The Unbelievable Science of How We Read
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- Опубликовано: 2 май 2024
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Reading. You’re doing it right now. I bet you don’t even have to think about it. But have you ever wondered what’s happening in your brain to turn all these weird symbols into meaning? This video will teach you how to read all over again. What you’re doing right now is way more amazing than you ever realized.
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As a graphic designer, in school, the biggest thing we were taught is that 90% of our work shouldn’t be noticed.
Is that because most of what designers focus on taps into the subconscious and influences the brain?
Not just graphic designs but verything is a language, from a walk of an individual to the culture of a whole nation.
Unfortunately many are not honest and deceptive and serve an aim for self benefit.
🛏️• ° ᴼ (Zzz Zzz Zzz Zzz
Me, as an artist, get the
[best ideas] when I start
to wake up slowly,, when
I am (still) half asleep. :)
Now fix my game graphic
I remember this concept was first introduced to me in a high school drawing class. Our teacher told us "artists are great liars," and it's always stuck with me. The point of this sentiment was to teach us how artists need to make smart choices (and the use of having a deep understanding of theory of visual imagery) so that what we create is perceived how we want it to be perceived - this can include not representing something perfectly realistically, but changing how something is represented so that a viewer _perceives_ it that way.
...Since that sounds kind of excessively complicated, it's basically the thing in this video about letters being slightly different sizes so that we perceive them as being the same size.
Someone once pointed out to me, you cannot look at a word and not read it (so long as you know the alphabet that is), and it completely blew my mind.
I can lol, it happens when I look at a word of arabic or hindi scripts - I absolutely know them, but I don't practicing them often.
Tell that to me when I have to read a book out loud in front of class
The same can not be said about mathematical formulae. I can stare at them for hours without any comprehension at all.
This is me being a pedant, and this doesn’t take away from what you said at all, but technically you can be looking at a word without reading it if it’s too small or far away.
I know that most People’s do that, but not me I`m dyslexic, it tales a real effort to do so.
I used to work in a care home for elderly patients, and there was a 92 year old lady with late stage dementia, should could barely formulate a sentence…yet she could still read! You’d give her a letter that had come for her in the post and she’d read it all aloud. It’s very deeply embedded into us
That is fascinating. I'm a retired kindergarten teacher, so I've had a hand in many emerging reader's end of the continuum. The acquisition process can feel a bit less automatic in the day-to-day, but it is amazing how much growth in language ability happens over a relatively short period.
@@dianemurray6550 I teach phonics to second language learners. My grade 3s are having trouble with spelling because, although they can read OK, they aren't breaking the words up into component parts such as d-o-g, or g-l-a-d. I've gone back to basics with them to get them to do this in order to be able to spell, because right now, they're trying to spell from memorising words they come across. So my task is to teach them to spell words they don't know the meaning of (since if I use familiar words, I won't know if they're spelling from memory, or phonetically). It actually seems to be working, but at the moment, I have break it up phonetically for them and they are then connecting the sounds they hear to the letters names.
It was the opposite for my dad.
Alzheimers ended his ability to read LONG before other symptoms, and he was always able to communicate.
It was about two years between losing his ability to read, and his inability to recognize his house as his home.
Yep--I've tutored a lot of kids to read who had barriers and were delayed. My theory is that reading developed 200,000 years ago, got lost through war and disease and was rediscovered a few thousand years ago,.
@@Kyle-sr6jm Because my mother has dementia I am learning FROM HER that it isn't the same condition as alzheimers. I gather they can co-exist, but don't necessarily.
I’m dyslexic and when you mentioned the part that we “don’t sound out words in our heads when we read” that is exactly what I do, I always wondered why other people find they can read faster in their head than out loud because for me it’s exactly the same.
I dont slowly.. Sound out words in my head. I read really fast but when im saying stuff out loud its a wayyy slower speed. Idk. Its really weird
I do this too. huh
Yeah kinda same (not sure if dyslexic or just autistic, tho I have strong evidence for the latter on other apsects of life, not sure if that has anything to do), tho sometimes I can skip over the text and still get what it was saying, just I'll get stuck back into sounding them in my head again. However I've found I apparently still read faster than a lot of people, prolly because I do it quite often (actually reading out loud is somewhat slow to me, but that's another story, and might have to do with muscular coordination instead)
*sigh* goddd what a mess of a human being I am
Bruh, every day I bargain with myself if I’m actually dyslexic or not
When I read I also sound the words out in my head and I always have. I read as if I was going to say what I’m reading out loud, and I do that when I type too. Sometimes I take longer to read or type because I end up going back just to figure out how it would sound if it was being said out loud, like pauses, intonation, and emphasis and stuff like that. I’ve never done it any other way but in school I read faster than my peers according to my teachers
It would be very interesting to relate this with reading sheet music, music is a language and when you read sheet music there must be a lot going on in your brain, not only you have to understand the information about pitch and rythm, but your brain has to figure out the movements requiered to accurately produce the sounds through your instrument or your voice, all in real time without loosing a beat. When I was first studying sight reading I remember my teacher always telling us not to read note by note, you have to read whole phrases at once, because otherwise you would never have enough time to perform the music correctly. There must be some kind of musical "word superiority effect" going on, that allows us to read and perform sheet music.
As someone who used to be a semi-professional viola player, I can say that well-written music has a very spatial quality when it comes to rhythms. In modern musical typeset, rhythm usually occupies as much space in the bar as the sound lasts. But, there's also another element of melodic and harmonic syntax. In tonal classical works, there are expectations that certain notes will lead to certain other notes in a given harmonic structure. It's incredibly difficult to sight-read a more recent work from the atonal period or even something like The Rite of Spring, because so little of it flows in expected ways. But, as you say, there's also the added complexity layer of "how do I move my body to make this note happen". Having 4 strings and the ability to shift positions of my hand, there are so many ways I could choose to play a particular passage. Much of that comes from prior experiences of those previously mentioned expectations and where they were comfortably played. For me as a violist, it was typically a matter of "how can I minimise string crossings?" or "how can I finger this so there isn't an awkward shift in the middle of this line?". It's all very fascinating.
@@FB-no4lr That's the thing though, isn't it? You start consciously doing those movements and consciously thinking about thise things, but at some point your brain "automatizes" the process.
Like driving a manual car, at first I used to have to think all the time what gear to use, now I automatically shift them, without much thinking.
It's really fascinating.
@@bemascu7087 yes, I think it's a very similar process to reading words, at first you have to decipher every single note (letter), then with experience you begin to build a pool of known rythms and melodic expectations (words) that you can understand and execute with a quick glance. It becomes very difficult when you come across a musical style you're unfamiliar with, because you can't rely on that word superiority effect.
it's awesome because our brains understand the math in the harmony as information that sounds good and we can differentiate between ratios of frequencies instantly. imagine if people were speaking different words at the same time and how difficult it would be to try and make some understanding of it. also it's fun to think of playing by ear, improvisation, sight reading, playing by memory and how it's related to discussions, chatting, announcements, debates, etc.
i suppose harmony can be related to how the different colored letters in the video around :44 where each letter is a note and when the letters are overlapped and you see the colors mix it's like different notes overlapping. both wavelengths that have a ratio of overlapping frequency can still be perceived in it own respect. only overlapping colors are represented on space and overlapping notes are represented in time.
