David Foster Wallace’s wrote ‘Infinite Jest’ a huge sprawling novel that is free from the usual earnestness of the novel. You need to find the time and quiet to read its 1000+ pages. It requires effort. Here he explains why reading is now often cursory, if people read at all.
I’m not as fanatical as most about reading, especially the ‘reading Taliban’, kids spending hours and hours reading Harry Potter. I’m with Plato on this and think that being out doing stuff is often better when you’re very young. Nevertheless, he has a point about solitary silence. I want to apply this to learning.
All my life I’ve been told that learning is ‘social’, ‘collaborative’ and should be done in ‘groups’ or ‘cohorts’. Most education is assumed to benefit from being in a ‘classroom’, ‘lecture hall’ or ‘training room’. I’m not so sure. It strikes me that most learning is done afterwards in the quiet of your bedroom with homework, in the library as a student or when reading and reflecting on your own as an adult or doing your job.
Teaching and training tends to be fuelled by people who think that you need to be in their company to learn anything. This is rarely true. I much prefer being free from the tyranny of time, tyranny of location and the tyranny of transience. That means the tyranny of ‘courses’.
My least favourite and one I refused to attend or having anything to do with, are those round table sessions where you choose a chair, get some vague question, discuss and feed back with flipchart sheets stuck on the wall. It's simply an exercise in groupthink. Nothing good comes from it as it's just a lazy, embedded practice.
I learn best when it is at a time and place I choose and not at some arbitrary pace set by a teacher, lecturer or trainer. I’m not wholly against the classroom, lecture or course, as it is clearly necessary to bring structure to young people’s lives for sustained attention in schools and for critical tasks. But for most learning and especially adult learning I’m not convinced.
One cognitive phenomenon that confirmed my views is the ‘transience effect’. Perhaps the least known but most important effect in learning. When you watch a video, television or a movie, listen to a lecture or get talked to for a long period, you will be under the illusion that you are learning. In fact, due to your working memory’s inability to hold, manipulate and process them enough to get into long-term memory, you forget most of it. It’s like a shooting star - it shines bright in your mind at the time but your memories burn up behind you.
This is why I am suspicious of using a lot of non-recorded lectures, even video in learning. Even note taking is hard in a fixed narrative flow, as you’re likely to miss stuff while you take the notes and still don’t really have time to deeply process the information. I have no problem with recorded video or podcasts as I can stop and start, as I often do, to reflect and take notes.
What is annoying can be the cacophony of bad e-learning, with its noisy, cartoonish animations, visual and sound effects, especially in gamified content. I find it almost unbearable to page through this stuff, with its speech bubbles and often pointless interactions. I posted this six years ago but you get my point…
https://youtu.be/BlCXgpozrZg
Being alone in the quiet (even music has a negative effect, especially if it has lyrics) actively reading, taking notes, stopping, reflecting and doing stuff works well because you are in the flow of your choosing, not someone else’s narrative flow. Agency matters as learning, the actual presence of knowledge and skills in your long-term memory, is always a personal experience. It requires your attention, your effort and your motivation.
For thousands of years the loudest things we would have heard was the background noise of nature, something that we barely register now. The church bell was perhaps the loudest non-natural thing one would have heard for centuries. Now, it’s the din of traffic, sirens, TV on, radio on, computer on… something’s always there. The cacophony of music in pubs, shops and public spaces drowns out thought or worse stimulates annoyance, even anger.
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