Anagnosology (READING) with Adrian Johns

Alie Ward
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Found wherever candy is sold. And I am oh, hey, it's that book on your bedside table. Just wondering how you been, Allie Ward? And here we are. We're listening to words about reading words.

Let's get into the science of reading. It exists, and our expert wrote a book titled the Science of Reading. So here we go. Now, this guest is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and a department chair of conceptual and historical studies of science. And their book is the science of reading information, media, and mind in modern America.

But we'll chat about times and places in other parts of the globe as well, and also even how reading things like smut can improve your life. But before we get into it, a quick thank you to folks who submitted questions for this via patreon@patreon.com smologies, where you can join for $1 a month. And also, if you need a shirt, if you're not wearing one right now, or you need a bathing suit or a hat, ologiesmerch.com is linked right in the show notes. Also, thank you to everyone who leaves reviews of this show on their podcast apps, which helps so much and it costs you nothing. And I read them all, such as this freshly penned one from Liz 6046, who writes, I work at a factory for eight to 12 hours and you make it so much better.

I love learning new and random things. Well, hey, thank you for taking your Internet dad to work, Liz 6486. Also, there was one review left by Mooglitz who wrote beeped. No teacher is going to play bleeped episodes in a classroom. That's risky and imo inappropriate.

Three stars. Well, good news, Muglitz. Our smologies episodes aren't even bleeped. They are carefully trimmed to avoid anything kid inappropris. And they have their own show with their own feed.

We just launched it a couple of weeks ago. So if anyone wants episodes of ologies that are totally safer classrooms and a little shorter, please go to the show notes or your podcast app and click on the show smologies. It has a colorful new logo with a fish and a frog and a bird. Subscribe there to get those as well. So Moogletz, check osmologies.

You'll love them. I give them five stars. Okay, anagnosology I have found exactly one time in the literature, but it's legit enough and it comes from the Greek for reading. So there you go. And anagnosology is not to be confused with a previous episode we did on agnotology, which is about ignorance, which is also excellent.

It's linked in the show notes, but this here term, an agnusology. It appears in the 1976 book the Rustle of language by this french literary theorist, Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes. I don't know how to say his name, but I do know how to say anagnosology reading. Where did it come from?

How long have humans been doing it? How do our eyes move across a page? Are ebooks books? Is listening to an audiobook reading? How do we focus on books better?

Is speed reading real? What about font choices? Why was printing illegal? And what is he reading these days? So pour a cup of tea at the perfect temperature, sit back in a wing back chair to crack open this convo with professor, author, and anagnosologist doctor Adrian Johns.

Adrian Johns
Adrian Jones he his so right before. We started, Adrian mentioned that he lives in this historic home once owned by a famed Chicago journalist and screenwriter. But I cut that part out because I didn't want you to know exactly where Adrian lived. I thought that'd be creepy. But the person who used to own his house described himself as a youth who, quote, haunted streets, brothels police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls, and bookshops.

Alie Ward
This was a former owner, and Adrian and his wife bought the victorian home years ago, and they fixed it up. What a life. Do you ever feel like his ghost is there when you have writer's block urging you to? I wish the man could write like a machine. So, you know, I wish.

Adrian Johns
I wish I could do with it sometimes. You know, I interviewed a quantum ontologist who wrote a book about what is real when it comes to theoretical physics, and he is a cosmologist. And he said that in writing his book, he had to use the Pomodoro method, and he had to write, and then he had to go sit and read fiction, any kind of fiction, and then he'd go write, he said, without reading fiction, without input, he had no output. And do you find that as a writer? Is there a word for that when it comes to your research?

Well, I actually don't find it. I find that when I'm doing the writing part of what I do, I basically have to stop reading anything that isn't directly related to what I'm doing, because I get distracted. And if I'm not sort of completely immersed in it, then it takes me a long time to get back immersed into it. And the other thing is that what I'm trying to do, I basically. I'm a sucker for telling stories.

So what I tend to do is, I probably shouldn't confess this, but I get really interested in these kind of weird dead people and try to follow them in a kind of detective story manner, and then all of the kind of rationale for why I'm doing it gets tacked on at the end.

Alie Ward
Is there a word for those rabbit holes that when you. Because I did that, too. I recently found out that Amelia Earhart's dad lived around my neighborhood, and before I knew it, I was absolutely suck down a mnemonic tube of research. Are there brain chemicals that do that to us? I'm sure that neuroscientists settle this down, but I don't know.

Adrian Johns
But I find, personally, that if I don't keep myself immersed in it, then I lose the thread. And it takes me a long time to get the thread back. And what can I say? I'm lucky enough that I have tenure at the University of Chicago, so I can do what I actually want to do, and so I can do this kind of slightly self indulgent saying of following weird dead people around. It's one of my favorite things to do, because you really.

Alie Ward
Because they're dead too, you can't infringe too much on their privacy. You can just find out what they left behind. Yeah, it sounds horrible thing to say, but it's much better to work on dead people than it is to work on living people. Doctor Adrian Johns, however, is an alive person, chatting with me from his book lined study. Tell me a little bit about your history.

Were you a library kid? I know you have a bookshelf right behind you full of, like, amazing ancient looking books. So I come from the UK, as you can tell from the accent. And when I went to university, which was at Cambridge. Oh, fancy, fancy.

Adrian Johns
In the 1980s, I was originally going to be a scientist, physicist and then chemist. But in Cambridge, when you do sciences as an undergraduate, you don't do a degree in physics or chemistry or something. You do a degree in this field called natural sciences. And one of the options within natural sciences is history of science, and I got obsessed with that. So that ended up being a PhD, which is about the relationship between the printing revolution and the scientific revolution.

Alie Ward
Can you tell me a little bit about the process of when you set out to write your book, what were some things that you really felt like you wanted to convey to the public? How did you narrow down, when you're talking about the science of reading, where do you even start to narrow down what you include? That's a good question, because it's in principle, like an awfully large, rather amorphous subject, because there's a pretty widespread acceptance, at least in principle, that reading experiences are themselves historical, that they change over time. So what it is to read a heavy hardback Bible in 1600 is different from what it is to read an ebook Bible now. And the way that we get to understand what it was to be alive in the culture of, say, 1650 or 1550 is to go and read the newspapers of 1650.

Adrian Johns
The effort was to try to really come to grips in a serious way with the historical disconnects and connects in the trajectories of reading practices over the years, and how they've been thought of and manipulated, actually by people like teachers, research scientists, propagandists, people like that. I'm just going to do my job here. I'm going to ask this very smart person, possibly not smart question. Can you give me a very brief timeline of when did people start reading? How long have we been reading?

Alie Ward
And I imagine there was a giant jump at the advent of the printing press, but how long have human beings been looking at symbols and saying that's what that means. That's not a dumb question at all. That's a very hard question. But it goes back, you know, thousands of years. And it probably depends on what you mean by reading, of course, and what you mean by symbols.

Adrian Johns
There was a report like six months a year ago of somebody who claims to have deciphered marks in cave paintings that they actually mark things like the reproductive cycles of animals that these cave dwellers were living around and hunting and so forth. There you have something that maybe counts as reading. There's a bit of competition here, actually between Egyptologists and experts in the fertile crescent about where in fact, you start to see writing as such, depending on which one you believe, it's either in Egypt or in roughly Syria Iraq area in three, 4000 bc. So human beings started being around 300,000 years ago and historians debate but have landed on reading being roughly 6000 years old. The earliest things, as I understand it, that we have are often actually very mundane documents.

