A Brief History of Reading | Aaron Friedland | TEDxManipal

hi everyone my name is Aaron free blent and it's a pleasure to be here with you and share a brief history of reading with you you know if someone who learned to read a little later in life I didn't think I'd be giving a talk on the history of reading but I'm pretty excited to do so as a student with dyslexia I struggled learning to read and some of my early teachers suggested that I should read a book and listen at the same time it's called reading while listening and it turns out that this process works really well so well that despite my early teachers telling my parents that I likely wouldn't go to university and now doing a PhD in economics looking at the impact of reading while listening and during my studies I wanted to understand if this same approach of reading while listening could actually be applied in other countries I'd spent time in Uganda I'd spent time in India and I'd seen classrooms like this one students studying under mango trees or studying in quite rural conditions and when it would rain they would run for shelter and they did not have the same educational social safety net that I had growing up and I wanted to understand if the same approach that taught me to read could be applied more globally for these rural communities and could be applied for the refugees in UNHCR refugee settlements so what we did was during my Master's we developed a really basic technology called Simbi and the way that it works is that students would read books out loud into symbian and it would take their voice and take their texts and bring them together to create what we call an audio-visual book and these would then be used to teach people around the world as they read while listening to the content and what was really incredible to see his classrooms like this one in rural Uganda students literacy rates were vastly improving and as little as three months and was quite validating to understand that the same approach that had worked for me could be applied and scaled more globally and the more that it the more time I spent looking at this issue of illiteracy the more I came to understand that illiteracy was not just a lower-income country problem in fact it's a global crisis with over 1.2 billion people illiterate worldwide and investigating this further put me on a really interesting journey to understand the history and future of reading and this is what I'll be sharing with you today but in order for us to understand the history of reading it's imperative that we understand the evolution and how we actually came about to be a species where our brains were capable of reading and so 300,000 years ago sapiens early humans tamed fire and in doing so we developed the ability to cook at our will all of a sudden were able to cook food and were able to eat cooked food very quickly burning far fewer calories than we previously had and this meant that our bodies had extra calories to spend and these were demanded by our brains so over the last 300 thousand years our brains have increased in size from 600 to 1200 cubic centimeters and 80 thousand years ago this increase in brain size led to what we call the cognitive revolution and the cognitive revolution enabled humans to start to do increasingly complex activities with our brains one such activity is called decoding and decoding is the process of being able to extrapolate meaning from a text so from type typography text or from pict ography an image and what we're able to do when we decode is if you think about the word fire for example that would just be text and if we didn't know how to read it wouldn't mean anything but through this process of decoding were able to actually understand this is fire I have actually been camping I can start to relate different ideas to what I'm reading I can picture a big fire that I had previously seen and so this process of decoding put humanity on a remarkable path fifteen thousand years ago the first reading revolution takes place humans start to decode their natural surroundings we start to decode the Stars by using them for navigation and we start to decode tracks animal tracks that we see to understand is this animal good to eat or is this thing really large and is it going to eat me and this process of decoding does something remarkable to our brains it begins to rewire them and what it does is it takes our these previously disparate lobes our occipital and our temporal lobes and it actually starts sending neural pathways and they start to connect and speak with each other and that process lays the foundation and the groundwork for what would later become typographic reading and it's interesting people think we've only been reading for five thousand years but in reality this process and the processes that have enabled us to read started roughly 15,000 years before and so the second major reading revolution takes place 5,000 years ago and what ends up happening is some clever farmer living in ancient Mesopotamia which is modern-day Iraq realizes that if he's able to actually make a couple of scratches on a clay tablet then what he will be able to do is he will be able to track how much grain he's using and he'll be able to track how much grain he has lent and how much he has borrowed and that process of writing down and that permanence of the written word is the invention of writing which enabled us to read and what this farmer ends up doing is that small idea to just start scratching on a clay tablet is what we call kunia form the first writing ever discovered and this being an initially and agricultural based writing system laid the foundation for writing that we know today and today the entire world uses writing the third major reading revolution takes place when two kings living in Egypt in the first century are battling over papyrus and it is the unintended consequence of their battles so in the first century you have told me and you memes and they understood that whoever controls papyrus controls scrolls and whoever controls Scrolls while they control information because at this point what we had realized was that a Kunia form was too heavy if we were scratching it up in clay so it made more sense to shift over to papyrus so King told me understands that if he controls all the papyrus