November 7, 2013
The Story
When I was young and in grade school, my mother had a very peculiar method for improving my reading ability. She would take the page, turn it upside down, and place it back down in front of me. You see I had a bad habit of reading too quickly. I read too quickly, because well, I read very slowly. So as any small boy concerned about the grades he was told he should strive for, and the friends he did not want to look foolish in front of, I worked very hard to read the words fast. However in doing so, I would often peruse the page, get to the end, and have quite poor retention of what I had just read. The words and ideas did not stick in my mind. My mother tried instructing me to use a ruler to underline the line I was on, predicting that if I my eyes could not skip to the next line preemptively, I would not be as apt to visually/mentally skip words without reading them. This helped some but it slowed my reading even further, and provided only modest improvement. Plus it made me feel dumb and inferior to my peers to have to use the ruler, especially if other people were around. The solution she settled on was simple: read upside down. Not only did the additional work focus my attention on the words and content, improving my reading comprehension, but my speed also diminished only slightly at the beginning and actually improved by the end. Because it was new and challenging, I focused more keenly on the task. Because I focused, I did not have to reread things I knew I had only glazed over the first time. The result was that I could read quicker than before, and answer questions about what I had read. The best part however, was that instead of feeling inferior for needing a ruler to help me to measure up to my peers, (get it?) I had an aid that made me feel, if anything, more skilled than them. In fact any emotional strain I felt came from a dislike for the attention and the questioning eyes of the people watching me read that way, not from embarrassment. I, admittedly, must have seemed awfully strange, or at least like I was trying to show off something that was mildly impressive at best. Still, my little trick improved my confidence and reading ability, none the less.
The Trick
I’m not advocating this as a way to improve a child’s reading ability. I’m not a teacher, and I don’t know much about improving literacy. The trick isn’t turning the page upside down.
The trick is turning what you know upside down.
We live in an unprecedented information age, when it is easier in the developed world to have information at your figure tips than ever before. Things that once we would have had to study, or consult someone in the field about, can be looked up online in an afternoon. However, the gap between the amount of knowledge we ‘know’ and the amount of knowledge we have acquired first hand, or even second or third hand is arguably also at an unprecedented level. How do you know the Higgs Boson exists? You know, if you know, because the good people at CERN told you that they were 99% certain it does. Only they, most likely, didn’t exactly tell you. They told reporters and journalists, who extended the news to your friend who brought it up in a confounding fashion while you were trying to eat hot dogs and watch fireworks for the 4th of July. (You have a very interesting friend.) None of this is to suggest that the information you finally received is false. It was based on scientific methods that support their own credibility, and was conveyed in a thorough manner. (The conversation was well timed between the CRACKs and BOOMs of the aerial display.) Nor is it to suggest this is exclusive to complicated, theoretical physics. How do you know where India is if you’ve never been there? How do you know what color an albino brown bear is if you’ve never seen one? How do know your friend does in fact, as he claims, have other friends if you have never met them? You took in indirect information expressed to you in some medium, and added it to what you already know.
This is how we accumulate a good deal of the knowledge in our minds. We take what we know, and we add to it. It fits that way. There is a relationship of information and thus this method produces much less cognitive dissidence. It is much less work than the alternative, because we have become so very good at this method through practice. However in our ongoing mastery of information accumulation, we often neglect to practice learning by our own thoughts and observations. We forget how to use them entirely independent of second-hand statistics. We do not get enough practice taking what we ‘know,’ turning it upside down, and asking “What if that’s not completely right?” This is not a matter of critical analysis of what we have heard so that we only trust and act on factual information. It is a matter of understanding that learning by external means alone can only take us so far. Too often we read the world around us only by taking in information and extrapolating the results to form conclusions.
It is just as vital that we read our existences in a way that creates new ideas. It is necessary to spend some of our time practicing taking what we think we know, flipping it upside down, starting from scratch, staring our premises in the eye, twisting the pieces in our fingers like a deconstructed toy, and wondering if there is not another way. It helps us to find more effective ways to accomplish our goals as individuals, as employees, and as a society. It helps us to identify and discard the refuse in our thinking. It is not important whether it is done through conversation with a friend or forum, on paper, or only in your head. Just like flipping a text-book upside down, flipping our knowledge completely around provides new and renewed focus, clarity, and perspective. It stifles lazy thinking in which we take the facts given to us, remark “Ah, very interesting Stewart,” and move on to the next thought without really examining the content we will inevitably use later. It prompts us to imagine conclusions of our own, examine the merits of those ideas, and decide whether they are worthy of us leading their exodus from our minds to the outside world. This is not ‘thinking outside the box.’ It is turning even that on its head and knowing for certain, if only in our minds and if only for a few moments, that there is no box and what that could mean. This is not an alternative to our normal way of gathering information about the world but an equally important accompaniment. It is the method by which we encourage creativity, and support healthy growth instead of growth for growth’s sake. It is the method by which we see existence, not in the way that makes the most sense based on what we have known before, but in a way that is amazing and unique to ourselves.
It is not infallible, and it is not mysticism. In the same way science provides more false hypothesizes than facts, so does this provide dead ends. Yet it is not without concrete results as well. While jumping off the trail may take you to nowhere, it may also take you to a place that only you have seen. You may appear strange, an odd-ball doing things that the others do not understand for reasons they can not see, but you will know the trick. Examine your thoughts, toy with them, insult them if you need to, and throw them aside -not forever- just long enough to read the world in a way that has only ever been comprehended by you. Often what you see will not, and can never exist. Sometimes though, you will see an existence that only you can bring to be.
-Michael Speck
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