Recent Feeds + Reads

The results don’t mean that after a nighttime Beethoven sonata, a piano novice will wake up with the ability to play it. But the results do suggest that an existing skill can be sharpened during a nap…

Just because a skill can be sharpened during sleep doesn’t necessarily mean that it should, says sleep researcher Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School. “I think your brain does a lot of triaging at night. Now, you’re trying to override that triaging and tell your brain what it should be worrying about.”

And overriding the brain is fraught with the problem of choosing what to listen to, Stickgold says. “I would argue that sleep might be smarter than you.”

Oral forms like ballads and epics exist in every culture, originating long before the advent of written language. In preliterate eras, tales had to be appealing to the ear and memorable to the mind or else they would simply disappear.

Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material.

Reading Krystal’s subtle and savvy piece, it struck me that our talk of guilty pleasures involves two controversial assumptions: that some books (and perhaps some genres) are objectively inferior to others and that “better” books are generally not very enjoyable. Combined, the two assumptions lead to a view under which, to pick up Krystal’s metaphor, we think of books the way we often think of foods: there those that are “good for you” and those that merely “taste good.” Here I want to reflect on the viability of these two assumptions.

Seemingly more plausible is the idea that serious fiction is not enjoyable because it is difficult, requiring intellectual effort to untangle complexities of plot and syntax, to appreciate obscure allusions, or understand deep philosophical themes. Literature of previous centuries is likely to pose problems simply because of unfamiliar modes of expression or cultural contexts; and more recent literary fiction-beginning with the great modernists like Proust, Eliot and Joyce-often seems deliberately constructed to be hard for readers.

Vigorous intellectual activity is itself a primary source of pleasure-and pleasure of greater intensity and satisfaction than that available from what is merely “easy reading.”

It was 1963, and 16-year-old Bruce McAllister was sick of symbol-hunting in English class. Rather than quarrel with his teacher, he went straight to the source: McAllister mailed a crude, four-question survey to 150 novelists, asking if they intentionally planted symbolism in their work.

A review on Brain Pickings. Selected quotes from the book:

Non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught.

The book is an undefined object that we can discuss only in imprecise terms, an object forever buffeted by our fantasies and illusions.

Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting.

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.

If a book is less a book than it is the whole of the discussion about it, we must pay attention to that discussion in order to talk about the book without reading it.

Reviewer’s conclusion:

Ultimately, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read isn’t permission to dismiss books but an ode to the very love of books, the totality of which we use as a powerful sensemaking mechanisms for the world.

The next time you’re stumped on a creative challenge, head to a bustling coffee shop, not the library. As the researchers write in their paper, “[I]nstead of burying oneself in a quiet room trying to figure out a solution, walking out of one’s comfort zone and getting into a relatively noisy environment may trigger the brain to think abstractly, and thus generate creative ideas.”