then he's going to control information and what he does is he places a trade embargo on King Yu memes and King Yu memes runs out of papyrus and isn't able to actually make scrolls and isn't able to share information and so what we understand is in these kind of dire times when we're running out of when we're running out of resources that can fuel innovation what Indians will call Dugard innovation or frugal innovation and in this case what innovation emerges well in this case the innovation that emerges is you memes understands that he can actually take animal hide known as vellum and rather than rolling that up into Scrolls he can actually attach it as pages into what we call a codex and so the modern-day book is created and what's so interesting about this book well it's the first time in history that you're able to take ideas from different authors from different periods of time from different places and bring them all together in one unified book that can be easily carried and when we think about it the same way that the internet changed the way that we consume information today so too did the book format for the Codex format changed the way that information was consumed in the first century and this book format was so successful that reading actually doesn't change too much after that book format so between the fourth and the sixteenth century the book format dominates reading doesn't change much text doesn't change too much while books will range in size and shape they are mostly handwritten and that is simply what is common and the next major reading breakthrough takes place after Johannes Gutenberg develops the printing press and when he does all of a sudden text is standardized previously text was not standardized it was handwritten by different people but now we have this text based or typographic standardization and when this emerges all of a sudden books can be widely distributed because they can be printed quickly and shipped out and this leads to a reading revolution as books are made widely available and reading begins to enter the mainstream and so reading enters of the mainstream and following the standardization of texts the next really large breakthrough comes about in 1839 when photography is developed photography meaning writing with lights and this creates an absolute breakthrough in reading as it involves reading pages and viewing images and photography also leads to the popularization of picture books which helps to increase student literacy and helps to motivate children to read more books and reading continued to grow in popularity and the future of reading was looking really good until the introduction and mainstream views of television and screens in the 1960s so television changes reading in many ways for starters we moved from active readers who are bent over their books reading to very passive viewers who are falling asleep in front of the TV and this really perfectly depicts how TV and television changed us as readers from active readers to passive viewers and I should mention the TV and screens do present a remarkable opportunity to improve literacy rates but for the most part they have distracted us from reading and have left humanity in a slightly precarious reading situation so this chart shows how over the last 50 years as TV has risen in popularity books have really been pushed aside what we see is in the 1950s TV is significantly less popular than books but what we have happened in 1963 is something called the crossing and the crossing emerges when TV overtakes books in terms of time spent watching TV versus time spent reading and that trend really continued and it reached a pinnacle in 2010 when the average American would watch 5 hours of TV a day and on average they would read for maximum 26 minutes per day and I know what you're thinking you're looking and you're saying hey it's looking good it's on the decline the trend is getting better and that is not the case this graph does not account for facebook Instagram Netflix and YouTube and if it did we would need to have a very different we need to have a larger screen to show the new graph now the problem is that this trend has left humanity in a really strange situation with a very concerning phenomenon for the first time in human history literacy rates in higher income countries are on the decline so for example 1/4 of students in North America in grade 4 are not reading at grade level and over 68 million students in Europe are on track to functionally literacy and we're losing this reading habit which not only impacts the literacy rates it has a massive economic consequence illiteracy costs the United States over 338 billion dollars in 2017 now what's interesting is that while literacy rates in higher income countries are on the decline due to our obsession with screens and instant gratification in many lower-income countries they're not they're not speeding up fast enough and why is literacy in a lower-income country so important well for starters literacy is the number one predictor of academic success and it's also closely correlated with health according to the United Nations a mother who is literate in a lower-income country is 50% more likely to raise her child past the age of five than a mother who is not but not everyone has access to quality educational resources such as good books or good teachers and so in order to ensure that we remain illiterate reading species it's imperative that we perpetuate this behavior of reading but how do we solve for this two side of prop this two-sided problem where literacy rates in higher income countries need to be improved and at the same time they also need a rise in lower income countries and so this is the question that I've been working closely with the national with National Geographic the United Nations and the University of British Columbia to solve for and the results are pretty exciting I'm excited to share with you so today's theme is cognizance and this means knowledge or awareness and it's very fitting because in order to understand that you have a problem and in order to realize that an issue exists we have to have the awareness to see that the problem that we're looking to address is humanity's growing tendency towards illiteracy now the good news is that solutions do exist and that