This is so cool! When I read a book it’s usually a voice in my head reading it (but my thoughts are like that constantly). But when I get really into a book I’ll stop reading individual words and it turns into something like watching a movie in my head, seeing images rather than hearing words.
Weird, so you think in English? like just thinking about the tasks you need to do for the day you think like a English verbal list?
@@elizabethstein369 Yeah I do, it’s like my thoughts are explaining to someone what I’m doing as I’m doing it, if that makes sense. Like having a conversation with myself.
@@elizabethstein369 That's how most people think. 70-80% of the world has an inner voice they hear when they think.
I love it when I get into that zone of reading a book and it really does feel much more like watching a movie than reading lines of words on a page!
Me too. I always think it’s wild that people don’t have a inner voice aka a conscience talking lol
It would be dope to see the letters sized the same and an example shown just for the shock factor, or just to be able to really feel how much it would distract from automatic reading
That’s what I really wanted. Because even when he showed the same size letters overlapping, I couldn’t see a problem with it.
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I'm pretty sure that if the rounded letters and the blocky letters were the same height and always had been, we would be used to it and it would seem normal
Yeah, I kinda call bullshit on that one. Simply look at handwriting, I have some of the worst handwriting I've ever seen, barely legible letters with varying sizes, and sometimes I write lowercase mixed with uppercase with the same heights, and it doesn't look weird to me. It especially makes less sense once you look at other scripts, like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc. Every single character in Chinese and Japanese has the same height.
I don't think you read many books, as the type sets have a wild variance between cheap and expensive and worn and new over the last 100 years.
I thought he would at least touch on the fact that the human brain can recognize words in a sentence even when some of the letters are scrambled almost as quickly as when they aren’t scrambled.
I've always been noticably slower at reading than everyone else, because I read at about the same speed as I speak. I was in my late 20s when I learned that other people don't "say" every word in their head as they read. Whenever I'm watching something and text appears on-screen, I often struggle to read the entire thing before it disappears, and I spent my entire life wondering why they make it disappear so fast. It was when I told someone about this grievance that I learned that other people don't read "out loud" in their mind.
I've tried learning how to scan a sentence the way other people describe, but no luck. I think my brain might be cemented like this. If only I'd have discovered this when I was a developing kid in school.
I am the same way I'm in my early twenties and just learning this. I think the way we read is understudied and should be researched more. I was put into special reading classes in elementary school and told I was slow at learning how to read. But I wasn't. I was just processing the words different and reading at a comfortable pace like I speak and I've always loved and had no problem reading
I totally agree that most text pop ups are too fast to read.
Maybe you’re dyslexic?
@@Tygor9000 I was tested in my mid 30s and was diagnosed with dyslexia & dyscalcula.
For me it's also rather exhausting to read for longer than 1 or 2 hours. Maybe this is also a side effect of reading "out loud" in the mind. I like reading books and other stuff, so it's not a lack of practice.
I've realized this phenomenon while reading. During intense parts of the story, I'll "skim ahead" to get to the point faster and then go back and read regularly to before that part. Well.. it always turns out that I DID read and process nearly all the words and I just waste time reading them again. It's pretty interesting!
Hahaha I do the same!
re-reading a good book is not wasted time at all
I realized most of this when having my kid - suddenly i was forced to read at a snails pace and magically knew all the words to come without looking at them. When you read at your own pace you dont notice your eyes going ahead. It felt weird lol.
@@vvohvaelez9277 That's not what I said. I said re-reading the part I skim read ends up being a waste of time because I took in all the words subconsciously during the skim read.
@@TheSwauzz There is a difference between reading just to see words and also reading for comprehension. I can see words really fast and it’s easy for me or anyone to do this anyway but to comprehend the information you get is something else entirely. It’s called subconscious for a reason, it is not part of your conscious mind. You cannot get long lasting information by relying your subconscious because it doesn’t help us during our conscious state all that much.
I don’t think you wasted your time trying to re-read the parts you skimmed because I don’t think you can comprehend it deeply what the information is telling us in detail.
I used to have a friend who can read superfast and it takes like about a second to read one page of a book but to actually understand and comprehend the words better and what it means takes more time than just skimming it and you’ll lose a lot more details on the nuances of what the book is trying to convey
As a dyslexic growing up having to go to a special "reading tutor" for years to help train my brain, I really appreciate this video, and I think it would have really helped me if I could comprehend it. Its really peculiar to look back at that time, and remember how my brain kept guessing the wrong meaning. My brain would always miss interperate a word and a different word. It was like my brain could only see the tall letters, its very strange. But I did come out of it reading at a college level in junior high, so I was killer at reading comprehension lol
I’m 62 and also went through special classes inside and outside of public schools. They also would flash words on a screen and thought this would help. I really don’t think they had any idea what they were doing but they were trying.
bdpq are the worst...
I'm dyslexic as well and I think it would be a really cool video if he would explain what's happening in our brains to make it be different
Have you ever tried reading the Dyslexie font? It was formulated by a dyslexic man studying graphic design. He figured out how to make all the letters look different enough from each other that about 80 percent of dyslexic readers report a drastic difference in their reading experience. And the “tallness” of letters IS something he made look different for all of them!
Another thing he did is design all the letters and numbers to look more bottom-heavy, so they float and spin around less. It’s ingenious stuff!
"miss interperate"
Checks out.
7:00 "you're brain ISN'T sounding out the words as you read"
mine does. and it's extremely distracting and frustrating. it is very, very difficult to turn it off or ignore it & doing so usually distracts me more. this is probably the biggest reason i read so slowly.
Weird. I read the words out loud in my mind in the narrator's voice and can still read kinda fast
@@Ash-gk8jp sometimes I can read really fast despite this but I almost have to concentrate on not actually "hearing" the words. I think part of my problem is that I get bothered if I miss "saying" a word, so I have to re read it.
Idk, it's all just so distracting lol
I am also unable to read without any voice in my head. And if i don't know a narrators voice it's replaced by my own.
@@basti5263 Interesting, I think for me it's always my own voice unless I choose to "hear" someone else's :D
Those quotes by certain people where it says at the end "and you read that in my voice" don't work on me lol
I have a related phenomena but with simply thinking instead of reading. Even though I don't speak out loud when I'm by myself thinking, I find it *nearly impossible to continue my train of thought when brushing my teeth.* It seems that what is happening is that brushing my teeth interrupts my *_ability_* to speak out loud which in turn blocks my brain from thinking even though I wasn't actually speaking out loud. Weird.
I always read the words out loud in my head. I'm one of those people who has the non-stop internal monologue going, and it doesn't stop when I'm reading.
Sounds like hell...
@@desertshield Not really. My son doesn't have it and I have no idea how he thinks. He says it's with pictures, which blows my mind because I don't see any pictures in my head when I think of something. Like I close my eyes and think of an apple and I get a black screen with what I can only say is a somewhat lighter gray circle. My wife an my son say they see an apple like they would when they are looking at a picture with their eyes open. I don't get it.
@@rickseiden1 Art teacher here. You might be describing a haptic response to visual input. As a strongly visual person, I have trouble understanding how a haptic mind works, although I can recognize a haptic student by how he/she responds to drawing. No, I cannot explain how I can do that.
@@rickseiden1 Subvocalising and degree of aphantasia probably aren't very connected. I can't see much detail in my mind's eye, but still generally read without subvocalising.
@@diribigal I did not mean to imply that there is. I'm no expert, but as far as I know, they are different things, and you can have one or both to varying degrees. This is just how my mind works.
