Kari J.’s Comments (group member since Feb 13, 2011)

Kari J.’s comments from the Q&A with Livia Blackburne on Neuroscience of Reading and Writing group.

My name is Kari and I'm a writer/reader/stay-at-home mother of a 4 year old who is autistic. :) I love Stephen King's voice when it comes to reading novels--I get lost in the images--the "movie"--it creates in my head. Currently, as a writer wanting to learn more, I'm going back and rereading his old short stories to get a feel for exactly what he does when he writes that I like so much.

I've got a BS in Physics and Mathematics and left school in the middle of my Master's due to my daughter's diagnosis--and, no, I really have no intentions on going back to finish. Which is ok by me.

Neuroscience is fascinating and I'm eager to learn more about it :) That's why I'm here :)

Robin wrote: "A recent piece on PsyBlog titled "The Zeigarnik Effect" describes how research has demonstrated that people are more likely to recall an interrupted task than a completed task. A comparison is made..."

Robin,

I don't know much about neuropsychology but what I do know is that if you get out of the practice of doing something, when you go back to do it, it's not going to be as easy as it was when you stopped--or it won't SEEM as easy. (I wonder if part of that is muscle memory, but I digress...)

The Internet is a wonderful tool. As everything is easy accessed on the Internet, a lot of people (myself and hubby included) find that instead of trying to rack our brains remembering something, we'll Google it instead. Note: remember if we don't use it, we lose it. Needless to say, the connections that we would normally use in remembering something that's "on the tip of our tongue" aren't used as completely as they once were--we take the shortcut and go to Google.

Also, as I've mentioned elsewhere, everything is in bite-size, ready-to-eat pieces. News articles, blog posts, even stories are written for the Internet to be scannable--the authors knowing that the reader's attention has to be firmly caught before they will read anything in much more depth. People who are wanting to learn to blog "for money" are told that their content needs to be scannable because the average viewer isn't going to sit down and read a long diatribe on the benefits of XYZ.

I think, because of this, some people's ability to concentrate has lessened--but again, because they haven't used their "concentration" muscles in a long time. Not that they will never be able to concentrate again, but that they will have to work on developing their concentration muscles again.

I completely agree with you that distraction is not a permanent state. The Internet has made it a great deal easier to become distracted but, if I may, if you compare the Internet to television, I think it's going to go through a similar phase. My stepfather, who was raised while television was developing, only wants to watch television in the evenings when he gets home from work. He sits down, watches TV, goes to sleep on the couch and, at some point, will wake up, turn off the TV and then go to bed.

My husband and I, on the other hand, were raised in the era of the Internet--where THAT'S what we do instead. Mind you--I'm not going to weigh the benefits of the Internet vs the television here--that's not the point.

The point is we grew out of the television stage of our childhood into the Internet stage of our adulthood. Isn't it possible that others (like us) are doing the same and this NEXT generation who is growing up with the Internet will find something else to take it's place? Ok, if not the next one, then somewhere down the line :)

What do you think? :)

I've never quite considered why I read, but I've read books my entire life. I LOVE to read--if you ask most of the people who have known me my entire life, that's probably the first thing that would come into their mind about me. I ALWAYS have a book in hand.

In the past few years, however, it's been a bit more difficult to choose exactly WHAT I want to read. I have a 4-yr old daughter who is autistic and she takes up a great deal of time. The Internet also makes it more difficult to choose what I want to read because everything nowadays is in bite-size chunks. It's been proposed that the Internet reduces our ability to concentrate because we have so much at our fingertips. I think we simply get out of practice.

I also am probably a true bibliomaniac. My favorite place to go, my favorite thing to do, is to go to a bookstore and shop. I'm fairly picky when I pick out books, but I'll also admit there are TONS of books on my shelves that I need to actually read. I would rather go to a bookstore than almost anywhere--it frustrates my husband because he gets to take care of our daughter while in the store and, needless to say, he can't look around because she's so active...

Why I write is a different story. I write because I love to read. Because I want to be able to draw those pictures in someone else's mind the same way some authors draw theirs in mine.

I'll be looking forward to these discussions! :)