I’ve thought about this phenomenon often, and plan to return and reblog this post with further thoughts later. Here are a few disorganized thoughts.
I was that six year old reading books about dinosaurs written for adults that were half my size, but to this day, my eyes glaze over when I read a textbook, and I comprehend and remember very little.
At first, I thought it was purely because reading “real books,” especially primary sources, was pedagogically superior to reading pre-digested pap like textbooks. Only later did I realize that my preference for real books wasn’t just a matter of choice.
First: Textbooks are just too much.
My second masters thesis was inspired partly by this phenomenon of difficulty reading textbooks, and partly by a moment during SLP graduate school that I will never forget. I had a fourth grade student who struggled to state the main idea of a passage he could read and generally understand for 10 weeks, no matter what I tried. On my very last day working with him, my clinical supervisor made it possible for him – just by asking him about the passage 1-2 sentences at a time. Taking away information didn’t just make it easier for him to comprehend – it made it possible.
Now think about textbooks. Dense text is crammed onto the page. There are endless detailed, hyperrealistic images that often are there to look cool, not to convey information efficiently. Information overload in textbooks is real, especially for neurodivergent folks.
Books and textbooks vs. fanfiction and blog posts is another distinction I’ve thought about a lot, and experienced personally. The most important difference: how much you care about and enjoy what you’re reading. It’s like the child who can play video games for hours, but can’t concentrate on boring homework for ten minutes.
We read fanfic because we fall in love with characters, relationships, stories, and worlds, and want to give ourselves a fun experience, and perhaps an escape. When we engage in our passionate/intense/”special” interests, we lose track of time. We’re in “flow.”
Above: A screencap from Spongebob with green text saying “5 HOURS LATER…” over an orange/brown/red/yellow patterned background. Yes, it looks as hideous as it sounds.
Ever seen people on Tumblr complain about how voraciously they read as kids and how slowly and rarely they finish books now?
Motivation explains that, too.
I’m one of those people. Like many of you, I used to read books nonstop, voraciously. I read most of the Harry Potter books within the day I got them. As an adult, I have completed very few books. There are several reasons: lack of dedicated open time to do nothing but read, the sense I should be doing something more “productive,” being unable to choose between many books and thus choosing none, and the change to less “fun” material.
(There are complications here. As an adult, I switched from reading books to academic journal articles. I was still “productive,” reading up to 10 articles per day while taking notes. But again, I was passionate about what I was reading. After I left my neuroscience PhD program and academia entirely, I had difficulty reading for the first time in my life. It made me feel stupid).
This blog post was intended to be at most three or four lines of text, saying “I relate and I’m going to write more about this some time.” It ended up as this monstrosity. Earlier this morning, I sat down to read a piece of fanfiction, and looked up to realize two or three hours had passed. Can you see a common theme?
Although I shared more of my thoughts here than originally planned, this was still an off-the-cuff ramble. I intend to organize my thoughts and return to this topic.
There’s just so much to say here about neurodivergence, attention, flow, motivation and intense interests, information overload, educational practice, societal changes to reading shorter material, the purpose of reading determining the difficulty of the cognitive processing necessary, and more.
Do you also find it easier to read 200 pages of fanfiction than 200 pages of a book or textbook? Do you also have an easier time learning from “real books” than textbooks? I’d love to hear what you think.
theartofmadeline
romaincrisis
stormborns
dededos
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