I wish they would've touched on the subject of Dyslexia and how that affects someone's way of reading compared to what they described. Also, I wonder how it works with languages that have different symbols and if they're learned and read in a similar way.
While watching the part about SOAP and as someone with Dyslexia all I could think was "nope, not in my brain it doesn't"
Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, “do dyslexic people not have this process and that’s what makes it so hard?”
I'm dyslexic in English but not Japanese (which I learnt from about 9 years old), both written, spoken, and conceptual (concepts like left and right). I've always thought it was fascinating and suspect it's to do with learning it later in life.
yup, part of me was fascinated, the other part was watching my dad ignore most of this (English is not his native tongue). I also noted the western bias in the terms "cumbersome" to describe certain writing systems. I was just having a conversation with a friend today, about how it takes longer to learn to read Chinese, but once you know how to do it, it's significantly faster and shorter to communicate. Though part of that is because Chinese words are typically monosyllabic (I often joke that Chinese dubbers have to work 3x as hard because they have to fill the time an English speaker uses to say one sentence, with 2-3 sentences).
yeah that wouldve been good.
You definitely read whole words rather than individual letters. In fact, your brain is so good at it that as long as you keep the correct starting and ending letters of a word and repeating letters (i.e., the same sound) together you can scramble the inner letters of a word but still be able to fairly easily decipher the correct word. For example, can you guess what this says: I LKIE ADOACVO. IT IS GEERN AND TSTAY.
The A in TSTAY is too far too the right and tripped me up for a while.
The first time I heard about this my mind was blown when at the end of the paragraph (or whatever it was, I can't remember) it revealed that nearly every word I'd just read had been written mixed up like that and I didn't even notice!
taths so caisrevortnol :)
I don't think this contradicts the "individual letter" thing. Because (as the video says) you have different regions of sharpness. So when your brain is reading ahead (without you knowing it) it might recognize "hey there is this letter and that letter" but it doesn't get the order right. Because it's not sharp.
So the brain can handle scrambled letters IF they happen to be CLOSE to the location they should have been.
That might also be the reason why i needed a few seconds for your word "tasty". The "A" is very far from where it is supposed to be.
Green and stay?
I think the reason we learn to read words initially by sounding them out is to give us the tools to aquire new words we are not already familiar with. This allows us to be able to independently add new words to our vocabulary through out life as we encounter them, since we learned a method to decode the word until we became familiar enough with it to recognize it at a glance.
When I read a really good book, I actually feel like I'm watching a movie. My eyes are looking at a bunch of black lines on white paper, but my brain sees drama and action scenes.
When I was younger I would catch myself saying to myself "I want to watch/see what happens next in my book" but I meant I want to read what comes next because there were no pictures but I was playing the scenes out like you said
I wont that. I just need to concentrate so much when I read.
I wont that. I just need to concentrate so much when I read.
You cleary don't have Aphantasia. Tell me something, are you left handed as well?
@@daniel_rossy_explica what is the correlation between aphantasia with left handed? Also what is aphantasia?
I feel like I read it out loud in my head. I've always thought I was a slow reader. If I just scan the page and purposefully read quickly I get panicked. I actually "hear" the words as I read them. There's a voice behind them.
Me too. I had know idea other people don't.
It's weird because I hear the words as well, and yet I read very fast. Faster than people close to me which can get annoying. Sometimes I can even feel my throat like move as if I'm saying the words I'm reading.
More or less the same. I sometimes also comment to myself as if I was conversing with someone on what I read with my "internal voice."
I find it hard to discuss this subject because of how intangible it is.
Me too.
@@DrAustinThomas @6:54
I wish you could do a follow-up on this on why some dyslexic people can't read as smoothly or make mistakes in both reading and writing.
I experienced it again when I learned to read the Korean alphabet. My brain struggled to recognize full words right away, and I still read it slower than Latin letters.
Yet I am absolutely in love with the letters and their shapes in Hangeul.
Coming from a Chinese background, it's obvious to me that you recognize the whole shape instead of individual parts. No one reads Chinese characters by looking at the strokes. If that's true then phrases like "晨曦" would take forever to read.
Another evidence for this is that knowing to read a character does not mean you can write it. I am perfectly able to read and type traditional characters but I can only write a handful of them without looking them up.
Also I read out English words in my mind but doesn't do that when reading Chinese, probably because English is a second language.
That's been something I've been curious about for a while. Individual characters are fine, but how do you recognize individual words (I.e. ones consisting of multiple characters) when reading? In western languages there are obviously spaces to help, and in Japanese the different alphabets are distinct enough in shape to structure the text.
@@ocirMZ All characters are roughly squares, so spaces are not necessary since each character is a self-contained block of information. Most characters have distinct shapes for people familiar with them. The overall process might be quite similar to English reading described in the video, but instead of word length character complexity is more important. It's pretty common to skip characters when reading, either ones very simple, or ones that can be filled in by inference.
For example, "我给这个视频点了赞" (I clicked like on this video), if you just take in the characters "我" (I), "视频" (video), and "赞" (like), that's enough information to get the gist of the sentence and move on.
I read for example Italian or Arabic purely phonetic. It's slow and hard.
English and German takes no effort to read and there are no phonetics in my brain while I do it.
It takes some time to build the pattern recognition
Now eat anaconda 💪👨🦲🤳
🐍-🍱
A great watch on; Why you need to self-reflect? And the consequences if you don't. Collective Self-Reflection. ruclips.net/video/S5f5zKsN1DE/видео.html,
I 100% read text "aloud" in my head. That's why it can often take me longer to read something, but it may also be why I spot grammatical and spelling errors so quickly.
whats that got to do with grammatical mistakes
spelling mistakes make sense tho
@@hpsmash77 when you speak something out loud, you're much more prone to noticing errors in grammar, as something that is incorrect will "sound" wrong. I find it's similar when I "speak" what's written in my head. I'll notice that words are wrong or in the wrong order, whereas if I were to breeze through the text, my brain would be more likely to fill in the gaps for me. It's just like how there's those trick sentences with two of the same word in a row, but your brain doesn't notice when you read it too fast. I generally spot those quicker as a result of my slower reading, because my eyes are near the mistake for longer.
I read like that a lot too. It feels like it is being read to me by someone else.
I once attended a seminar with a person who taught speed-reading, and that voice in my head that is saying the words as I read them was considered a flaw, the thing that supposedly keeps me from reading faster. It is called "subvocalization" or something like that, and it tends to restrict your reading speed to your talking speed. However, when I try to implement the techniques they taught and read faster without it having to be a voice, I really lose a lot of comprehension. I AM able to very rapidly recognize the words, but putting them together in a comprehensible way gets lost without that voice. About the best I can achieve is when the voice becomes an auctioneer---faster, but not eliminated. But interestingly, once I have read a paragraph, comprehension is no longer an issue since, well, I have already read it and comprehend it. Then I find I can go much more rapidly while still reading every word. Reading a paragraph several more times means it gets even quicker yet. I've always been fascinated by that
@@SuperDaveP270 I will take reading accurately over reading fast.
I am from Indonesia and we write with the same alphabet as English, but when I read, I notice in my native language, I read something in the visualization of what I think... I describe words in a real shape as a picture. It's so different when I read in English, I was so good when I read movie subtitles because I see the picture, but when I read a book, my mind reads it as a 'word'. I was sometimes frustrated why my head can't do the same when I read in Indonesian words. I notice this when I read english novels. Maybe it's because I am still learning English, but it's so weird how my brain works differently just by the language I use
The idea that I can take a stick and make some markings in the sand, show it to someone else and without ever opening my mouth, transfer information from my brain to theirs is just insane to me.