They're things like records of grain transactions and things like that. So it's like accountancy. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Yeah. So it's not, it's not like the first book is written as the Bible or something.

It's pretty basic stuff, which means that there was something like a cadre of people who were skilled at producing and interpreting these documents. And the early documents are often they're not sort of paper, they're, you know, clay tablets and things like this. If you ever see them in museums. I mean, obviously I don't understand cuneiform or something, but you look at them and you wonder how somebody can possibly have made sense of them because they're tiny and they're very close packed, the inscriptions on them. So cuneiform is a style of written language developed by Sumerians in what is now south central Iraq at least 3500 years BC.

Alie Ward
It's thought to be the oldest form of writing and surviving tablets. And there's a lot of them, actually. They resemble clay slabs indented with tiny wedge shaped impressions. They kind of look like patterned geometric tattoos. They're just dazzling and really beautiful even though they're just ephemera from someone's day job like 5000 years ago.

Adrian Johns
The other place where you see this, incidentally, is on seals. So things that mark out property, that kind of thing. You know, in ancient Iraq, in ancient Sumeria, you have these cylinder seals that, you know, in a certain sense are writing their inscriptions and they carry meaning. Then it's not so clear that they're characters as such. They're more like emblems, symbols, something like that.

So it goes back an awful long way. And actually, one of the reasons why that's an interesting question for my people in the 20th century is that when they were trying to figure out what reading was and what it had been in the past, they asked that question, and they go back and they start worrying about things like egyptian hieroglyphics. So those cylinder seals, imagine an empty toilet paper roll, but made of carved stone. And then when rolled onto clay, it makes this cool picture. So those date back potentially 9000 years, but egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform are closer to 5000 years old.

Alie Ward
And hieroglyphics, Adrian told me, have language experts all upside down wondering, is it better for our brains to learn from pictures? And for more on that, you can enjoy the Egyptology episode. Or for a modern take the two part curiology episodes on emoji, which are linked in the show notes. But, yeah, in terms of writing systems, you've got alphabetic symbols that represent phonics or sounds. There's also abjab writing systems like Arabic and Aramaic and Hebrew.

And those emit nearly all vowels, and they let the reader figure it out like a little puzzle. There's also syllabographic language, and those symbols represent syllables. And then there's logographic, which is when a character or shape has already a specific meaning. And according to studies like universal brain systems for recognizing word shapes and handwriting gestures during reading and reading at the speed of speech, the rate of eye movements aligns with auditory language processing. All of those types of reading use three parts of the brain in tandem to assign meaning to shapes.

Adrian Johns
It's a question that's been asked repeatedly over the decades, and particularly with reference to Japanese and Chinese, and also with reference to Hebrew. Also, braille is the other thing that people picked up on. And the thing about those character sets is that they're not alphanumeric. They're more like words per character than phonological characters. And you also read them in different directions.

Alie Ward
Yes, I was going to ask about that. Yeah. Which way are you going? So one of the questions that these scientists had have is, is it more efficient, faster to read horizontally left to right, or to read right to left, or to read down to up or up to down? Yeah.

Adrian Johns
Or even to do this thing that in some ancient inscriptions, you see where you read horizontally, but you read as if you're an oxen ploughing a field. So you go left to right and then turn around and go right to left, and then go left to right. What? Is there a name for that? Busterfieden.

Alie Ward
I've never heard of that in my life. But, yeah, you just keep going like you're in a queue at Disneyland or something. Just winding. Yeah. And so, yes, the word boosterfiedun actually does come from the greek meaning ox turn.

And when you flip around and you're reading from right to left, the opposite that English usually goes. The letters are also in backward order. And I tried reading a sample of this just to see what it was like. And for some reason it just instantly churned my stomach, like being on a vessel in the Drake passage in the middle of a typhoon. Just waves of ick.

But I have no sea legs when it comes to the oxenfield of the written word. So English is written left to right, top to bottom, and that is called sinstradextal from left to right. And languages that run the opposite way, like arabic Alphabet languages, are dextro sinistra going the other way. But there are, of course, other forms of reading that go top to bottom in vertical rows, like mongolian and vietnamese and Chinese, Japanese, Korean. And there are some theories of why languages tend to literally go one way or the other, like left to right, if you were chiseling in stone, versus top to bottom, if maybe there was a factor of ink strokes drying on bamboo.

Again, people still debate that. I think it's interesting, but, yeah, ancient Greeks, they looped back and forth like beasts of burden, boustrophedonically. In which case you could imagine an argument for that being an incredibly efficient way of reading because you don't have to track back each time and start a new line afresh. These are certainly questions that have been asked. As far as I know, there isn't much in the way of sort of completely definitive answers to them.

When the printing press came into history, was there just an exponential jump in terms of who was reading and who was given access, essentially to knowledge and language? Yeah, I think so. I think that's a fair thing to say. You know, the quantitative increase in the amount of, like, paper with words on it that circulates is enormous because you can print roughly 1000 impressions a day on an early hand press. And if you imagine what it took to just write out that in a scriptorium, the difference is a lot.

So a thousand copies a day versus handwriting like ten by a flickering candle, and no headphones, no podcasts to keep you company. Just misery. So the popularization of movable type in the printing press gave quite a boost to reading starting in around the mid 14 hundreds. And the other thing is that because you can produce much more, things are much cheaper, by and large. So it's also accessible in that sense.

Adrian Johns
So, yes, there's that. But the other thing is that this is something that we tend to forget because of the accidents of survival. Most of the stuff that early printers produce is not books like this. Right. Adrienne casually holds up a nearby hardcover book.

It's like individual, small, ephemeral sheets of things, like indulgences, bills of lading for ships, tickets, proclamations, things like that, almost all of which vanish, so we don't have those. And books are, in a certain sense, parasitic on that. So printing really started to take off in the mid to late 14 hundreds, and it was great for the Bible business. But interestingly enough, some governments did not love this. And by 1563, any printing in France without royal permission was not only illegal, but it was punishable by death.

Alie Ward
So your zine could cost you your life, mon ami. And Spain in the 16 hundreds colonizing spree forbid paper making in any of its new territories. They were, like, reading. Nope, don't worry about that now. What is the most banned book of all time?

I was so curious, and I'm glad that you are, too. So, it's 1984 by George Orwell, and this is a futuristic dystopia novel published in 1949 about, of course, a governmental big brother exercising totalitarian control via the thought police. And it's so banned. This book has been banned up and down. Interesting.

Hmm. All right. And here in the US, the list of banned books you may have been hearing in schools and public libraries is growing. And according to the American Library association, from 2022 to 2023, there was a 65% surge of challenged or banned books. And the number of titles censored at public libraries increased by 92% over the previous year.

Most of the top challenged or banned books wound up on lists because of LGBTQIA content. And as the late professor and Sci-Fi writer Isaac Asimov famously said, any book worth banning is a book worth reading. So reading what they don't want you to read, it's not just a nice way to enjoy an afternoon. It's also an act of protest. Very quiet, very mellow, chill protest.

But, yes, back in the Renaissance era. So people are doing probably a lot more reading. But we also need to remember that a lot of manuscript stuff has been lost. I think that there's a kind of myth about how scarce manuscript writing was pre printing. It was actually probably more common than we think, but still, I think there is a big jump.

