"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." [via]Ironically, the article is of the length that Carr suggest we don't have the capacity read any more. It is a phenomena I've noticed in myself but I've actually put it down to the fact that my brain has become used to the way that different types of writing are structured. I rarely read a newspaper article from top to bottom since the point is usually made in the first quarter to half and everything else is background.
But I can still read books when I have the chance, and I'll be looking forward to that once I've finished working my way through more than a decades worth of BBC Music Magazines. I've reached February 1997, at which point in the real world, the panic that I'd ever work again had really set in. Reading about classical music in this all but random manner fits the way my brain works. I've tried to read histories of the genre from cover to cover and my retention is low.
In small chunks, jigsaw like pieces of knowledge I'm remembering more. Even if, earlier on tonight I decided that Nielson composed The Rite of Spring not Stravinsky. Obviously. Though considering that this time last year I'd heard of neither them or the piece I shouldn't be too hard on myself and it's still a step up and I'll be able to remember next time.
Meanwhile: Porn star golf for charity.
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