Yeah, basically how I felt when I read about memes in The Selfish Gene.
Transferring information purely through precisely modulated sound is equally insane to me.
Closest thing to real magic I can think of.
I'm a teacher and I think about that all the time: that from across the room, just by creating vibrations in the molecules in the air, I can cause the neurons in someone else's brain to connect in different ways.
@@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself you are oversimplifying it way too much
@@tonyisnotdead
I'm not here to write a dissertation for you.
I got a question, or more like at least two: Do brains work differently when reading in a foreign language? Or is it just the same as when you're reading in your language? And do brains work differently with languages that are written with "pictograms", like Chinese?
I think that depends on how familiar you are with the foreign language. I feel no difference at all between reading in english and in my native language. I can even forget if something was in english or danish after I have put it down.
I read out the words in my head when reading English. I don't do that with Chinese.
I have studied three different Indian languages and English to varying degrees of proficiency. Although the script is entirely different for each, I only find myself reading the letters when I am reading a language I am not too used to reading or while reading an unfamiliar word.
I also noticed that I read german pretty slow even though it shares the script with English(almost). So i think it is just about how many times we looked at a certain word and the letters in it, irrespective of language and script.
@@sarangtamirisa5090 Exactly this. I have never bothered learning how to read properly in my native language. I can do it but I have to spell out the words sound by sound. And it's slow. I'm much better at reading the other languages I can speak fluently. And talking/listening in my native language is fine too. Reading is a separate skill that is learned independently from the language itself, and it happens the same way as for a native language. Except second languages are often taught through writing so you'll learn it at the same time.
English is my first language, and I read it in different ways, from skimming for items of information, through reading rapidly for content or story, to reading slowly and lovingly, savouring the use and potentially the sound of language. I read French, my second language, in all those ways too. In Spanish, which I speak only at an intermediate level, I'm much more inclined to sound it all out in my head. Same for my very rusty German. Is that any sort of answer to your question?
So. Much. Mindblow. In a single episode! This channel is getting better and better every year, I swear!
This video is amazing, thanks for putting it out!
This entire video is actually a good introduction to typeface design. Making certain letters longer than others to make them "look" the same; designing letters so that negative space works together (since the word, not the letter, is the basic thing you read); spacing the lines out just right so that they line up with your saccades; etc. etc. Its crazy how technical it is, and typographers pretty much figured all this out by hundreds of years of trial-and-error (Typography is quite an arcane field) without having any concept of what your brain is actually doing.
It's not only amazing how we recognize printed words but how we quickly we imagine the things, actions, and ideas those words represent and build a complete scene in our mind's eye as we do so.
I enjoy looking a ink blots on dead trees and hallucinating deeply.
Technically that gryphon is segreant, in terms of heraldry.
When you add in that we can recognize a word even if it's misspelled (often without even realizing it's misspelled) and we can breeze over double words or missing ones (particularly connectors), the layers of pattern matching and context extrapolation is even more fascinating. Loved the presentation!
What is the the mistake?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This video was so good, I wanted to subscribe again! Amazing, thank you!
7:10 - Sounding out words as you read them, and then constructing meaning from the sounds, is actually quite common! Not all people are good at going from shapes of letters directly to meanings in their heads.
If you move your lips or throat as you read, it’s called “vocalization.” If you don’t physically react to the letters, but still _imagine_ the sounds of the words, it’s called “subvocalization.”
I subvocalised this comment and all the other comments about subvocalisation.
I was shocked when he said people don't do that. I had to replay it several times to confirm that he said that. I've only read by subvocalization. Now, I'm going to try not to do it.
I wasn't shocked but I was kind of offended. Hello we exist! How can he not know about subvocalization when making an entire video about how reading works?
@@DaviddeKloet, I personally wasn’t particularly offended, but a little surprised that he didn’t know, or at least didn’t mention, sub/vocalization.
Am I the only one who reads both ways?
99.9% of the videos on RUclips are pretty bad... and then once in a while you encounter a video as good as this. Thank you VERY much for your calm demeanor and very informative content.
I subscribed to you.
Fascinating! Thank you for an excellent presentation.
6:57 I definitely sound out everything I read in my head
when I try really hard to read fast it slurs a little but I naturally "speak out" the words in the same voice as when I think.
Ahahah same here.... and even the intonation changes depending on whats being said.... so for example if someone seems angry in text, my internal voice sounds the words with an angry intonation :))))
@@ConstantinChirila exactly! Gotta be careful with that tho cause it's prone to projection.
Weird that he takes for granted that people don’t do this, pretty sure it’s fairly common
@@Protectthesun Until recently I had no idea that people don't have their inner voice. I thought it is something that everyone has/does
This is called subvocalizing. Do you also have an internal monologue always going whenever you're thinking about something? Like for instance, as you type your response to this comment, are you hearing every word you type as if you were speaking them?
One of the coolest things I found out when I started reading out loud to someone is that it is SURPRISING how far ahead you're actually reading. Before you even start speaking a line you need to know how to make it sound, so you need to know ahead of time what's coming, and it turns out my eyes are at least half a sentence ahead of my voice, maybe a whole sentence ahead.
This was unexpectedly wonderful! Thanks for enhancing my day.
Excellent content! Very informative. Thank you!
I'd be curious to understand where and how dyslexia falls into this
I thought they were going to talk about it
I was hoping they would have talked about it too.
Yes. Or autistic non-gestalt sight.
@@cerberaodollam what is this?
@@anastrixnoodles The elephant thing. There was a study in which non-autistics saw the whole elephant before the parts, and autistics saw it the other way around.
As a literacy researcher I really appreciate the thoughtfulness you put into this video. Even though you are simplifying a complex process you have done so in a way that is accessible and reflects our current understanding of how reading works - Thank you.
First, I can’t help myself, & must make an introduction: Hello, Jeffrey Wood, nice to meet you. My name is Jessica Wood :D Forgive me lol. Second, I read “literacy researcher”, which instantly fascinated my incorrigible curiosity, especially as a book-worm-word-nerd. I’ve many questions about your work, likely too many for practicability. The best I can summarize, for lack of a better phrase, is to say I wish I could know your literacy researcher career’s autobiography. Truly, its whole history, factually & perceptions: so it’s infancy through childhood, adolescence, & maturity to date; as well your commentary, perspectives, beliefs, takeaways & so forth.
As previously mentioned, I’ve a rampant & incorrigible curiosity, which often leads me down a rabbit hole lol. Typically, when interested, I’m happy to read, research, & learn all I possibly can. And the job title “literacy researcher”?! I’m desperately interested!
@@jessicawood421 Thank you for your interest Jessica. As far as becoming a literacy research goes, I am former kindergarten teacher with a Ph.D. in Language Education from Indiana University. I work as professor of education in Ontario, Canada and at this moment I hanging out and learning with young children and their teachers in the far north of Ontario. I know this is not a comprehensive answer but I hope it gives you and idea of what a literacy researcher is and how to become one. - Keep reading
And yet you missed a word.
@@ChrisArnold1975 Thank you Chris...and isn't amazing how the brain works to make meaning so that you others were still able to read and make meaning from what I wrote.