Adrian Johns
And you find by quite early, like 1520s, 1530s, that knowledge of what one might think of as fairly arcane issues about, say, scriptural meanings, scriptural quotes, things like that, goes quite far down the social scale. Arcane is one of those words that's always a mystery to me, and I feel like very few people use it or know it. So I looked it up, and it means something that is a mystery and known to very few people. So there you go. Arcane is arcane.

Alie Ward
But his point is that by the 1640s, according to records of troops in the English Civil War, we find that. Quite ordinary, buff coated soldiers, as crummer would have said, are able to bandy quotes about scripture around with quite a lot of facility. So they're at home with a world of print by then. Certainly. It's not that there's one jump, and then you're into modernity because you're still dealing with a world of hand craftsmanship.

Adrian Johns
So you go from no hand printing to hand printing, which takes you up to roughly a thousand impressions a day, vaguely, right? But then there's another big shift in the 19th century when you get industrial printing in, and that takes you up by maybe another couple of orders of magnitude. So the Times, which is the first paper to be printed using steam, in the early 19th century, they start printing something like 10,000 copies an hour. Oh, my gosh. That's a really big difference.

Alie Ward
Yeah. So, yes, the Times was founded in London on January 1, 1785, and then we just careened toward modems and monitors when the digital giant of the net was officially birthed on January 1, 1983. And we went from reading on wet clay to thatched flax fibers to stretched animal skin to chewed up wood pulp to now reading each other's daily journals via pixels from across the world on our toilets. And then do you have to track also how the Internet then is another big jump? Yeah, I mean, what happens with the Internet and with digital culture at all, of course, is that, to a certain extent, the very idea of something like a print run just ceases to have any meaning.

Adrian Johns
And this is true even for books nowadays. When I started out in the 1990s, one of the first things you would ask a publisher if you were talking about producing a book with them was how much their print run would be. And now you just don't. It just doesn't matter because they're circulating digital copies. And even if they're printed copies, they're often short run digital printing.

So it's that idea of a run impression size has kind of dropped away a bit. And digital printing means it's printed with a type of inkjet or toner, and it's more affordable for short runs and small batches or even just printing on demand. But offset printing refers to printing presses stamping pages with ink. And usually you'd need a print run of at least 1000 books to make that worth the cost. Or you could also read books on a flip phone around 2003.

Alie Ward
The cell phone novel genre. This is an actual genre. I did not know about this. Cell phone novels, they erupted on the scene in Japan and they let readers subscribe and, you know, download chapters at a time. Usually kind of saucy romance or sci-Fi to read on their tiny screens.

I don't know, you're like cellphones on a screen. We've all heard cautionary tales that staring at screens is bad for our sleep. And centuries ago, reading in bed was also verboten because people, I didn't even think about this. People just sometimes drift off reading by candlelight and then they'd set their bed curtains on fire. Also, a few hundred years ago, reading novels, long form novels, was looked upon as kind of scandalous and rude because it wasn't as social as, like, gathering around to hear a tale.

So, yeah, staring at a book a few hundred years back, it was like, old timey scrolling. But if you don't have open flames next to paper and fabric and you like reading in bed, there is a word for you, and it's a libro cubicularist is Adrienne one? What about you? What are you reading right now? What book is on your nightstand?

Adrian Johns
What book is on my nightstand? God, I hope it's 50 shades freed or something. Just fucking terrible.

It's not quite to that terrible degree, but like, a couple of weeks ago, on a whim, I was rereading Heinlein's the Moon is a harsh mistress. Oh, I've never read it. No, it's actually amazing because Heinlein was this kind of ultra libertarian right winger, military kind of authoritarian right winger of the 1950s. Oh, dear. And the moon is a harsh mistress is a rerunning of 1776 on the moon.

When the moon declares independence from earth. Oh, my God. The reason why I went back to it, there's this slogan that what he calls the loonies, the lunar citizens, have tanstarfel, which stands for there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. That's where that comes from. Huh?

That's their motto. Well, no, I mean, he picked it up from, you know, the Chicago school economics people. You know, that school of economics? And this, I just found this out originally, comes from saloons offering free vittles to their drinkers. And the food, ha ha, was usually very salty and hammy and salty foods.

Alie Ward
What do they do? They make thirsty customers. So free lunch? Yeah, just for the cost of 13 beers. What else is on the nightstand?

Menu? I've been going back and rereading Samuel Pepys diary, actually. Oh, I don't know him. Which, when you get into it, is actually hard to put down because you find yourself drawn into this man's life. And he's such a sort of appealing personality in a certain way.

Adrian Johns
He's curious about everything, which I think is a very appealing trait. Okay, I had to look this up, of course. And Samuel Pepys was a guy who kept a journal for nine years in the mid 16 hundreds. He was a naval administrator, even though he had no nautical experience. And over his journal keeping era, he wrote over a million words.

Alie Ward
That's equivalent to 13 novels, most of it in tachygraphy, which is a nearly indecipherable shorthand, which is decipherable, I suppose, to people who can read shorthand, but it looks like squiggles and dots to me. And one of the reasons he used it was it was fast, but also it vexed any snoopers. Not everyone knows how to read it. So he started his journaling practice in the fresh New Year's morning of January 1, 1660. And during his nine years of jotting down his days, he covered things like the great plague of London and the great fire of London, neither of which sound very great to experience.

And I wanted to know so much how he started off. So I went all the way back in an online archive and found the entry for 1116 60, and it reads, blessed be God. At the end of last year, I was in very good health. My wife, Jane, after the absence of her terms for seven weeks, gave me hopes of her being with child. But on the last day of the year, she hath them again.

So his very first entry starts out of the gate about his wife being on the rag, and then later in the day, she burns her hand cooking a turkey. Honestly, I want to see Jane's take on all this, because I bet they're more emotionally riveting. But feel free to snoop through pepysdiary.com. if you're in the market for, like, a blogger in a wig, do you read a few books at a time? You go from one to the other, one to the other.

Adrian Johns
Yeah. Usually I don't have time to read fiction because the reality of working at a place like the University of Chicago is that during the teaching quarters, you have to keep reading stuff just to keep up at an enormous rate. I think this is actually interesting. I'm going to give away what I afraid is a kind of trade secret, that at the height of a teaching quarter, it's not unusual to be claiming to be reading something like three or 500 pages a day, which I actually think is impossible. And that it can be possible.

Alie Ward
That can be possible. So what's happening is something very, I think, sociologically interesting, which is we have this notion of reading as being, in some sense, incredibly individualistic, that it's something that we all do and we're all independent at doing it. But it's actually, especially in this setting where I think it's actually impossible that we're doing what we're claiming to be doing, what it actually is, is collectively constituted. So sometimes reading scholars just hear each other talk about a book and then they think they've read it. Like watching a trailer and being like, oh, yeah, I saw the new mission impossible.

He ends up doing the mission. Yeah, because you can't possibly keep up with that much. But, you know, a big question I feel like that's on a lot of people's minds is audiobooks and e readers. Is it reading? Some people get a lot of flack for, you didn't read that book, it was an audiobook.

And others even feel guilty for reading ebooks instead of on paper, or they have trouble with ebooks because it's not on paper. Where does that factor in in terms of technology? Like what is reading, what counts and how do we absorb it? It's actually interesting that ebooks, or actually audiobooks more the idea that you could, as it were, read a novel or something by having it read to you by a machine. There are schemes for those going back as far as pretty much the origin of recording.

