The Human Brain and Cognition
Doing things and checking off the list of items satisfies the human brain and provides a sense of accomplishment. Numerous challenges and trends get viral online on social media on a daily basis and netizens never fail to follow those.
One similar trend we have noticed in the past few years is book reading challenges. People make goals of reading a certain number of books every year/ month/ week where some of the most read genres are self-help, personal development, leadership, psychology, biographies etc. But I wonder how much do people actually retain or implement from that reading? Studies says people retain only 10% of what they read (source) so how much are we learning from making over ambitious reading goals? We easily surpass the human brain cognition capacity by reading 50-100 books a year.
According to an article posted by goodreads in June 2021, there were more than 4 million readers who joined the reading challenge, pledging to read a total of 218 million books! By the end of the challenge, according to goodreads there were in fact over 5.7 million participants with over 308 million books pledged which on an average is 54 books per participant which is almost a book per week. Kudos to the participants who met their goal but how many of those people will actually be able to share knowledge and learnings from the books they read a few weeks/ months later?
People are definitely reading innumerable books but of course there is a lot of obligation and pressure involved in such reading challenges. As a result, people in order to achieve their goals, sometimes skim through pages so they can get through the book faster. Given that reading does involve grasping and absorbing what we read, this makes me question if this new way of reading is a healthy way of reading? Are we making reading more like a chore and less like a mode of learning? If so, are we not defeating the purpose of reading?
Something to think about — should the shift be more towards making a goal on how much we will implement on things that we read/ learn? The brain due to recency bias will retain more recent information so shouldn’t reading be done in sprints where we read and challenge ourselves to implement and put in action a few things that we learn before moving to the next book?
The question we should ask ourselves is if we are tricking the human brain on feeling accomplished or are we letting the brain trick us by not retaining enough… Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