I wonder if autistic people read like normal people or differently
Ahh this explains my experience with Chinese so much!!! After I moved away from China when I was a kid, I lost the ability to read aloud or sound out a lot of the characters but would still either know what it meant, or got a gut instinct about what it means that was usually right. And, while I could tell you what a word made from multiple characters might mean, I would have a lot of trouble recognizing just the individual character (ie. “自己(zi4 ji3)” means “self” but I had so much trouble recognizing 己 on it’s own because it’s so rarely used without 自in front of it.) This idea that I don’t sound out words, or characters in this case, when I read them, and that we remember whole word blocks not characters or letter is really valuable information for studying!
Excellent topic you covered. Great presentation!
This is so interesting topic! I have studied cognition science at the University for a minor and I have learned multiple languages. My native language is Finnish, while been learning Swedish and English since elementary school. The coolest thing however, was learning Japanese when I lived there. From a multilingual perspective having multiple "neural hooks" in your brain for the same concepts (words if you like) while learning Kanji and their distinctive parts (radicals) actually made me learn the language super fast.
What a mess of a comment, but more videos about this topic would be super interesting for me and I hope many others too!
I am Italian and I just realized that while I was reading your interesting comment I did not translate it in my own language! Just like listening to the video I did not translate the American language: I just understood it.
This is an exception, though. It happens because he speaks rather slowly, he articulates the words well, he does not "eat" his words and the context is clear and restricted to the subject of the video. In real life videos or movies, on the other hand, I often can't understand what they say because the contents are more random and people speak with an accent and use slang words. Subtitles can help, tho.
@@raffaelevalente7811 English per se is not American; it originated in Britain and have been prevalent there. It was brought by the English colonists to North America.
@@raffaelevalente7811 I read to find new words ☝️
@@raffaelevalente7811 iv never hearded this way🤔
That’s interesting. I learned to speak Japanese only from interaction. I guess it’s survival Japanese used in everyday life or with my friends. I only learned survival kanji like instructions on a ramen packet, the form to get my bus pass, some brand names I liked, my neighbors’ last names, signs, words like bank or post office. It’s just much more useful to know those words in Japanese and ask. And finally….never speak English. ❤️🤟🏻
I've actually realized a bit about this a few years back when teaching kids who didn't know how to read but had a general gist of the alphabet
The kid I taught kept reading words that weren't there, because his brain was lazy and didn't want to read what was actually there only guess what he already knew
It was an interesting experience for sure
because his brain was lazy or because he was dyslexic and trying to compensate?
@@somewhat7 he wasn't dyslexic! At least as far as I remember he didn't struggle in ways dyslexic people do
It sounds mean but all of our brains are lazy! Since paying attention and reading attentively takes energy and the brain has other important tasks to also use that energy to like breathing, your heart beating and all that fun stuff!
It's the first time I realize that we don't really read, we compare and quickly glance at things but if you ask people to fully describe what they read, most will give a vague description or have forgotten about it already (me included) unless you have a fabulous memory!
From realizing this I have gained the habit of reading things twice or even three times, so I can always catch those things and nuances I'd missed the first time!
@@somewhat7 OR! everyone is guessing every time we read(hear), what exactly the writer tried to say ... and the video had some wrong stuff, when we wrote letters in first grade, it was on paper with 3-4 straight lines per row, so O's and I's were exactly the same height as all other, also, there is not enough room on 7 segment display or the 3x5 font so also no, in Roman Latin all letters were the exact same height all of them ("by law", maybe?), so double also no.
This was me in primary school, total lazy reader (still am). I'll read words that're not there. I'm not dyslexic (as far as I know).
I've noticed myself doing this since doomscrolling and social media were invented. My brain just skims so much trash info that it isn't paying attention and I catch myself inserting wrong words.
One thing that I find particularly different is reading in your second language. Portuguese is my mother tongue and even after reaching a proficient English level, reading in my mother tongue feels much more natural and actually faster somehow, like I really don't have to think; sometimes in English I tend to speak the words out loud in my brain, or in the early years of reading more complex books in English I found myself almost "translating" the words into Portuguese, sort of turning a book to default mode in my head. Nowadays it seems to have gotten better, and reading in English feels just as natural as if I didn't have to translate to my mother tongue, I can just associate both words "gato" and "cat" to the same cute animal that purrs and meows y'know, it's pretty weird not having to think about translating it anymore. It would be really nice if there were videos on the topic of bilingual folks learning how to read in a second language and how different is it from the first one.
(Edit: my keyboard autocorrect function might have made some words funky so I had to change it to the correct way after posting it lol)
Same thing happens when I read Spanish, my "second language". By no means am I proficient in Spanish, but I find myself translating the words to English. My High school Spanish teacher said, "You are going from Spanish to English to meaning, instead go directly from Spanish to meaning."
Happened to me too. But actually I speak Spanish and English is my second language. I "hated" learning english as a child, but my parents put me in an intensive language course and I started really improving and linking english. One of the most notable changes I felt is that I didn't have to translate the words/ sentences from spanish anymore, I could "automatically" read in my mind, like I do reading my primary language.
Vídeo maravilhosoooooh!!!! Amei. Sensacional. Thanks Joe and all the team for all this storm of super interesting information!!!
I often find myself reading the same sentence multiple times until the words finally get into the right place and missing words reappear and extra words go away.... This usually includes dramatic shirts in what's being said.... (Like it'll go from saying somebody hates something to they love something)
But it's like I stutter on a sentence or chunk of sentence then it clicks into place and I read the rest of the text block without issue.
Wow, interesting! Do you think it's a sensory processing issue or something? I've found this happening occasionally if I'm tired or bored while reading haha
I've done the same thing, but sometimes I will go back and read a sentence (or a couple) is some whacky order just to get what I missed. So my eye is darting all over the page, but at some point I'm satisfied I got what the sentence said and can move on. But I don't just re-read the sentence. it's like randomized spot checking.
Yeah, that's why i find reading too hard
Dyslexia?
I have this issue as well. It's got nothing to do with dyslexia for me. I can usually read sentences just fine (like 99% of the time, not an exaggeration), but occasionally there will be a sentence I'll "read" (voice in my head), but I have to stop part-way through because I'm just not picking up any meaning. I'm getting all of the words, so it's not misreading, I'm just not processing the information properly for a bit. Sometimes it takes multiple reads before all of a sudden the information is processing, clear as day.
I always "hear" every word in my head when I'm reading ~ even doing so right now, as I'm typing. Glad to see from the comments that I'm not the only one. It was a little disturbing to hear in the video that people don't do what I've always done. And, for what it's worth, I'm a good reader with some advanced degrees. So maybe I've just learned to live with this "handicap"? Sheesh...
Yeah I don't get that either I can "hear" myself read all the time. But then again I also narrate my own thoughts. Reading = thinking /imagining to me. It's part of my interal monologue.
i do that with certain types of texts (informative, comments, articles...) but a narration in a good book will pull me straight into the "movie" and i wont reaaaally see words. same thing when im writing (and again im talking narratives, not essays or stuff like that, and mostly in my native language bc its a bit more difficult in english), i do mind my words, but most of the time i just write the exact concept that is in my brain and i dont have to "translate" it to words before i write them, bc my brain knows what symbols go with wich concept, so i dont rlly have to think abt the exact words im writing. that sometimes leads to sentences that start off like theyre going somewhere and end up going somewhere else, or maybe some wacky structures, never a grammatical error tho im great with that. maybe a typo every once in a while, but only if im typing and not manually writing
+1 :)
I'm on the autism spectrum. I not only "hear" the words, but I get vivid images as I read. So, how come numbers make absolutely no sense whatsoever to me?
