasts so long before it decays from disuse. Some amount of area under this curve represents what a person can functionally retain. It isn't a fixed amount, as more connections between subjects tends to reinforce both, but there is a limit.

1) Neurogenesis halts in your early 20s. After that, no new neurons for you, sorry. Although the connections may change.

2) "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points" is actually one of Alan Kay's famous quips.

> 1) Neurogenesis halts in your early 20s. After that, no new neurons for you, sorry. Although the connections may change.

This statement as written is almost total nonsense. A cursory internet search yields abundant studies on adult neurogenesis. Even small amounts of cardiovascular exercise increase brain volume, stimulate neural growth, and create synaptic connections in adults well into old age.

At best, one could claim that neuron growth slows as we age, but it absolutely doesn't halt.

And yet when Arturo Alvarez-Buylla and his team of researchers actually searched for physical evidence of young neurons in adult brains, they found... nothing: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25975

The studies which came before may be based on nonprimate animal models in which adult neurogenesis does occur. But the best evidence we have to date suggests that adult humans do not grow new neurons.

That article you linked to is about neurogenesis in hippocampus only.

1) Can you please cite sources to this? Here is one (of many found) negating this statement. [0]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3106107/

> One thing I am wondering though is if there is a certain types of literature that the brains reacts in a more positive or less than observation way. For example, does our brain engage more when we’re reading a technical literature review moreso than if it was a novel?

I've often wondered this also. It would be interesting to quantitatively determine the effects of reading fiction versus non-fiction material on the mind.

Intuitively it would make sense to me that they both provide advantages to the mind. Certainly, being able to parse dense technical literature is impressive, but the ability to use the imagination and think creatively would probably use different parts of the mind, and I'd think the "best" minds could do both.

Wasn't it said that Einstein kind of came up with the whole idea about relativity based on the imagined idea of "riding" a beam of light or something like that?

I highly recommend Richard Feynman's talk [0] on imagining physics from the BBC series "Fun to Imagine":

"In the case of science, I think that one of the things that make it difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination. It's very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like."

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zZbX_9ru9U

I believe any current studies focused mostly on brain engagements on screen vs book. We know that there are studies that indicate that reading fiction engages the brain in such a way that it is speculated a given reader literally experiences the fiction as if it were real life.

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