A spellbinding world

Dr Fahim Chand | Monday August 29, 2022 06:00

This alluring oasis was called the weekend. Following a long stressful week filled with the essential blocks of academic nourishment and the spiritual pursuit of enlightenment, the bell had rung following religious class to indicate that it was Friday afternoon and the weekend would now be paying a visit.

The early mornings waking up for school and the stresses of eluding the deliverances of "Barakat bibi" had taken a toll. For those of you not in the know, the aforementioned "Barakat bibi" was the neatly trimmed stick, used to mete out punishment to a waiting and petrified hand when one had not learned their religious lessons diligently enough.

This cane scared me more than being trapped in an endless loop of Ed Sheeran songs, which is saying an awful lot. My six-year-old body was definitely ready for the weekend and it's offerings of more leisurely pursuits. My hometown Lobatse, while a peaceful oasis in itself, offered very little in terms of children's amusement.

This long before the advent of electromagnetic fields and illuminated pixels that introduced us into the endless world of social media. While challenging for my parents to keep a curious young mind stimulated, they managed fairly well. My mother Rehmat, who I always said was ahead of her time, introduced me into a spellbinding world, which I still occupy today. On every Saturday morning both my parents took me to our local library to choose a book for the week. It was with gleeful anticipation that I hurried through my morning routine until it was time.

As I walked through the doors, I entered into a world of enchantment. A realm populated by distant lands, filled with magical creatures and endless possibilities. A place where lost lovers serendipitously found their way back to each other. Places that had the ability to inspire and catalyse dreams of greatness. I was hooked. As my life has journeyed through many transformations, some even involving continental change of addresses, one thing has remained constant. My LOVE of the written word. As the world has voyaged on its own journey of change and transformation, so has the world of books. While the ancient art of embellishing pulp with ink, to create words that tell stories bounded by the hardest of covers remains, these stories can now also be told by illuminated pixels.

These tales of adventure and enlightenment are just as readily available using electronic readers such as a Kindle or an iPad. One may ask, are these devices equally adept at funnelling information into the human mind? Researchers in Spain and Israel compared 54 studies comparing digital and print reading. Their 2018 study involved more than 171,000 readers. Comprehension, they found was better when people read print rather than digital texts. So it seems, if you really need to LEARN something, you are better off with a print text.

The logical question is: Why? Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf from UCLA explains that the brain has no special network of cells just for reading and suggests that reading is not natural. To understand text, we have adapted neural networks evolved for other functions. While this flexibility allows the brain to do many different things, it can also be a problem when reading different types of text. When we read online, the brain uses a different set of nerve connections than it does for reading print. As a result, the brain may switch into skim mode when reading on a screen and into deep-reading mode when reading a text. Our developed mindset anticipates how easy or difficult we expect the reading to be. If we think it's easy, we may not put in much effort.

Much of what we read on screen tends to be text messages or social media posts, which are usually easy to understand and hence we may read faster, failing to absorb all the ideas presented. That fast skimming then may become a habit associated with reading on screen. This type of reading may not be the best when trying to understand the themes in The Great Gatsby. It's also unlikely to get you far studying the Gauss-Bonnet theorem of differential geometry. Furthermore researchers suggest that we make mental maps when we learn something.

Being able to "place" a fact somewhere on a mental map of a page, allows us to remember it better. Scrolling on a digital page doesn't allow us to do that. Reading Tolstoy's War and Peace would probably be better served on a printed page since scientists have determined that length matters. When passages are short, students remember just as much on screen as they do in print. But once passages are longer than 500 words, then they learn more from print. Still more research suggests that non-fiction is better understood in print. While I have seemingly begun this reading journey from the cradle, its intensity and determination know no bounds. I have broken bread in the minds of Nietzsche and Socrates. Their sublime brilliance forging the fabric of my own existence. It is in the structured construction of medical writings that I educate myself everyday, to evolve personally and provide the best and latest health care for my patients. Fortunately in this pursuit, I am not alone. My wife Shabana and my sons Ayaan and Azeem share this passion. I will conclude with this from Napoleon Bonaparte: "Show me a family of readers and I will show you the people who move the world."