@@miriambucholtz9315 My thoughts: Well letters are representations of sound and words are a combination of those sounds making a word sparking the imagination through it's meaning. Numbers are symbols of amounts. There is no imagination other than that 1000 is more than 10 (numbers must be converted/calculated in your head first) . However if I would directly say ten soldiers on a battle field v.s a thousand soldiers that would spark the imagination much faster.
Numbers are immersion breaking.
Such awesome density of information in this episode
Dude you’re an amazing teacher… the way you break things down in all of your videos is so easy to understand… this was such a cool video!
"next time you pick up a book you wont even think about this, you'll just enjoy a good story."
BOLD OF U TO ASSUME I DONT OVERTHINK EVERYTHING, JOE
I remember when I learned to read. After a couple of weeks of reading class in the 1st grade., while sitting at the kitchen table studying, sounding out each word in my Tom and Betty reader, I turned a page and suddenly the entire meaning of the sentence jumped into my mind. I ran to my mother and told her I could read and demonstrated it to her, with the words meaning jumping immediately into my mind, she was not impressed. Oh well.
It's sad when parents don't get or appreciate children's Eureka moments. I once heard a little kid ask a really smart question: Why does electricity shoot out of train tracks on the London Underground? And his mother just dismissed him and said I don't know, as though it was a silly question and he was being a pest.
That’s a shame she didn’t appreciate (or recognize?) that amazing milestone! Similarly, we are so accustomed to walking that many people take it for granted. However, when a baby takes their first steps, it’s thrilling! It’s a shame your mom didn’t recognize that.
Also, there’s a good chance that your mom was stressed, distracted, had a headache, etc. That has nothing to do with you, and I hope that thought brings you peace.
She should have been.
It would be really interesting seeing how do we “lip read”, and maybe what reading words and reading lips have in common
@Don't read profile photo this is old bro bring something cool and new
It might have close connections to hearing. Covid made me realize just how much I depend on seeing peoples' mouth movements to discern what they are saying.
@@ravinshu4145 interesting observation
From my experience with the Deaf community and animation, lip reading is heavily based in interpreting shapes, like the art example Erica gave. We recognize different sounds move the mouth into different shapes like we recognize the shapes of words. For example, animating someone talking can be broken down to a simplified 'key' of mouth shapes put into a certain order to mimic the dialogue. Interesting part is many sounds/words have similar or identical mouth shapes, which is why when hearing people talk exaggeratedly to Deaf/Hard of Hearing people, they are just making it much harder to lip-read (it is already a lot guessing and mental work). It is seriously so cool to think how this all connects, definitely will have to look more into it!
The pandemic has make me see how hard it is to understand what people are saying when you do not hear them clearly.
Love the little homage to They Live! As soon as I saw "OBEY", that was my first thought. Then, you threw in the alien facial image. Love it!
That was absolutely fascinating! Thank you.
Your discussion of reading only applies to phonetic-based representations. If you learn Chinese characters, for example, you’re not starting with sound-based letters. You’re memorizing and then reading by the shape of the whole word (there are phonetic transcriptions that can be used for teaching like pinyin, but this is very recent). Fluent readers of English and fluent readers of Chinese read the same way, recognizing whole words and groups of words by shape. Different initial way of learning new words, but once acquired, works the same way.
@Hernando Malinche 您不用解释，我这些都很熟悉。基本词汇，就像“我看得懂中文”这几个字，很少用”phonetic”的字根；而且，这些拼法常常依靠旧发音，并不表示现代的普通话。您误会了我的意思。主要是表示，不管读字是怎么学来的，不管是哪种语言，学会了以后，看懂字的过程都是一样的。
Indeed. With Chinese characters you initially learn individual radicals, similar to learning letters, but then you read the word word.
e.g. 言 五 and 口 gives us 語, but when you read 語 you do so as a whole unit, not the individual radicals. Just as when you read the word "language," you're reading the whole word, not individual letters
Go to 6:46 he basically blasts phonetics out of the water (which it should be because deaf people read and English is not a phonetic language.)
Question for you, apart from societal prejudices, (trust me i am Indian, I know the feeling), are their cases of dyslexia or other forms of reading issues in chinese? I have never looked into this but I wonder if dyslexia is less or more common BECAUSE of the way logograms are taught and read.....
@@firdaushbhadha2597 I never thought of this, I’d love to learn about whether or not that happens
Hey Joe. Thanks for this video. I lost my peripheral vision and this video really helps me understand and explain to others why I have such a hard time reading.
As a homeschooling mom I really appreciate this video. Really any parent with a child learning to read would benefit from watching this. It can be very frustrating when your child seems to just be guessing, but when you understand how we read it makes sense that they would do this.
ah this is so cool :D
i've recently started learning korean and that was so interesting bc it entails consciously learning an alphabet (i dont have that specific memories of how it felt to learn the latin letters as a child lol)
and really the whole process of only being able to figure out one letter at at time in the beginning, because i didnt have that mental dictionary yet!
very fun, 너무 좋아해 :)
I speak every word in my head like a mini internal monologue. I can read a whole sentence all at once if I want to, in order to read fast. But I have to do that very deliberately. 99% of the time I read as if I'm speaking, even pausing at commas and periods and such.
Exactly... and to think there are people that don't have their inner voice at all... wild....
For something like these comments, I'll read with an internal monologue. But if I'm burning through a novel, I can process chunks of paragraphs in one go, with no time for the internal monologue. However, if I really pay attention to how I read these comments, I can tell that I'm seeing a group of words, and then creating an internal monologue that "reads" those words I've seen to "me". I find the internal monologue is more of an aid to make sure that I'm getting the meaning of what I'm reading, by going over it directly in my mind.
@@o.s.2056 How can you have thoughts without an eternal voice?? How can you write or read?? It would be impossible for me to write if I didn't have thoughts because I wouldn't know what to say! I can't write any of this without thinking every word as I'm typing it that would be IMPOSSIBLE
@@o.s.2056 it blew my mind!
@@BainesMkII but how? that is so wild to me. i have a reading voice in my head which isn't my own outward voice. it reads every single word as it is written in my head for me. i cannot imagine being able to process whole chucks of paragraphs or read without this inner voice or skip past words or punctuations. that is mind blowing to me!
Great vid/episode, as is usual, Joe! I was mildly surprised though that, given the subject, you didn't make any direct mention of that common popular little "factoid" about how it technically doesn't necessarily matter a lot what most of the middle-letters are in a word because most people can still often easily-identify the word just by the first (or first few) & last (or last few) letters.
Actually, neuro-cognitive research has shown that good readers are perceiving each letter in a word when we read. We might not be conscious of this occurring as we become more proficient readers, but it is occuring.
Not it doesn't matter what the middle letters are, rather it doesn't matter what the order of the middle letters are. To recognize the word, the first and last letter have to be in their proper places and the middle letters have to be the right letters for the word but their proper placement is not essential.
12:50 This got impressive to me here. I have always been a slow reader but when I speed read it is an intentional change to my visual scope. Instead of reading lines. I look at whole paragraphs and 'glide' over the text.
It very much feels exactly like your visual and speed reading is just making it wider.