Adrian Johns
So the late 19th, early 20th century, there were visionary schemes for having things like, oh, you know, vending machines where you could put your money in and there would be a speaker's, you know, like a speaking trumpet that would speak a book to you. Yeah, there was a french artist who drew these things in. It's like 1890s or so I forget exactly when. This notion that we might have books read to us really tracks with the emergence of a true mass print culture, which is really, again, an 1880s and onwards thing. So it's always been there.

It's not like there's something that is that radically new about audiobooks, per se. Having said that, I mean, my own sense of it, kind of crudely, is that I think with audiobooks, it's really that you're having something read to you rather than reading. And part of that has to do with the control of the pace of it. You know, so you can slow down recordings, you can pause it and all of that kind of thing, but it's not the same as doing what one does with mind's eye all the time. In reading a page where you're constantly shifting the speed and considering things and going back, you know, without even necessarily thinking about it, you don't have to press a button or something.

Ebooks, on the other hand, I think, are just reading. I mean, I don't have any issue with those at all. And in fact, for what it's worth, the science of reading book that's overwhelmingly based on texts that I found digitally through HathiTrust library and things like that, which I have to say was a revelation to me about how much you can actually do now. And during the COVID lockdowns of 2020 through 2022, libraries like the collaborative archives of the Hathi Trust, which has over 18 million library items in its digital pockets. They opened their online archives because in person visits weren't possible.

Alie Ward
And this was right when Adrienne was writing the science of reading. And if you are a person who enters a library or a bookstore and immediately has to find a bathroom, at least during lockdowns, there was always one nearby. It's just in your house, a few feet away. When it comes to literacy programs in the past, how are literacy programs orchestrated to get as many people reading as possible? And what benefit and what harm has that done in the past?

Adrian Johns
Yeah, well, to a large extent, public education, when it was introduced in the western world, was to generate literacy. That was the point of it in countries like France and the UK and the US in the late 19th century. And it is the case that the proportion of the population that went through schools and thus learned to read in some systematic way goes up by leaps and bounds between 1860 and 1930. And originally, that has a clear motivation, which is that you want to create an informed citizenry, because on the one hand, you have industries that need intelligent people working the machines or, you know, telegraphy operators or train drivers and this kind of thing. On the other hand, if you're with the United States or increasingly the UK or France, you have a democratic system, and so you want the people to be informed enough that they can actually be trusted to vote.

Alie Ward
So this, again, was the olden days of the US, when having informed voters was something that all political parties wanted. So starting really, that period, you see big, not least publishing programs to produce textbooks, you know, what are called readers often in this period, by use of which children can be brought up to be readers. And right from the beginning, there are huge fights about how you do this and complaints that poorly produced McGuffey readers or something like that are not only not teaching children to read well, but they're turning children into, you know, whatever. You don't want them to be, like, amoral or super moral or, you know, puritanical or they're not generating proper citizens, in other words. So these readers were little novels used as textbooks, and they sold over 100 million copies.

They were up there in sales with the Bible and the dictionary, also in terms of popularity. And McGuffey's, they were like the Beatles of the book world, but also kind of with a biblical slant. So, like, if the Beatles made christian rock, so their popularity, it was also a way at the time of spreading these protestant values of the era. Not a lot of room for diversity of thought there. So there are big fights over that.

Adrian Johns
But this is one of the things that the scientists of reading really wanted to intervene in. They wanted to create, on the basis of a science of how reading happened, a kind of objectively better standard of early reading book to produce children who would be then adult readers, who would then be the model democratic citizens of the future. Hence things like Dick and Jane books, which were completely a product of this. They were produced by a University of Chicago psychologist in collaboration with a woman called Zerna Sharp, who was an official in a publishing house. So Zerna Sharp was a book editor who came up with these illustrated and simple books for kids with kind of Norman Rockwell like, watercolor illustrations and words like look, Jane, look, look, see, dick.

Alie Ward
And they used what is called the look, say, method, or sight words, which means repeatedly seeing and recognizing familiar words, but not using the phonic approach to know what sound each letter makes to break it down into a word. So you see the word look a bunch, you go, oh, that's what looking is. You see the word dick a bunch and you go, that's that guy. But you're not going, look or D or Jane. Anyway, that's phonics.

They didn't do that. And sight words, you know, just memorizing the meaning of words without sounding them out can be an absolutely terrible way for some people to learn to read. And it's come in and out of favor over the phonics approach. And the phonics approach, again, is learning what sounds letters make, which makes sense to me. Phonics makes sense to me.

Adrian Johns
And one of the things about these books, things like the Dick and Jane books and rivals that existed at that time, is that the physical layout on the page of the sentences, characters, words, is done to guide the child's eyes across the page at certain speeds and with certain pauses. And the idea is to train the movements of the eye to be almost like dancing. So you jump from thing to thing, and the idea is to create a certain kind of facility of eye movement. And the thought is that the mind will sort of go with that and you'll create people who are not just able to read, but actual readers, which is a bit different, right. People who read for pleasure and are fluent at it.

Because by the twenties and thirties, there's really kind of two panics in America. She's freaking out. I'm freaking out. There's a panic of illiteracy per se, but not enough people are literate, that's one thing. But there's also a panic that people are what comes to be called illiterate.

That is, they can read in a mechanical sense, and they do actually read. They buy newspapers and things like that, but they don't habitually read, and they're not regarded as good comprehending info citizens in a certain way. And that's actually to some extent the harder problem is how you make people who are habitual pleasure getting readers. And of course, reading habits and skills start pretty early. And in the US at least, most kids were once just taught by their caregivers with this intention of learning to read the Bible or other religious texts.

Alie Ward
And Adrian says that public schools in the American south didn't really come along until the very late 18 hundreds. And even in this modern era, in ours, things like the pandemic lockdowns meant a bunch of kiddos skipped kindergarten, which may see lasting impacts on a relationship with reading. Well, how are literacy rates now? Or rather reading rates like where are we in terms of how much we read? I would want to say it's about 80% across America, and it's been that way for quite a long time.

Adrian Johns
But it depends on what degree of fluency you're looking for in terms of being able to read at all. It's very high, 90 something, I would think. And globally, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO. Literacy rates for adults vary by country, with many in the 97% to 99% range. But others, like South Sudan and Chad and Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, hover lower, some in the 20% to 30% for adult populations.

Alie Ward
And I was poking through some stats, and I saw one country has a 100% literacy rate across the board for youth, adult, and elderly populations. And I was like, boy, howdy, hot damn. Nice. And then I saw that it was North Korea, and I was like, 100% for everyone. Okay, all right.

North Korea, sure. But, yeah, it varies for many reasons, mainly accessibility to education and infrastructure, gendered access to literacy programs, socioeconomic access, and in certain countries cases, just lying, just not true stuff. In terms of habitual readers, it depends on sort of how you measure and how you ask the question. I mean, it should be said that for all the doom and gloom about, you know, oh, nobody does everything these days except play video games. So one of the things that the neuroscientists bring up is that there's a question about attention.

Adrian Johns
So it's not so much are we able to read? And it's not really even are we able to make sense of what we read? Because we are. It's how long do we read at one time for? Yeah, because we all have this sense.

