INTERACTIVE Study DOESN’T TAKE A COMPUTER.
The Head Room. The Vulcan, the Explorer and the Un stand at center stage.
Shudoff: People should study what they are told to study. It doesn’t have to be interactive.
Vulcan: Reading is always interactive. But there are different kinds of interaction.
Explorer: When a child first learns to read, the brain sets up a special reading system. The system is trained to point the eyes at text and to translate it into spoken words.
Un: Some people call that translation reading. Children practice it in school.
Explorer: If you listen to children reading aloud, you will easily notice that they are not producing the kind of speech they do when they are talking.
Canter: That’s because they can’t understand what they are studying.
Un: Much like what happens to adults when they read an instruction manual.
Networker: For people to understand what they study, other brain parts have to get into the act.
Empath: A child reads emotional dialogue with no emotion because the parts of the brain that handle emotion are not engaged. An actor can read the same dialogue with the appropriate emotion by engaging the parts of the brain that handle emotion.
Explorer: There is more information about this on the Web. Key terms are: method acting, Stanislavski, Marlon Brando, Lee Strasberg.
Networker: This is beginning to sound a lot like thinkering.
Engineer: People can get more out of reading with the same techniques they apply to thinkering.
Vulcan: Thinkering is based on interacting with the problem. The trick to getting your brain involved in reading is to interact with what you read.
Explorer: You remember more of what you read because those other brain parts can carry a lot of the memory load.
Hunter: You may even like it better. You don’t sit and let the book tell you what to think. You get to be part of the action.
Storyboarder: People do whole-brain reading when they enjoy fiction. You can look over fiction and see how it calls up the non-verbal parts of the brain.
Explorer: In fiction, you will find concrete words that call up images, sounds, scents, and feelings. You find concrete descriptions of the events that readers will watch in their heads.
Un: People enjoy fiction. People don’t study fiction.
Engineer: People remember fiction because they see the images, they see the action. Fiction is written to go to parts of the brain beyond the language channel.
Explorer: To parts of the brain that handle scenes and events.
Shudoff: We should not be talking about fiction. Most of what people have to study is not fiction.
Storyboarder: We are talking about interactive studying. We were showing how fiction makes for interactive reading. It builds pictures in people’s heads.
Explorer: People can store a lot more information in pictures than in words.
Canter: People can’t make images out of what they study. It is abstract. You can’t see abstractions.
Vulcan: Abstraction is made of instances and examples.
Networker: Learning is like picking berries. Half the job is storing things well.
Un: People who neglect to store what they read are like people who pick berries without a basket.
Vulcan: Storing is the interactive part.
Engineer: Memories are made at the time of input. When people study, they need to activate the parts of the brain that store scenes and events.
Vulcan: Some people forget to do that. Thinkerers remember.
Un: That’s because thinkerers don’t study.
Learning, studying
and other tribulations