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| Photo by Ben White on Unsplash |
I read daily for a fairly enough amount of time. Along with
reading about my field of study, I read about anything. Anything includes
anything except fiction. I have a queue of books, each waiting for its turn to
get outside of the shelf. I am a regular reader of Medium. I get daily and
weekly newsletters from top websites. I spend 3-5 hours of my daily life in
reading and I have been following this routine for years. This is a good amount
of time I think I have invested in reading and I still enjoy it. It is one of
the things that I am proud of doing it. I am obsessed with it. I mark the day
as an unproductive day when I read for less than an hour.
Reading has its own charm. The first sign that you may have
fallen for the charm is that you will start loving the smell of books. I
remember the days during my graduation when I couldn’t sleep without keeping my
books so near to me that I can feel its smell.
But I remember hardly 10% of the things that I have read. At
the end of the day, I don’t even remember titles of all my readings of that
day. I find it frustrating and I feel there is something wrong with my memory.
I started thinking, am I getting older than I should be at this age? Am I
suffering from a hidden neural disorder? Do I need to see a doctor? I finally
started thinking about it each night before going to sleep and I found that:
There is nothing wrong with me but there is something
terribly wrong with the way I read.
Our brain is made of billions of neurons that connect with
each other using synapsis to form the most complex network that could exist on
earth. Synapsis is a small gap filled with a chemical called neurotransmitter
where the dendroid of one neuron connects with the axon of other neurons. These
synapses are believed to be the key to our memory. When we sense something
through our senses, it flows like water through neurological pathways in the
form of electric current. Every new thing that flows to our mind makes its own
unique pathway in our brain. The things that we already know follow old
pathways already created by similar information.
You can easily visualize this by a simple experiment that
you might have already done. Pour some water on a surface that does not absorb
water and keeps the water still. You will see that water struggles a little to
spread through the surface. Now dip your finger or something in the water and
draw a line through the surface. You will see the water will follow that line.
Now pour some more water on the same spot and you will observe that it is
easier for water now to follow the line you have drawn.
The same is the case with our brain. When a piece of new
information comes in, it tries to make a neurological pathway for itself. For
the first few times, it hardly leaves small marks in our brains. Every time we
push the same information to our brain, it makes the existing path stronger.
The stronger a neurological pathway is, for longer, we remember the information
that flows through it.
It seems black and white but it is not. There is always some
noise, random thoughts floating in our brain. It keeps the information we want
to remember from making a neural pathway for itself.
To make reading effective, we should empty our brains first.
There is a Chinese saying: you cannot fill a cup that is already filled.
Empty the cup first. Try to focus on what you read as much
as you can.
Focusing is an art and it could be achieved by meditation
and practice. It seems that sitting in a quiet place can help in focusing but
that’s not true. There might be no external noise but it does not guarantee the
non-existence of internal noise in your head. In contrast, one can empty his
head even if he is sitting in a place full of distractions and noise.
In the absence of external noise, I find my brain full of
random thoughts. It is harder for me to ignore internal noise than to ignore
external noise and requires more effort. The reason I think this is that we are
born and living in a world full of noise. We have already learned how to ignore
distractions if we want to focus on something. This feature is so well
developed that we don’t even notice any struggle from our side. However, all of
us know how much we suffer when we fight against that noise-making monkey in
our head.
To be honest, I don’t like my head when it is empty. So I
always try to keep it busy with the noise I love to deal with to avoid the
shitty one. There are two types of distractions, the one we love or the
beautiful noise and the one we do not love or the ugly noise. Music and any
other natural noise are beautiful for me. Everything else that is not music or
not natural is ugly.
So, most of the time I wear my headphones and listen to
music whenever I don’t like the internet or external noise.
It is quite easy to ignore the beautiful noise than the
other. It is just a matter of experience for you to know which noise is
beautiful noise and which one is ugly. In order to make your reading effective,
replace ugly noise with the beautiful noise.
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