Like, I certainly have it, and probably you do, because, you know, we're like average people that maybe 15 years ago, one could sit down and read a whole chapter of a novel. Sure. Yeah. But now it's actually hard to do. And it's not just that you're constantly being distracted by things.

It's that you've become habituated to being distracted by things. And so when you sit down, you start reading lines. After a while, your mind is off doing other things, even if there's nothing else going on around you. And there's a sense that this kind of magpie mode is. It's not just that we lack intellectual discipline.

It's that at some neuronal level, our brains are actually changing, and we're becoming less kind of evolutionarily attuned to paying attention to things like texts for, you know, longer periods of time. So that's not, as I say, it's not a question about the ability to read. It's a question about what the character of the reading practice is and its coherency over time and things like that. So it's a change, and we're always tempted to give it a big moral valence and say, it's a decay. We're not as good as we used to be, but I kind of feel that we're on our way to something.

We don't know what the end point. Is in a bad way or a good way. I think it's too early to say. Like, are we fucked? Like, are we.

Alie Ward
Are we in a. Are we on a downward slope? That's analytic. Yeah, we've had it in so many ways. I mean, never mind.

Adrian Johns
The reading is a small part, right? If all we've got to worry about is reading, then we're. Then we're fine. Because you mentioned those, see Dick and Jane books and that cadence of da da da da da da, turning people into readers. If we're getting habituated to our cadence being interruption, interruption, then is there something about that that we can unlearn?

Alie Ward
If we sit and turn off our phone, set a timer for 1 hour, and we're going to sit and read for an hour, can we kind of get back that ability to pay attention? Because so many people who, our listeners of the show submitted questions, and a lot of them were about how do I not zone out? Or what do I need to do to stop from reading the same sentence four times? Because I'm off thinking about something else. All right, so this is kind of a bigger topic than we can adequately dive into here, which is why we have a three part ADHD episode, which is linked in the show notes, and it's with world renowned expert doctor Russell Barkley.

But the reality is, not all of us have ADHD, but most of us are seeing a decline in our attention spans. And Doctor Gloria Mark, speaking to the American Psychological association, reports that in 2004, which was, incidentally, right before MySpace took off in popularity, the average 2004 attention span was about two and a half minutes. Now, eight years later, in 2012, it was half of that 1 minute and 15 seconds. Nowadays, it's about 45 seconds. So in 20 years, we went from two and a half minutes to 45 seconds.

So, no, it's not you. Also, it might just be you. You might just be getting older. In fact, I guarantee that you're getting older because all of us are by the second. I'm so sorry, but according to the 2023 paper quantifying attention span across the lifespan, attention span is longer in young adults than in children and in older adults.

So don't freak out or try to correct yourself too much. Your brain may just be being a brain. Also, as discussed in our ADHD episode, hormones and their decline can also play a role. But if you suspect that you might have ADHD, listen to our episode with doctor Russell Barkley and see a doctor to get a proper evaluation. If you don't have it, you can start trying to pay attention to your attention by eliminating distractions to kind of retrain your new baseline, Adrienne says.

Adrian Johns
I don't think that's an impossible thing, and you don't have to kind of go off and do a retreat in a monastery, which people do, right? But I don't think that's really essential. Well, I have some questions from listeners. Can I do a lightning round with you? Sure.

Alie Ward
But before we do, we'll take a quick brain break for sponsors of the show who make it possible to donate to a cause of theologist choosing. And this week we'll donate to a literacy nonprofit, 826 LA, which is dedicated to supporting students ages six to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills and helping teachers inspire their students to write. And you can learn more at 826 la.org dot. But we're splitting the donation as well to send some love and some money to the Glioblastoma research organization, which is raising awareness and funds for new global, cutting edge research to find a cure for glioblastoma. Adrienne's beloved wife of 25 years, Doctor Alison Winter, was a professor of history and historical studies of science and authored the book fragments of a Modern History.

And Adrienne spoke so fondly of her off Mike and in her obituary, he notes that their connection was instant and that Alison quote had a creative audacity that was just relentless. And Doctor Alison Winter passed away in 2016 of a rare glioblastoma brain tumor, and this episode is dedicated to her memory. And we'll link the Glioblastoma research organization in the show notes and thanks to sponsors of the show for making that possible. Do you know about the all important work the Humane Society of the United States does to protect animals? Together with millions of supporters, they take on puppy mills, factory farms, the fur trade, trophy hunting, animal cosmetics testing and other cruel industries.

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To get free shipping in 365 day returns. Quince.com ologies okay, let's read your questions. On reading, many of you had queries about sounding it out via phonics, such as first time question Asker Stephanie Bloom, Shirley Lou Zanombo, Brendan O'Donnell, laser interlegator Lynn Rowicky, sleepy John Beth, Juan Matthew Nguyen, Sinead Lewis, Rena Des, Matt Cicado, and Gina Ann asked, there used to be a lot of infomercials in the nineties about speed reading programs and hooked on phonics. Do they work, or is that why we don't see them anymore? Well, they actually still exist, these programs.

Adrian Johns
It may be that they're advertising in different venues. So even if you go back into the nineties, what's our target in time? Late 20th century, the main place where hooked on phonics advertised, for example, was AM radio. This was the moment when AM radio really took off, and hooked on phonics was a huge AM radio financer. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah. Ended up becoming a bit of a scandal because they were claiming that they had scientific proof that their technique worked. And in the end, I think it was the Federal Trade Commission, certainly a federal agency, moved in on the basis that this scientific evidence didn't actually exist. It may actually work or not, but there wasn't the kind of scientific confirmation that there was. And in the end, they got put out of business.

But that generated a huge public backlash by supporters of the hooked on phonics program, who believed that what was going on was a kind of, you know, a suppression of a system by essentially the teaching industry, by the public teaching unions, and so forth. The short story here is that hooked on phonics didn't have the appropriate scientific literature to back up some kind of exaggerated claims, so they had to pay a lot of advertisers back. Also, I just want to take this opportunity to give a shout out to teachers out there. Teachers, man, you deserve so much more than you're getting. First of all, you shouldn't have to buy your own supplies.

Alie Ward
But you already know that. What would we do without any of you teachers, we love you. But the phonics methods of learning the sound that letters represent instead of just sight words or whole word learning, does have a lot of scientific support, and it also relies less on a child's home life to give advantages of memorizing words in different contexts. Now, what about racing through reading, just booking through books? So many patrons had questions, and I will say them quickly, such as Christina Khan, Katie Noble, Frank D.

Colin Croft, Chelsea Rabble, Annie Benani, Nick a. Cardi Pereilis, and Cass Fresca, who said, I wish I could formulate a question, but all ive got to say is speed rating. All caps. Karen H. Wanted to know if its witchcraft.

Heads up. We do have an episode on Witchcraft and yeah, I will link it in the show notes, but speed reading, let's get into it. But the speed reading programs, those were a bit different. Those go back to probably the thirties, but they really flourished in the fifties and sixties when they were really a big deal. And pretty much every american citizen would have encountered them to some extent.

Adrian Johns
So if you work for GE, for example, at GM and at the Air Force, there were internal operations designed to teach their management speed reading techniques that it's not entirely clear that they don't work at all. The problem I think that hit these programs in the end was that if they did work, the benefits didn't last. Oh, okay, so you could train people to read quickly while they were in the program, but it seemed that you could measure increased reading rates and comprehension rates through these programs, but then six months later, they'd be back to where they started. But you can still take these things up now if you so wish. So, not exactly a get lit quick scheme, but perhaps it just requires some patience and keeping up with.

