FRESH IDEAS: How we read and think

From The Smart Set: "Since our Judeo-Christian roots, we have ascribed mythic power to books. And though popular culture has lost some of this mystical veneer since the Enlightenment, the fetishization of books has not abated: In the modern scientific tradition, we have come to consider knowledge to be only that which is communicable via text.

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“But that is a terribly impoverished view of what human knowing can be. Part of the reason for this is the way we conceptualize reading. We tend to think of books as things that hold information, and we think that when you read, the information jumps into your brain.

“If that were really how it worked, how could two people read the same text and get different information from it?”

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