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| William Randolph Hearst, yellow journalist. |
Zach Neal
How does a book actually work, anyway?
Nobody really seems to know, or if they do, it’s a
highly-technical process description not well suited to lay men and women.
The brain, or mind, has working memory. It is a kind
of short-term memory.
When we read, we process that information. That
processing is what brings the book to life and makes pictures and what passes
for sound begin to appear in our head.
It seems to me that reading is a process of short term
or working memory. What part of the brain it happens in is a secondary
question. The thing is that short term memory is much more plastic than long
term memory. It gets wiped regularly, using the mechanism of sleep. Once
something has made it into long term memory, it's usually stuck there pretty
good.
If you can remember a book, something like Winnie the
Pooh, that’s from our youth most likely. I don’t recall a single line from the
book, and yet I know that I have read it…
That’s long-term memory. I have stuff labeled Winnie
the Pooh filed away in there somewhere.
Once something is in long-term memory, it’s never
really lost to us, although we may not remember it ever again. It’s still in
there.
I saw someone in the grocery store today. They have
one distinctive feature. The lady, about forty years old, had long, lush,
curling eyelashes. She has other features as well, and for whatever reason I
was looking at her.
It struck me later that it might have been
Alice—someone I hadn’t seen in over twenty years.
We didn’t recognize each
other, not at the time. Those other features (as I remembered them from the
past) matched up, when I thought about it, with what she might look like twenty years later.
I’m one of those people who are pretty good with names
and faces.
I really had to think about it. I had to dig for it—and
it could have been her. What really struck me was that she was looking at me.
Was she digging in her memory, trying to figure out who that guy was?
Honestly, I doubt if she’s thought of me since that time in college. We were
just somebody in class. It’s not like we ever spoke much, or got to know each
other. The human brain is hard-wired to recognize faces. That goes back a
million years in our programming. The ability to read came much later in
evolution
Memory is reconstructive. Some little thing jogs our
memory and a lot more stuff comes tumbling out.
When I read a book, it’s usually at night, before I go
to bed. During the day, that book is the farthest thing from my mind.
Right now I’m reading Gore Vidal’s Empire. It
happens in about 1899.
It’s just after the Spanish-American
war. The only reason I can tell you that, is because I’ve been working on
the book for a few days. When I pick it up again, it sort of all comes back to
me, and there are reminders on every page, who the characters are, the time,
the place, the circumstances. What’s happening, is that I am learning, rather than just
reading. Much of learning does involve repetition. Reading can be for pleasure,
and that kind of reading is shallower, more transient. It’s gone as fast as it came
in. Stuff that you know, has entered
the long-term memory. Ten years from now, if you ask me, I will be able to tell
you that Empire is by Gore Vidal and
that it’s about the period just after the Spanish-American War. Carolyn and her
brother Blaise are at odds over her inheritance.
I don’t have to look at the book to tell you that—I’ve
learned it and the odds are I will be able to recall some of that later. There
are some interesting character studies in the book, including President McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and William Randolph
Hearst among others.
The thing to remember is that the reader forgets what
they just read as they move along in the story.
Whatever is happening on the page they are reading,
that is ‘the moment’ for the reader. It takes on a reality of its own, settles
into our memories and becomes a kind of shared experience. That’s because
someone had to write it and plenty of other people have read it.
Some books are
not intellectual heavyweights. They are meant to be consumed as fluff, as
entertainment. In a genre that is more than usually formulaic, for example
romance, people aren’t looking to have their world questioned, or any great
revelation. What they want is escape. They want to be entertained in a way that
is not particularly challenging.
The easiest thing to remember is the story. There was
a book I read as a kid. I will never find that book again, because I have
forgotten the title, forgotten the author, forgotten the name of the main
character.
Yet I can still tell you that it was about a boy, and
his cousin. They had a series of adventures at the time of the siege of Fort Beausejour. It
was the time of the removal of the Acadians. The boy had a
sailing dory and they had named it Ann.
The cousin’s name was Pierre. Since the boy was the viewpoint character, his
name was probably not mentioned very often, if at all. Otherwise I probably
would have remembered it.
His father was a Captain Harvey (I think) of the 40th Foot.
The average reader, immersed in the story, perhaps halfway
through the book, might completely forget a character introduced earlier on
until they reappear. For someone who reads a book in one sitting, that
character pops out and they say, ‘oh, there he is again.’ Yet they are just as
likely to forget him as soon as he’s gone again. Reading an entire book at one
sitting uses short-term memory exclusively. What’s interesting is when you’re
reading an old book. Agatha
Christie is a good example. Publishers over the years have re-titled and
re-branded those books so many times. You get to a certain part of the story
and you realize you’ve read it before.
And yet you can’t quite remember what happens, you
can’t remember how it turns out.
The opposite kind of reading is where people are
forced to read books over and over again in order to memorize and recite them.
It’s obviously a different skill from reading for pleasure, or even the more
normal forms of reading for instruction. When I want to learn a new thing, it’s
like I have to read it fifteen times sometimes, and then keep it beside me
while I attempt any new trick or skill. It is only when I can do it without the book beside me, that I can
truly say I have learned it.
END