Alie Ward
Now, a few of you wanted to know how machines can help our goopy little brains, including patron Olivia Eliasson, who asked why haven't we all gone to using speed reading tools like rapid serial visualization, presentation, RSVP? That's when a word at a time flashes on the screen. Kind of like a. A caffeinated teleprompter. Speaking of uppers, James Eva, first time question asker, would like to know bionic reading.

What's the crack? My ADHD mind loves how certain letters in each word are bolded and seems to be able to read a lot faster while actually retaining the content. A few people asked about other programs like bionic reading, and there are programs like accelerator or velocity that will show you one word at a time or might change the font so that you're skimming differently. Do those increase reading speeds or reading comprehension? How does that work?

Adrian Johns
Yeah, these went through a moment of fame about, I wouldn't say about ten years ago. And the ones that I remember, like you say, they would show up one word at a time and at a certain rate, and then the idea is that you kind of have to keep up with them because the next word is up on the screen. They're actually uncannily similar. They're basically the modern descendant of techniques that were invented in the twenties and thirties as part of this moment of speed reading. So it used to be, for example, that you could get reading accelerators, which were devices that you could put on the page of a book, and by a mechanical kind of clockwork or spring mechanism, this little window would move down the page.

Now she has read in 1 minute, 27 pages of this book. So you had to read as fast as the window moved. It's so stressful. Yeah, it's incredibly stressful. My sense of that is it's similar.

I mean, you can probably accelerate your reading to a certain extent. The question is whether it really takes. I think that in my own case, I could see that working for things like reading novels, like we're part of. The point of it almost is to kind of get lost in it and to be drawn in so that reading and thinking sort of become one you read at the speed of thought. It's different if what you're supposed to be reading is something like, you know, professional reports or scientific papers, but they've been businesses since probably the earliest ones of the thirties.

But like I say, it was really the fifties that they really took off. If you're curious, you can get old ones from eBay. Oh, can. Oh, I bet you can. Yeah.

Alie Ward
So, yes, I looked this up, and there are many reading pacer speed reading trainers by book of the month club for sale on eBay. And it's kind of like a device that scrolls text past a cutout window, so you're seeing only a few lines at a time that leave quickly. So you better kind of keep it up like an assembly line. And according to the 2019 paper, how many words do we read per minute? A review and meta analysis of reading rate for english readers.

It's about 250 words per minute, but if you're reading out loud, it drops to about 184. But in the 1960s, there was this woman named Evelyn Wood who coined the term speed reading and taught courses called reading dynamics. And it involves this process of scanning a chapter or a chunk of pages, just scanning them first real quick, 4 seconds a page, making notes, and then going back and doing a longer scan, maybe 15 seconds a page, and then making notes again. And Evelyn apparently had an average speed of 2500 words per minute, ten times you or me. And apparently JFK was said to read 1200 words a minute.

Were they the fastest? Oh, no, of course not. The world's fastest reader, some guy named Howard Steven Berg, has a Guinness book World Record for reading 25,000 words per minute, a hundred times more than you or I can do. And he uses his fingers to guide him down, the text kind of swishing back and forth. And one riveting news clip I watched showed him getting through half of a law textbook about check fraud in less time than it takes me to put on mascara.

Now he could get through his own 258 page book, Super Reading secrets, in less than five minutes. Not that he needs it. Also, if you ever have to give a presentation, this is just a hot tip for me. Or you have to make a speech for something, factor about 100 words per minute, because speech naturally has pauses, little quips, maybe audience reactions. So if you have to give a speech, like for someone's wedding, don't freak out.

Let's say you wrote it out and the word count is like 1200 words. You're going to be up there for a while. So if you're stressing about a speech, just factor like, okay, I got five, six minutes, you can write 500 words. Just start from there. Also, when it comes to that RSVP method, that one we talked about where it's one word on the screen at a time, I was stoked about that.

But sadly, a 2017 study debunked it as flim flam. And the American Journal of Psychology's paper, modern speed reading apps do not foster reading comprehension, kind of says it all. It reports that static text was associated with superior performance hmm, Bummer. But when it comes to bionic with some parts of words in a thicker font, its inventors, one of whom is a typography designer, cite decades old research on text comprehension models and eye movement tracking, and they claim that over 15% of the population has great difficulty reading and understanding texts due to factors like adhd and dyslexia. And the feedback that they've gotten is that some of those people immediately understood the context of various texts the first time they read them, which was impossible without bionic readings.

Ding. And then they have a registered trademark. So with all of these things, your brain is unique, your mileage may vary, which kind of makes a bolder font out of certain parts of the word and lets you kind of, like, get the gist of which words are which. And I think it's so interesting, too, when you see sentences written without vowels, how easy you can decipher, how quickly you can work that out. Yeah, there have been several kinds of experiments about that kind of thing going back again quite a long time.

Adrian Johns
The question of fonts goes back, oh, at least to the 19th century, the question of whether there are certain fonts that are more efficient, less fatiguing, and the idea that you can get rid of some certain characters. One of the first people who invented a scientific approach to reading was a guy called James McKean cattellite in the 1890s. He thought we should ditch the letter e because he thought it was completely pointless. And so you were just expending energy, literally for no reason in having it. I mean, this is very much of the first age of factories, right?

This is for the generation of people for whom the question of efficiency and fatigue is really a kind of central question. So they extended to reading, and they think, well, we don't need a letter e. Let's give. Ditch that one. Yeah, he was like an original tech bro trying to biohack.

And there have been various, say, other experiments with these kinds of things. And the extent of these experiments is really kind of heroic in a certain sense. Psychologists of typography would sit readers into these machines and see how fast they could read things, and they would do it for, like, 10,000 people, one after another. It's like taking years over it. It's really a kind of heroic endeavor in a certain sense.

And the other thing you get is efforts to produce spelling reforms that are going to be closer to things like phonics. So phonological spelling systems, which I can remember being in my elementary school in England in the very late sixties, early seventies, I can remember there being a rack of these books done with this kind of bizarre spelling regime. Why are we doing this? And I remember the rack partly because nobody used them. It sat in the corner of this room and everybody thought it was just bizarre and nobody did anything.

Alie Ward
So you know how if you look at a dictionary, there's a phonetic spelling of a word that's right before the definition? So, yeah, these were books spelled out like that for kids, which is beyond phonics into just a whole new type of phonetic Alphabet. And yeah, kids were not into those. Or adults, let's be honest. Now, I want to preface this next question with the fact that the topic deserves its whole own episode one day with like a dedicated expert.

But many, many of you, including Madison Piper, Julia Fisher, Scott Nichols, Hope, Neil Sorensen, Marissa Laws, Jennifer Piacente, Gretchen Schroeder, Ann Jewett, Kathryn Wood, Leanne McAvoy, Faith Stein, Jo Hummingbird, Allie Brown, lovely bites, Emily Burns, Emily Rossmar, Archie George, Nat Schaeffer, Kelsey Lohr, Paige van Horn, Sarah Avila, Sonia Carrie Micklem, San Juan, Josie, Kat Kessler, and Wild pack of dogs, as well as Maya, who kindly requested that we address the topic without any value judgment, which Maya, I got you all brains, welcome. We love all operating systems around here. And first time question asker Ab, who asked, one listener wrote in to say, love this subject. How do we help kids with dyslexia earlier? How do we help them succeed in the k through twelve system?