through my PhD research and research of other passionate scientists who I'm very lucky to work with three important realizations have been discovered which are going to help us ensure and work to ensure that we remain a literate speed she's and these are all pretty exciting the first is that reading while listening is the most effective way to read and it's a great way to encourage of the behavior of reading the second reading out loud dubbed the production effect is a great way to motivate reading and the third is that motivating reading through reading for good or through motivation is one of the best ways to be motivating the habit of reading so when we think about reading while listening why would reading while listening be a good way to improve literacy well first of all as we say it's the best way to read but why is that it's because when you read and listen you have more neural pathways being connected and this helps to ensure that you can comprehend and retain a lot more information but it also means that you can read faster and it doesn't actually become such a struggle to read you can enjoy the process and so we're seeing a lot more people who loving reading when they read well listen the other reason that reading while listening is a lot more is a lot more impactful than simply reading deals with human evolution if you think about it we've been speaking and listening for over a hundred thousand years but we've only actually been reading from text for five thousand and so our brains are not quite optimized for this process and the way that that manifests is through a process known as a saccadic a movement and what you see here is a saccadic movement it is our eyes twitching and bouncing all over the show because they don't actually read all too well and so when we are reading we think we're reading linearly we think we're following a line but in reality we're actually bouncing all over the show and this distracts so when we read why listen it helps to ensure that we're reading and if you get distracted you can still hear the voice and so once you look back at the text and once you look at back at the highlighter moving across you can continue to focus on where you were the second reason that were the second discovery that we have is that reading out loud is a very effective technique technique and through a process known as the production effect it really increases literacy rates and that's because when you read out loud you actually hear the sounds that you're producing and when you hear those sounds that helps to ensure and really cement them in your mind and so it's another process that we're working to encourage the third is motivation we're looking to motivate people simply because when you're motivated to read you read better so we took all of these insights and in collaboration with National Geographic and the United Nations we built a really interesting reading program which I'm excited to share with you it's called the Simbi Global reading program these insights look at reading out loud reading while listening and reading for good and we've put them all together and so how does this reading program work well when I read a book out loud it takes my voice and text and brings it together to create this audio-visual book that people around the world can read while listened to and when someone with an Indian accent reads out loud it tags the book as an Indian accent so that a child let's say in Maharashtra can actually listen read and listen to an accent that they're familiar with and that they're passionate about and through this we are scaling our ability to improve literacy rates not only globally not only across Russia Germany the US Canada but also in rural communities such as United Nations refugee settlements and we need your voice and so I would encourage everyone when you have a moment to select a book on Simbi and read it out loud and help us to empower literacy and ensure that we remain a literate reading species now we're not that there are quite a few innovations taking place in the intersection of Technology and reading and I just want to leave you with four of them we're reading intersects with augmented and virtual reality we have a lot to look forward to and this is going to help ensure that we are able to remain this literature reading species speed-reading and its ability to motivate the behavior of reading is quite expand finally reading while listening as a way to read more and and to read better is quite an exciting field of reading and as we've learned reading hasn't changed much since the fourth century but for reading to secure its future and for Humanity to secure its future as a reading species it is imperative that these technological advances do take place in the field of reading and so to leave you with one final thought we're overly optimistic about humanity's future and it's important that we are I know that I am but if we're passionate about reading and we want to secure its future then it's imperative that we don't forget what Aldous Huxley had to say in his Huxley and warning what Orwell feared were those who would ban books what Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book for there'd be no one who wanted to read one or both feared those who would deprive us of information Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance friends next time you're scrolling Facebook or Instagram and you're just you have a moment to think I have a favor to ask you think to yourself am i passively scrolling am i involved in what I'm doing or am I really engaged in what's happening and if you decide actually I'm passively scrolling and I'm not particularly interested what I'd really like you to do is think about a book you've been meaning to read if you own that book pick it up then and there and give it a read for five minutes if you don't own it go to Amazon and buy it or go to Simbi and read one outloud but it really is these behavioral changes that humanity requires if we're going to remain a literate reading species thank you very much everyone you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 136,188

Rating: 4.9371729 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Education reform, Software, Speech

Id: ApbqizI_0rs

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019