Having just read three Ian Fleming novels, one Henry James and one Jonathan Franzen on my new Kindle over the holidays, I found myself vaguely troubled by the feeling that I hadn’t really read them… that their plots and characters might slip out of my memory as easily as they slipped into the Kindle’s.
I told myself this was old-style thinking, that just because I don’t have the actual physical, dog-eared, tea-stained books to shove onto a bookshelf as souvenirs doesn’t mean their contents have engraved themselves any less deeply into my brain.
Now along comes this post by my scarily intelligent friend Jonah Lehrer (and his previous post foreshadowing it), citing a new Princeton study hinting that, maybe, the inchoate unease we bibliophiles have been feeling is more than just sentimental:
This study demonstrated that student retention of material across a wide range of subjects and difficulty levels can be significantly improved in naturalistic settings by presenting reading material in a format that is slightly harder to read.
It reminds me of another study I read a while back, suggesting that elementary school kids who squirm and fidget in their seats actually retain and process information better than if they sat still like they’re supposed to.
I just wish I could remember where I read it.
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