ISSUE 01
I recommend you to read this newsletter twice.
Because you might just be losing the ability to read.
Scientists once covered up words just after people read them.
Readers could keep moving forward. But without being able to look back at those words, they understood less.
Those tiny trips backwards were doing useful work.
You've probably done this yourself: reached the end of a sentence, thought “wait, what?”, and gone back. In that experiment, taking away access to earlier words hurt comprehension, even in straightforward sentences. The experiment
Illustration of the study's method, not recorded eye movements.
That's one reason to make room for reading, even when there is a video available. You can spend ten seconds on one sentence and half a second on the next. Compare two claims. Check whether the ending actually follows from the beginning.
You can pause and rewind a video too. Text makes it easy to keep the words in front of you while you work out what they mean.
And there is more happening than recognising words.
In a brain-scanning study, researchers measured brain activity as people read stories. As the story moved between actions and places, activity changed in brain regions involved in movement and understanding spaces. The findings suggest that readers were building a model of what was happening. The study
A few marks on a page can get you following someone through a room that isn't there. I think that's pretty cool.
Does that make reading better than watching? That study wasn't a contest between books and videos. A good video can explain something brilliantly. I'm rather invested in that being true.
But reading gives you another way into an idea. You can use it to check whether you understand something well enough to explain it yourself. Neither format guarantees depth. What matters is having somewhere to go after “oh, that's interesting.”
So try this: pick one thing from a science video that made you curious. Find a written explanation. When a sentence doesn't click, go back instead of treating that as a failure.
You don't need to finish a book to start reading.
Behind the videos
When I made my Neptune video, I didn't expect it to do particularly well. I'd been interested in astronomy for so long that much of what I was explaining already felt familiar.
Then it did far better than I expected, and led to a series on Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter.
It made me reconsider what I call “common knowledge”. Knowing a planet's name is very different from knowing what might be happening inside it.
Here in Event Horizon, I want to follow more of those questions, including ones that need more room than a reel, and share a little of what happens behind the videos.
What's one topic a video made you want to understand better? Reply and tell me.
Dev