Reading for Mental Strength

“A little food well digested will give more nourishment to the body than the large quantity that overloads the stomach, clogs the system, and brings on disease.”

There is wisdom in those words for us as we sit at the table to eat and as we sit at the table to study. A few ideas thoroughly digested will provide more benefit to us than the rehearsal of many ideas superficially. Eating slowly and in a happy frame of mind, will benefit us in the absorption of ideas as it does in the absorption of nutrients. How this way of studying and reading provides mental strength will be the subject of future posts.

Our devices and the internet have made us hasty eaters. Skimming, cursory reading, and multi-tasking characterise our habits of reading online. We can’t seem to take in all the information fast enough. Our attention is eroding, and so are the capacities that help us construct meaning from text. Eating physical food quickly, can lead to overeating, which weakens our minds. Similarly, the method of reading that has become our dominant of way of reading— hasty, superficial reading— is weakening our minds. Reflecting on a decade that he had been a computer user; writer Nicholas Carr wrote:

“I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Has the internet made you a hasty eater? Has it robbed you of your mental strength? When someone sends you a ten-sentence WhatsApp message, does it feel like they’re asking you to read an encyclopaedia? When you read the summary of a book, do you wish someone would send you a summary of the summary? Does a 300-page book seem intimidating?

The wonderful thing about our brains is that they can regain the strength we’ve lost if we’ll practice reading slowly, deeply, and attentively. We can once more read for mental strength.

Escape the Path that Leads to Intellectual ruin

Cram, pass and forget, were the words of ‘wisdom’ invented among students in a system of education that prioritised content and exams. Students grew to see education as a process of accumulating facts. Whether one understood the facts or not, was irrelevant. What was significant was whether you could hold them long enough to pass your exams. This wisdom, I saw, placed its followers on a path that had immediate ‘benefit’— they could pass their exams and soon forget— but I now see it was also leading to the erosion of their mental powers.

1.The Erosion of reasoning and thinking ability

Neuroscience bestows on us an eternal principal, “Use it or lose it”. Our faculties— memory, reason, imagination etc.— strengthen as we engage in work that calls them into action and weaken with disuse. It follows then that as we engage in memory work solely, the faculties we are not using will begin to weaken. Put another way, rote memorisation leaves our other faculties inactive, and what we don’t use, we lose. As we train our memory chiefly, we sacrifice our abilities to reason, imagine etc.

2.The erosion of independent thinking

Having not sufficiently developed our reasoning powers by activity, we make ourselves dependent on thinkers, people who can do more with knowledge than we have practiced. Rote memorisation prepares us for experiences where we simply have to recall ideas, but not for situations where we have to reason through and synthesise complex ideas. Unable to reason through ideas for ourselves, we’ll look to others to reason and explain ideas for us.

3.The Erosion of our interest in Learning

It is practicing thinking that leads to more thinking, and since education will progressively call us to more and more thinking, it follows that if we only study by rote memorisation, we’ll be poorly prepared for our future education.

Whatever your journey has been, you can become a greater thinker, by engaging in ways of studying that call into action your thinking and reasoning capacities. It is this kind of studying that positions you to bring value to the world.

How to Understand Complex ideas

A way of thinking and seeing, each teacher brings to class. Their ways of communicating what they think and see will also be varied. All their views are valuable, but you are more likely to understand an idea if the teacher you hear it from thinks and communicates in a way you can follow and in a way that matches your current thinking ability. What can you do if your teacher thinks and communicates in a way you can’t follow?

You are privileged to live at this current time, where with a few clicks, you can have the worlds information at your fingertips, in a variety of formats— audio, video, text etc. And at this time, you can build a modest library of books at a reasonable cost. By physical books or the net—I’d recommend physical books— you can find someone who explains the idea in a way that matches your way of thinking. Thoughts can be phrased in many ways, with varying levels of complexity. As you sift through teachers/books you may find the idea clothed in simple language. This is helpful. Understanding the idea in simple terms will help you understand the idea when see or hear it clothed in more obscure terms.

There is another reason why seeing the idea phrased in multiple way is helpful. As you see it from multiple viewpoints, you build a comprehensive view of the idea in question. This deep understanding will make future learning easier. Ideas that are deeply understood can easily be related to future ideas. Connecting ideas is at the heart of learning.

You can understand complex ideas!

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