We wondered what is that bringing all of us together? Why is reading book such an important thing? Can’t we do it alone? Why do we need a club for this?
We found our answers in the corners of Cognitive Neuroscience.
To our brains reading books is hard. It takes a lot of energy. Anything that demands energy expenditure is hated by the 3 pound magnificent meat mass aka brain in our heads. This is because our eyes read and our brains perceive (make meaning aka comprehend). With reading, it is a stream of words that keep hitting our brains. Our brain now captures it like an image and searches the long term memory, its associated meaning, stay in this process (attention), use working memory (if the word is new and it is a fresh cognition) and finally understand all of it in split second. That is a lot of work. It does it, if it makes sense. It doesn’t if it doesn’t make sense. There is no point spending that energy.
On top of it, if our eyes read slowly (fixation and saccades), our brain wanders. So slow reading doesn’t work for our brain. But fast reading misses comprehension. Damn!
Our schools taught us to read slowly and worse, the taught us to use eye, ears, mouth, voice and brain for reading. All our organs do not work at the same pace and this bad habit hurts us.
In addition to the above, no one told us how to do reading right. there are one thousand methods, tips, tricks and hacks in the internet but who has the time to go through all that.
So we started feeling that reading books is boring. Especially non-fiction reading is 🤮.
We know the goodness in these books. We are aware it will do good to us. But, we just can’t find a way to do it in a way it is exciting and engaging. So don’t give the gyan around why reading is awesome. We know it already.
In a nutshell, We are standing on the shoulders of the giant and viewing the landscape. The authors multiple years of experiences and experiments is brought down to 200 pages of gold. We all know this.
On the contrary we don’t have this issue with Harry Potter, Comics and other genres of reading. We read it day and night. I have read it in the bath tub and the pot. We can’t keep it down. What is going on there 🤔
It is a story. It flows and syncs. Our brain spends very little energy to understand because it is a story and it can vividly imagine what is going on. The story is told well and that captures our attention. We can’t expect that from Robin Sharma or Marty Cagan. Sorry peeps!
Some authors do tell a story and make it really awesome to read but not all. 90% of non-fiction reading is hard however insightful it is. Period.
One more angle to this conversation is reading verbal stuff is hard. Visual is easy on our brains. It becomes a lot easier when the visual and voice is added. That is why audio books and videos are a lot easier to consume than reading from a book or a kindle.
Let me give you a case for why visual processing is faster than verbal here.
Nature was unfair to give a separate lobe for visual processing. It didn’t do that for verbal 🤷♀️ That temporal lobe is dedicated for visual processing. This is why your picture is worth a 1000 words. Our brains can process a picture 15-60X faster than a verbal word.
You may now wonder, what’s up with that audio thing being easy?
The scientific explanation is here (by my prof Dr Chris Wickens)
If that went above your head, I don’t blame you at all 🤪
The simplest way to understand is, we can drive and listen to music/talk to friends but we can’t drive and watch Netflix. Audio and Spatial modalities are separate. when we use them separately attention is beautifully split between the two. When we demand both audio or both visual, we struggle. We don’t know which ear to listen to if two are talking in two different ears. We don’t which one to see, the road or the screen when driving.
So in a nutshell, we can read two books at a time but we can drive and listen to audible. When we load our eyes and ears, it works. When we load our eyes only or ears only it doesn’t.
Enough of science and the why! This is why, reading from books is damn hard and boring. So we want to make it easy because it is valuable but we don’t know how. This is why a club is exciting. Now we can hear from others about the book. We can see their reviews. We can talk to them about the book. We can reflect and ask questions as we read. It is not so boring as you sitting and reading the book all alone.
If you want a scientific explanation for that, it is called distributed cognition. Knowledge can be conceived/absorbed better when it is distributed over a community of individuals, rather than being represented in individual brains (individual cognition). That is on the rocks version of distributed cognition. When we have a network of brains thinking about the same thing, we tend to absorb better, discuss, ponder, argue, ask, listen, observe and more. This is why a tribe works better together and not alone.
I hear you!
It is a pain to bring the tribe together.
Yes, I agree. the communication overhead is mind-blowing. For the uninitiated, here is a quick explanation of Communication Overhead by Josh Kaufman.
Communication Overhead is the proportion of time you spend communicating with your team instead of getting productive work done.
Communication is absolutely necessary, but as the size of your team increases, so does Communication Overhead.
A small team is awesome but the impact is also so little. That is we live with large tribes despite the difficulty. The ROI (return of investment) is exponentially higher than the (I)investment we make. Only those who understand this can make a club with a lot of empathy. It is very easy to become impatient, intolerant and impulsive when the communication overhead is uncontrollable.
This is why you see a lot of tribe members will join and in a jiffy will leave. They can’t handle all the above. They can’t see the ROI yet, so the brain tells them this is not worth it. I don’t blame them. Infact this is the time, we should be more gentle and inclusive to understand their context and allow them to do what is right. May be they will come when things are set at a latter stage.
Do you see the Chasm for all clubs 🤪 Early adopters learn a lot. Late adopters miss a lot. This is the natures law and it will continue in a club as well.
So now that you understand the WHY, can we move to the What and How?
