The Importance of Reading
If you can't read, not even the comics would be any fun.
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Reading isn't just about words. But even if it is, you still have to recognize the bits of ink as words, which is already a big start -- can you imagine your pet seeing them? I think not. A lot of interpreting, or word construction, is necessary.
So think of reading as tracking, as in hunting. Reading (or perception) is an investigative or hunting process. In perception you look for stuff -- like stock market prices, or food, or a tennis ball, or a date for the evening. All kinds of hunting. All involve skills.
In any skilled activity, whatever we perceive of the world has to be a construction -- a product of our perceptual mechanisms (primarily our brain, which contains most of the necessary neural connections to do the interpreting/constructing). That's true whether we are reading a book, scanning a scorecard, or enjoying the light in your lover's eyes.
Because we put it together, our experiences are strongly personal (or subjective) in nature with a significant historical aspect -- meaning the background that you bring to the job. So yes, reading is very important. Otherwise we would be much the same as ordinary dirt. It's important to other creatures, too, but they don't read the sane stuff as we do, though who knows how much they can actually see. We do know they hunt, though.
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Perception isn't like a still camera, taking temporally isolated pictures of the environment. Rather, it's a collection of complex skills. What we experience in our viewing depends on what we're looking for, what we’ve learned to that point, and what tools and capabilities we bring to the situation. It's a matter of searching for the true state of affairs in one or another situation, and success or failure depends on many personal factors. Too often, unfortunately, we are way off the mark. What we experience is doubtless determined ultimately by the real happenings. But the objects and events are clearly affected in their appearance to us by the quality and development of our many sensors and neural configurations.
In different situations we might interact with a variety of different entities. For instance, we might encounter traffic on a street we are trying to cross, or the events of a school party, or the discussion at a company business meeting, or simply the motion of the ball and players in a tennis game at the court. In our interaction with such perceived elements we are continually estimating characteristics as they relate to and bear on our various needs and intentions in the context. In large part the estimates are visual.
On crossing a busy street, for instance, we would likely be estimating the distance and speed of approaching cars that could possibly cause serious personal damage. Visually we might use depth perception to estimate the distances, or possibly engage other visual sub-systems to get motion estimates. In tennis we would be interested in assessing the speed and direction of the ball hit by an opponent, expecting to intercept it for a return shot. At the party or business meeting we might choose to observe persons of special interest to hear what they have to say.
How well we do in the respective circumstances (how close we get to the truth of the pertinent context dynamics and achieve out goals) depends on our perceptual accuracy, or perceptual competence. We would certainly like to be correct in our readings, but we could otherwise be terribly wrong. In either event, whether right or wrong, effective or ineffective, the estimates we derive reflect the subjective nature of our perceptions, our personal constructions, as difficult as that might be to believe.
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We process information through a complex chain of physiological events that may only be loosely organized and that are subject to continual change through ordinary usage in daily experience and notably as a result of learning. Or perhaps I should say that learning is attendant on certain changes in the brain that involve at least the addition of new synapses connecting neurons. In fact, research at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has provided convincing evidence that strongly implicates myelin as a key player in the learning of skills. (Myelin is a white fatty material that naturally surrounds the axon of a neuron and by its thickness controls the flow of electrical impulses through the neuron. The material is a bit like the cement-like dirt that sets the path we shape over time in our walks through the wild.)
Even so, despite the almost magical powers of the brain, the inputs to the perceiving mechanisms (from presumed real objects) are defined almost entirely by the context in which the person perceives them (inputs that are eminently cultural). So the output (i.e., the resulting perception) is ultimately determined by that context. In tennis, for example, it would be the tennis culture, primarily. (You wouldn’t expect to perceive yourself to be in a concert hall or at a dinner party, say, when playing tennis, unless perhaps you were suffering from a severe psychophysiological disorder.)
Secondarily, though, and concurrently, you are also very likely to be in other (broader or narrower) contexts, all with their own characteristics, likely in conflict with your tennis game. For example, the tennis court may be part of a larger athletic and health club or even part of an apartment complex that caters to the energetic set and gives it a special quality. (I once lived in an apartment complex like that -- in my younger days.) Also, many educational institutions have tennis courts as well as other athletic facilities that help to define the broader context. Indeed, the whole culture of sports or even the world could come down on the players in some respects, such as thinking about, and possibly being distracted by, the events occurring in the Middle East.
On the other hand, any tennis group may have sub-groups that like to compete among themselves. Or a group may possibly be an offshoot of a business organization that deals in athletic equipment and overlaps with tennis. So there are many possible sub- and super- groups that could compete for attention at the courts. I should think the successful player would have the "outside" forces under control and set aside somehow or reduced to a minimum, by having focused his or her interests on the game. The more the player understands the game, too, the less likely he or she will be distracted.
Howard Gardner expresses this very well (in The Disciplined Mind) when he says:
…Perhaps there are brain sites wired to anticipate faces or clusters of phonemes. But which faces and linguistic sounds are encountered – and how sense is made of them – is never determined by the brain. Sense-making is inherently a cultural phenomenon. And so one must always think of the brain as inside a mind that is developing in a particular culture, and that must necessarily take on the coloration of life in that (ever-changing) culture. Moreover, to the extent that the brain is exposed to a mix of cultures, their complementary and conflicting messages must also somehow be represented and reconciled. (pp. 88-9)
Unarguably, the brain does the information processing -- of that there no longer can be any doubt. But the information to be processed can only be drawn from the context. (The brain is like the supermarket cash register that adds up what comes through the aisle but doesn’t determine which items are purchased, or like the meat grinder that grinds away but doesn’t feed itself.) It’s difficult to imagine that the brain, by itself, could conjure up all the images attributable to the many different contexts that we encounter, not without external objects sustaining it (the brain doesn’t generate its own inputs, though segments of it may influence other segments). The brain is there to serve the human organism, not the other way around. There's more to us than just a brain.
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