Book Fanatics have reached a new level of arrogant stupidity. Right now they’re ferociously maintaining that hearing a text is hopelessly empty. Audiobooks don’t count as reading. Only seeing a hardback book with your eyes counts as absorbing the material.
1. How did people absorb knowledge before books were common? They obviously had no brains at all before books. Human intelligence didn’t exist before Gutenberg.
2. Different senses involve different parts of the brain. The meaning ultimately reaches the same meaning center, but it creates different sets of memories and resonances when heard or read or seen in ASL or felt in Braille.
3. Two paths at once give you VASTLY better understanding because the different resonances interact. For fucks sake, TELEVISION and MOVIES are more memorable and absorbing than radio or books. TV pushes the meaning through two paths at once. That’s why persuaders, whether commercial or religious or evil, prefer TV over radio or books.
4. Best of all is input and output at the same time. Senses and muscles. Hearing a lecture and writing notes, or reading out loud in call-and-response style, makes the material YOURS beyond any combination of input modes.
Polistra's Mill 