Better. You know, they're bright kids who are awesome problem solvers, but are at a disadvantage with the way the school system currently works. So when it comes to dyslexia, are there any, anything historically or anything in the science about the best way to approach that with reading to make it so that life is easier, school is easier. Yeah. Dyslexia has been a pressing problem both at the level of teaching reading and at the level of thinking about what reading is.

Adrian Johns
Going back to the pre 1900 era, what used to be called congenital word blindness. Yeah, because the idea was that, like you say, that people with it were completely intelligent, right? There's no sort of mental deficiency or anything like that, no disability. And yet the one thing they can't do very well is read by the measures of the science of reading. So that's actually in the first instance a challenge to the people who think there should even be a science of reading, right.

Because their idea is that what sciences are are things like physics, where the whole world is organized by laws. And the point of the science is to come up with the laws. But brains are not calculations. With one correct black and white standard. If you find that there aren't actually laws of reading because there's a significant part of the population that does it differently or doesn't do it according to the laws we think exist, that raises the question of whether you can even have the science at all.

And so in the twenties and thirties, there's a lot of angst about this among these scientists. And in particular, there's two people. There's a woman called Clara Schmidt, who I think was actually one of the first women to get a PhD from the University of Chicago in about 1912 or so, Queen. And she worked for Chicago, Chicago public schools. And she found a classroom and got together a small group of children with this, what was then called congenital word blindness, and devoted, sustained individual attention to them.

And she found that she could actually get them to learn to read well, but not by the standard techniques of the time, which were like, you know, you teach people by these kinds of dick and Jane readers where you're trying to train people to look at whole words and whole sentences, things like that. You really have to go back to phonics, and you had to sound out individual characters. The other things that she found was that you had to connect them to the sensory experience world of the children themselves. So it couldn't be kind of abstracted out. So she realized that, yes, phonics wins again, and you had to take the kids experiences into account.

Alie Ward
Like, if they grew up in a big city, they'd have different touch points for context. And this is known as sociocultural theories of learning. So you have to relate them to the world that they live in. And if you did that, then some way the connections, the associations, could be made in the mind. And so she found that you could do this, but it took dedication and close attention.

Adrian Johns
You couldn't do it at the level of whole classes. The other person is a man called Samuel Orton, who was a neuroscientist, actually, in the 1930s in Iowa. And what he did was he got a mobile clinic and was traveling around Iowa. And he's the first person to realize that there's actually a kind of proportion of children in schools who have this condition. He found in Ira, it was about 12%.

So the idea that there's actually something like, loosely a syndrome really comes from Orton's moving around in this truck, literally. Oh, wow. So if it weren't for rumbling around rural Iowa, the issue and the wide prevalence of dyslexia when objects or letters can become reversed, may never have come to light. So if you see a word like Gary, they will read it as grey, you know, so they'll reverse the order of letters and things like this, or they'll even reverse how the letter looks. They'll write the letter backwards.

And he says that basically what's happened is that the brains of these children have been habituated to sort of where the left and right half of the brains are both taking in images of characters, but on one side it's. It's mirror reflected, because that's how the brain works. And what's happening is that neither side is dominant. So when you start to try and interpret them, what you're getting is alternations between, as it were, the right way around and the wrong way around. Remember that Oxenfield analogy?

Alie Ward
A little like that. So in other words, it's recapitulating this thing that you see in ancient inscriptions at the very beginning of writing, when you see characters written around the other way and the flow of writing the other way. So what you have to do, and it actually mirrors. Again, what Clara Schmidt found, is that you really have to go in and teach them individually and re habituate them, retrain their brains to have one half of the brain, one hemisphere of the brain, be dominant. And so what that image in the brain, as it were, will win out.

Adrian Johns
And you need for that to be habitual and not just kind of reflective. He went on to have a long career talking about this. It's a question that actually dogs these scientists all the way through. They worry about it a lot. But that's how dyslexia came to be identified, as it were, a kind of thing that exists out in the world, rather than just individual people who seem to have problems.

Alie Ward
Yeah, I had no idea. One leading expert on dyslexia, doctor Jack Fletcher, spoke to the National Institute of Health and Notes right off the top that reading is not natural. He says to develop reading skills, your brain has to reorganize itself. And it takes brain areas that are built for language and for visual attention, and it repurposes them for reading. And a lot of kids develop dyslexia because they haven't received the instruction that their brain needed to learn reading.

And dyslexia, he says, is not something you're born with. You're born with risk factors like genetic factors and environmental factors. And he notes that the goal is to screen for it early and that phonics based teaching is much more effective than whole word learning for people who could develop dyslexia. Also audiobooks. So many of you said that audio learning and accessibility with text to speech are very helpful.

And as a hardcore audiobook consumer myself, I'm right there with you. I'm wearing headphones. Personally, that is legit reading to me. Now, some of you with questions about dyslexia friendly fonts like Francisca Gubman, Mike Weischel, Ella Sugarman, graphic designer Patrick W. And patron Sarah Lares, who wrote my question, fonts.

And I want to note that that was in all caps. Okay, so there's a 2018 study titled Dyslexia and Fonts. Is a specific font useful? And it looked at one in particular, a dyslexia friendly font called easy reading, and it found that the crowding of letters can contribute to comprehension issues, and that the most helpful fonts are those with a bigger size, a simple design, and a special serif to help dyslexic people distinguish between letters and numbers of similar shapes, like D and B and P and Q and six and nine and wide letter and wide word spacing. Also pluses.

Now, other than this easy reading font, though, experts recommend sans serif fonts like Ariel and even the once maligned but comeback queen comic sans, as well as my personal working favorite, Trebuchet, come because it's named after a medieval catapult. Stay because it's easy on the eyes. And last listener question, Julianne said, I've heard it quoted that reading fiction increases empathy. Is there any validity to those studies? Have we seen any rises in reading correlated to a better society or people understanding each other better?

Anything to that? That's a really interesting question. It's certainly something that's long been claimed. It's led to a lot of concern over the decades about inequalities of accessibility to reading. So if you have, for example, in the 1930s, when people started to map these things out, northern cities like Chicago and New York, where there are plentiful libraries, everybody has access to newspapers, all of that kind of thing, that thought, that creates a certain kind of social density and interaction culture, whereas in the deep south you have almost a vacuum of this.

He explains that in the 1930s there are few libraries in the deep south, and in times of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws, before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, black people didn't have equal access to the very limited places that even had newspapers and periodicals. You can't go into them. And the thought is among these social scientists that that generates a world of sort of almost. It's not a society at all. It's like a social desert.

Adrian Johns
So, yes, there is that conviction that's existed for quite a long time, and that's led to real kind of social policies. Expanding library access, things like that, which, of course, has its contemporary resonance and should give us pause, right? Because we're at a moment right now where things like library provision are under threat. So access to information, it's seemingly democratized, and in many ways, it is. It's also siloed and under control of a few big corporations like meta owns Facebook and Instagram.

Alie Ward
And a billionaire recently bought Twitter and stripped journalists of verified badges instead, just putting them up for sale or for rent to anyone who wanted to look legit. Bots are just improving on their own creepiness all the time. AI is tricking people into all sorts of shit. Congress is looking for ways to ban TikTok. Oh, and physical spaces with books like bookstores are closing.