Thanks for the informative video !
I agree, it's almost magical! We just scan through words, and we understand it!!!
@Don't read profile photo okay cool
i know ive actually been amazed by this for a while now and then one of my favorite youtubers posted about it :D
9:34
"We are terrible at reading alternating upper and lower case"
*Laughs in gen z sarcasm*
Absolutely fascinating XD
I even noticed that when I'm reading a well-written story I don't conciously see any writing, I just see the story in my "Kopfkino" (as an imagined movie).
This was fascinating. I have to write a lot of press releases and when I review them, I’ve learned I have to read them out loud. Otherwise, I find it’s easy to miss things like ”the the” when you’re reading in your head. You really do skip over some words.
There are actually two components here. First is *learning a printed word.* Second is *reading an already learned word.* (This involves mental processes separate from that of learning, recognizing and [re]producing a spoken word, which is why those with dyslexia can speak perfectly well.)
When we learn a new, written word, or run up against an unfamiliar word, we stop and sound it out, if we can. (This happens whether the writing system is alphabetic, syllabic, ideographic or something else.) The process of memorization actually implants several aspects of the form of the word in the mind-which is why most font-changes don't cause us trouble-and we move from *_vocalizing_* the word to *_reading_* the word. This is also one of the principle reasons now that teaching a foreign language starts with speaking, rather than jumping right into reading, as was done in the past (c. pre-1970). This difference in processing, between recognizing spoken vs written words, is why words misspoken are far more noticeable than printed words misplaced or misspelled may be. This is also why writers must either have others proofread their texts, or develop skills that overcome the ingrained processes of reading, which can be error-prone or simply too optimistically forgiving (in "fixing" errors).
English is not a phonetic language and deaf people can read so there is no evidence that "sound" is important for reading.
I once heard or read, that “silent” reading didn’t exist until some monk during the Middle Ages astonished his fellow monks by reading soundlessly and without moving his lips.
My mother can’t read without whispering the words to herself. I find it very annoying. What causes some people to read like that, and how do most of us (?) learn to read just by using our brains.
I also read that generally boys initially learn to read words like a picture, and girls by recognizing the individual letters. This is supposed to explain why boys initially have an advantage; until the words get longer, then they start to struggle.
Or you know you could just not try that i dunno about you but i was reading the news paper by age 4 apparently, my father took a video of me sounding words out
got that behaivor from time to time myself. for me the verbal repetion just gives another layer of information to my brain. easier to understand stuff if im stressed out or something like that
I don't speak out loud when I read, but I do in my head. I read only about as fast as I could speak the words. It makes me a noticeably slower reader than most people. It's annoying.
Yes I learnt that from QI
@@AlexWalkerSmith same for me :/
This is by far my most favorite video! 💯
THANKS FOR YOUR PERSISTANCE NOT ALWAYS MY INTEREST THEN I FIND YOU AGAIN AND IT IS GREAT INFO FOR ME, LEARN A LITTLE AS I CAN
Actually Joe, when I read, I do have the words forming in my mind, like a little voice reading them out. If this isn't happening for most people then I'm pretty shocked and I don't really understand how they do that. By the way I have a form of dyslexia.
I have that aswell and I don't have any reading problems
I do this as well, and I'm not dyslexic. I thought most people had a little voice in their heads when reading.
I've tested my ability to read by just moving my eyes across the page like this video claims we all do, and it feels so, so wrong. I'd get to the end of the paragraph and have no idea whether I actually understood anything or not, so I'd go back and re-read with my little inner voice, only to learn that yes, I'd actually read it all the first time when I skimmed through. It's such an uncomfortable experience that I've gone back to my inner voice exclusively.
Most people think dyslexia is exclusive defined by the letters getting jumbled up, but this is not true. That's just one type. I got tested in college and they said I didn't have it, then I got tested in university and they said I did. The tests in university were far more extensive. You may not have a 'problem' reading, but it could well be a relative weakness. If you're a very intelligent gifted person, you'll have already developed your own techniques to get by and possibly even excel in most areas, but actually may be *relatively* weaker in some aspects.
If so, then that could be a type of dyslexia.
Over 80 percent of people have internal voices. I have no clue how a person would turn it off when reading. How would that even work? Do they think in pictures?
I wonder if it is something that happen when you pay attention at your reading process. I have a little voice too, but at the same time, on retrospective, it doesn't appear like it shows up everytime I'm reading something. I guess that happen when a certain specyfic type of attention is involved. Maybe is more probable "hearing" a voice when you read a dialogue than a "no parking" sign, for example.
Great to see you’ve come through COVID Joe. Thanks for keeping our curiosity flowing with your great shows. Amazing how these arrangements of bent and connected lines can allow us to communicate through space and time…with people we don’t even know. What an amazing world we live in!
We really need more who Read and Write,
especially in a Quality-Drought where Show-Writers may
be choosen to write a Show without ANY Competence whatsoever.
To be made in Charge of Hollywood or Something takes ZERO Competence and Skill.
Nowadays, that's the world humans created for humanity.
This is all fascinating but why is it that when one can read well why does one not like or want to read??
I read a lot, and when I read a book there are a lot of things going on in my mind. I read the words, interpret them, and see the thing happening in my head. Also, if I am tired, I sometimes lose focus, and then I go word by word and imagine it, and then I can read fine again! It is so exciting to learn how I do one of my favorite activities. I find it interesting that sometimes I fill in spots where a "the" or "and" or some small word is missing.
this is amazing.. thanks for the video
Attempting to learn Japanese has really given me an appreciation for my ability to merely glance at an English word and immediately recognize the pronunciation and meaning without any intentional thought whatsoever.
Me too. Having learned English already, I noticed how spoiled I was, when I had to basically start at zero again. But after a while you do notice that you don't have to look at every single character to understand words, so がんばれ :D
It should be said that multiple factors can affect reading speed given that this is the way reading works.
1, Have better eyesight, allowing for the book to be held further away from your eyes, allowing for slightly greater width of area covering the text where the brain can skim information. Given that your able to see more words within your highly tuned sight section, you will be able to glean more information at a glance quickly. Ironically this makes reading glasses ineffective for reading quickly.
2. Practice reading often, and the ability to recognize common words will spread from only short connecter words to include some context words present right next to the other words you're actually reading. Think of the phrase "their sandwich", you can eventually intuit that its their sandwich while only actively reading the word sandwich. This kind of sentence structure adaptation works really well as you read content from dozens or hundreds of different authors, and ingrain the deepest common traits found among writers and writing.
3. Make sure you understand what a sentence is saying before you move on. This shouldn't be actively considered, but rather just a habit you develop. We all know that sometimes we have to go back and re-read something because you realize you lost the train of thought that was being covered or something just didn't add up in what you were reading, or that you were just scanning without actually paying attention to the words you were reading. Making sure that you are focused and prepared to read will be the biggest factor in determining how quickly you can get through a large volume of text, and it is imperative that you stay aware of what is being communicated to you when reading.
For reference there are plenty of speed reading classes, I took one over a summer back in middle school and my pages per minute didn't double but it did substantially increase, like over 50% faster. I've since lost most of that speed but the only way to maintain and improve a skill like reading is to do it consistently and work at it. Even if reading is a leisure activity to you, it'll still become easier as you do it more often and you'll get quicker as you adjust to the task.
11:43 🤔 interesting
I wonder how this affects reading logographic scripts (most relevant being Chinese, but presumably a few others out there are of similar utility). I feel like it would be a lot faster to read those as the characters are more densely packed, so it would involve more processing of information in the center of our vision in which we are most able to do so.
Edit: Not as related but I wonder how reading works when you read out loud words (e.g. for other people). I can barely understand what I'm reading if I have to read out loud since so much of my mental energy is going towards talking.
Makes sense though. Reading words I've seen a million times in my life is trivial. But seeing words I haven't seen before or seen very infrequently I would need to switch modes and sound it out instead of just intuitively knowing the pronunciation
I love this stuff. Especially being a little dyslexic, it makes me wonder what my eyes and brain are doing/ not doing. Thanks for the vid, and to everyone who helped! I subbed to your guest's channel as well!
I'm only 3 minutes in and this explains why I always have trouble lining up letters on my crafts! I just checked my painting stencils, and sure enough, the O is bigger than the R.
I could never figure out why I always had issues lining up letters with painting and vynil projects. This makes so much sense and explains so much for me. WTH???
Thank you so much for the video. ❤
this sounds all well and good for roman/latin languages, but i'm curious how other "types" of languages work... Like Japanese, chinese, korean, etc.
im pretty sure other alphabets work the same way in human brains
I've been studying Chinese in Taiwan for a while and even tho I'm not anywhere near long communication level I personally feel like it's the same thing. Just your starting ground is different.
When we learned alphabet in our young age we also used to spell words very slowly and it isn't fluent up to the point when you can say it fluently when it becomes a coherent body of a word. Similar thing happens when I learn Chinese characters.
I start by writing certain character using the radicals (think about them as building blocks for all the characters 手，工， 口，....) and once I can write all of the parts multiple times I don't really focus on each individual part of the character, but at the character as a whole and just notice some small deviations. Let's say differences between:
買Mǎi - to buy
賣mài - to sell
貴guì - expensive
I would compare it to something like an image recognition and sometimes when you stutter you start by comparing it to the nearest looking thing you can think of and then try to understand the difference with a new meaning.
Of course radicals can have deeper meaning in some of the characters such as 心 xīn（heart）in the character 愛 ài（to love）because you are supposed to love with heart. But honestly it's more used for poetic stuff than anything else everyday.
(coming from a guy who's native language is also using roman letters - Slovak)
An interesting thing that I observed is that little kids who just learned how to read cannot read silently or with their brain, they have to say the words they are reading out loud in order read and when you ask people about it they always deny doing it as a kid until they see kids doing it all the time.
I think it is harder to get the meaning of the word when you are busy sounding its letters.
As a short-sighted student who was too cool for glasses, I can tell you that for mid to long-range reading it's entirely possible to get the meaning from only the shape of words and other patterns within a sentence. I could not see the individual letters on the overhead projector or blackboard, maybe the 1st letter, last letter, shape of the word and position within a sentence, plus context. That is how I used to read/copy
4:53 This is so cool! I'm currently reading The Grieving Brain, by Dr. Mary-Frances O'connor, and she also says that our brain repurposed the early survival skills of knowing where food is and when to find it again, and turned them into the closeness we feel with someone (knowing where they are at what time, so that we can find them)
I asked this exact question a few weeks ago! I was wondering how we could read so fast, and as a result I started paying attention to what I was doing while reading- subsequently losing the ability to read quickly (I'm also the fastest reader i know). I think what had happened was that whenever I had skipped over to the next words, I thought, 'Eh, why did I just skip ahead. I must have missed something.' And so I went backwards and was consistently surprised at the accuracy of my reading despite the skipping. This shows that reading is genuinely something that happens 'automatically', and even subconsciously if my observation holds true.
Edit: i suddenly feel like doing a word search puzzle
In the video there was no mention of the contextual nature of reading. Sometimes very rarely I read a word wrong. The reason is always contextual. I don’t misread a word in a way it would not make sense in terms of the meaning of the sentence. The wrong reading always makes sense and forms a very logical sentence within the context of the passage I’m reading. That made me realize that my brain is utilizing the context when I’m reading and in essence guessing the words to help me read faster that way.
I think this may also apply to reading music. The analogy to the context would be the key the musical piece is written in. Just as the words need to form a meaningful sentence that would fit into the paragraph and the overall text, musical notes need to fit in what musical theory prescribes.
In short, words are not random and musical notes are not random, they all fit in a framework we call the context. And the brain uses the context to predict what may come next to help reading sentences and music.
The way you explained how our neurons fire in a "pool" of known words just blew my damn mind. I love learning about the inner mechanics of how just about anything works, ESPECIALLY the brain. This is an awesome video! I'd love to learn more about how the brain processes information on a physical level
A while back, I tried building a full true-type font renderer in C++ and learned a lot of the very strange and bizarre rules of typesetting like the difference in the size of characters you mentioned at the beginning. A lot of people don't realize this, but true-type fonts literally have entire miniature computer programs built into each letter for fine tuning how it's rendered at a sub-pixel level. Rendering text is ridiculously complex!
Super interesting video! ☺️ There is a small mistake in the anatomy of retina. Fovea and parafovea are much smaller than depicted.. which makes vision and perception of visual stimuli much more miraculous! You only use the very center of your retina (only small part of fovea even) to gather most of the visual information ☺️
Please - a compilation video of all of Joe's head exploding moments.
So basically, you're actually reading all day when you're looking at things. That's insane.
Good point, yes. We're constantly just recognizing shapes we've seen before.
Wow, Awesome Video Bro!!!
Love all your videos, but every so often, you guys just knock it out of the park. This one and that other video about fire are two such examples.
This is so interesting! When I am trying to write letters perfectly, for a sign like happy birthday, or something, i noticed that it is hard to get the s's the same size as the other letters. I have felt frustration about this actually! Having to start a whole project over again because our eyes see curved objects as larger than they really are wow...
So now i no that you have to mathematically account for this in art..
Typography is a fascinating art/science in its own right. I'd recommend Linus Boman's channel.
I can never draw my sign in the same way. Every time I sign something the sign turns out slightly different. I can recognize my own sign thou.
Great video, but I wish you would've included how the brain reads letters that have been artistically distorted. During the psychedelic '60s, a lot of psychedelic art used handdrawn typefaces that were heavily distorted and stylized, and some looked like they were melting - but they were still readable. Later, in the 1980s, typefaces were distorted in graffiti but it was still readable. Some artistic typefaces were harder to read than others, but ultimately they were cool, beautiful and exciting to read. Check out some of the Filmore East music posters of the late 1960s, especially by Wes Wilson. It's amazing how the brain can still read those beautiful, heavily distorted words.
On the subject of "you don't hear the words in your head", that is exactly how it works for me. Hooray constant internal monologue that assigns a voices and plays like an audio track in my brain for everything I read or write like my whole world is a radio show or something.
I was shocked when in different situations through my life to learn just how many people don't know how to read. I was homeless and an addict for a good long while, which put me in situations that I might not otherwise have been. In some jails, by being literate I was in a minority. I helped many women write letters to boyfriends, husbands (it is so sad this day to hear a woman say "My Daddy said women don't need to know how to read or write and my husband agrees"), judges, children. I read out loud at night in one jail, every night after lights out. I think it's assumed that "everyone" knows how to read nowadays, but it's not true. I just checked out a literacy program in the area in which I live. Adult illiteracy is at 20%: one in five adults in the city of Danville cannot read. It's shocking, but it should be.