Oh, and libraries, so cool. And not only the numbers of libraries and the investment libraries, but the book selection in libraries. Right. This is a time of, to my mind, quite extraordinary interventionist censorship. I naively assumed that that kind of thing had gone by the wayside ages ago.

Adrian Johns
Yeah, me too, but apparently not. So this conviction that shared reading creates shared culture and that it's therefore a tool of kind of harmony is one that bears repeating. It bears holding to, I think. What about your job or your process of writing this book? What was the hardest thing about it?

Alie Ward
What sucked the most, if I may ask?

Adrian Johns
The hardest thing about it was actually the part that was also, in a certain sense, the most exciting for me. Okay. Because that's my next question. What's your favorite part? But, yeah.

Well, no, my favorite part is different. So the hardest part was doing the chapter that's based in the deep south, that's dealing with this man called Horace Mann Bond, who was a social scientist, african american social scientist, who went down and was using literacy tests and the like to map out things like information inequality in Alabama in the Jim Crow era, and ends up writing the historical section of the NAACP's case in Brown versus board of Education. This was a case in the US that made it to the Supreme Court, wherein Oliver Brown, a Topeka, Kansas pastor, and welder, filed alongside neighbors a class action lawsuit against the board of Education, which at the time prohibited his young daughter, Linda Carroll Brown, from attending the white elementary school seven blocks from their house and forced her instead to walk six blocks to catch a bus to a school for black and other non white children. And this segregation was still firmly in place in many parts of the US. This case took place in 1954.

That was the hardest part for me, just because I've never, you know, worked on that culture before, and because I don't come from the United States, even at school, I never did a class on american social history and american racial issues. So I was really discovering stuff for the first time. And it's such a disquieting story at the same time as being, in a certain sense, a very heartening story because people like Bond are incredibly brave and venturesome, and they make a huge difference. So, of course, this was a landmark case because it was decided in favor of Brown and was a leap toward integration and the civil rights movement. Although don't feel too relieved, because decades later, in the early 1970s, Linda Carroll Brown, the child at the center of this case by that time was grown and a mother with children in Topeka schools.

Alie Ward
And she reopened her case against the board of education because, guess what? Schools were still so divided along racial lines. And she won the case again, prompting three new schools to be built in the area. So that part of it was both difficult and exciting. The favorite part of it, actually, is the part about a character called Samuel Renshaw, who was a psychologist in Ohio in the 1940s and fifties.

Adrian Johns
And what Renshaw decided he'd do is, in a certain sense, this is the beginning of many of these speed reading classes. What he thought he could do was to use a tachistoscope, which is like a slide projector that blasts up onto a screen, a set of characters for something like a 10th of a second or a 50th of a second or a hundredth of a second. And he thought he could use tachistoscopes to train readers to read really fast by getting them to take in these patterns in decreasing intervals of time. And he had this kind of extraordinary project to produce kind of superhuman thinkers by training them with this machine. And it turns out it then ramifies through american culture in the mid to late forties and onwards in the fifties.

So, for example, in the forties during World War Two, he latched onto the problem that if you're engaged in air warfare in World War Two, you're in these planes that travel at, like, 450 miles an hour. So you have to decide really fast if some plane that you see is a friend or foe, because you have to decide whether to shoot at it. And the existing methods of identifying planes were kind of piecemeal. So you looked at, like, the tail design and the engine design, this kind of thing. And what he said was, no.

If we use tachystoscopes with photographs of planes, we can get people to recognize an entire plane as one thing in the way that he thought readers recognized words as one thing. Oh, wow. And in the mid forties, through the end of world War two, he and his people trained hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors and airmen in this technique. You know, he was hailed as a hero for doing this. So, way to go, Samuel Renshaw.

Alie Ward
I hope people got you, like, a beer or flowers every once in a while. Good job. Speaking of good jobs, can you tell me a little bit about your job in terms of what you do and writing and researching this? Can you tell me something that you just absolutely adore about it or about reading? Well, you know, I'm a historian, right?

Adrian Johns
So a lot of the joy I get out of that is actually it's to do with tracking curious ideas and people from the past. It's a sense of the sort of limitless potential of human curiosity. I think it's eternally fascinating that to go into something like an archive, and you don't have to look for very long, like an hour or something, and you will find something. There will be something there about some individuals who made a mark in some way, and then you're off to the races, you know, so you can really just follow the trails wherever they go. Which, honestly, Adrienne, same.

Alie Ward
When your job involves descending into rabbit holes that turn into whole ass warrens of stories and trivia, it's hard to emerge and just chill. I love nothing more than a nice book and some time not talking, and it seems like such an indulgence, likely because our society is built on prestige for overwork, which sucks. I have to remind myself that, yes, I deserve to sit down and read a book. Like, it seems unproductive in hustle culture, you know? Yeah, that will resonate with a lot of people, I would think.

Adrian Johns
It certainly does with me, because we live in this world now where, to a certain extent, we're supposed to be on duty 24 hours a day, you know, at least in this country. Right. So there are other countries in Europe, for example, where there are now laws where companies, you know, your employer cannot email you. Yeah. In the middle of the night, this kind of thing.

But not so much in the United States, not America. Yeah, right. The land of the free.

And the downside of that is, as you say, this. This feeling of, like, one feels guilty to sit down and do something slow, like reading. And, you know, I think it's important to try to overcome that, at least. Yeah, brings so much joy to people. So ask literary people literal questions because they wrote the book on books.

Alie Ward
And for more on Doctor Adrian John's the science of reading, you can see the link to his books in the show notes. We also linked the charities of choice. For this week, we are at ologies on X and Instagram. I'm alleyward on both. We now have kid friendly smologies episodes available in their own feed.

Just find the colorful new logo and subscribe to smologies wherever you get podcasts or at the link in the show notes. Tell your friends, tell your teachers. You can submit questions for ologists by becoming a patron@patreon.com. ologies we have ologies merch@ologiesmerch.com. erin Talbert admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts.

Kelly R. Dwyer does a website. Noel Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our managing director. Editing on this episode was done by a wonderful trifecta, including Jake Chaffee, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland audio and Jarrett Sleeper of the Webby award winning Mindjam Media.

Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around till the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this one is that Jared and I have been walking around a nearby lake, and one day I joined him for a lap. He'd already done one, and he told me about this guy who was like a really fast runner who had lapped him a few times. And sure enough, like two minutes later, this shirtless guy comes around the bend.

He's tanned, he's got back tattoos. He's like lean as beef jerky but shiny with sunscreen. And we're watching him approach like, man, this guy's a good runner. He must be sustaining like a six minute mile. I wonder if he's like training for a marathon.

That's really impressive. And as he passes us, he huffs. Next time take a picture like he was the teenage villain in a John Hughes movie about a prom. We were like, what? What are you, a country club jock that just tried to haze a couple nerds?

We were just like, whoa, that guy's a good runner. Next time took a picture. Okay, man, we didn't mean to. We were literally just like, whoa, that guy's good at running. Anyway, okay, be nice to each other.

Okay, bye bye. Pachydermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, litology and technology, meteorology, nephrology, serology.

Adrian Johns
And I am so excited to read with you today.

Anagnosology (READING) with Adrian Johns

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1: The History of Reading

2: Challenges in Reading

3: Reading in the Digital Age

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