You reread the sentence several times, and then the paragraph. Or vice versa — quickly read the text diagonally. And the result is the same: you close a book or an online page and it’s as if you haven’t read anything. Familiar? The psychologist explains why this happens and what to do about it.
My clients often complain about the deterioration of thinking, attention and memory, noticing that they have problems with reading: “I can’t concentrate at all. I read and understand that my head is empty — there are no traces of what I read.
People who are prone to anxiety suffer the most from this. They again and again catch themselves thinking: “I read something, but I didn’t understand anything”, “I seem to understand everything, but I didn’t remember anything”, “I found out that I can’t finish reading an article or book, despite all my efforts.” Secretly, they fear that these are manifestations of some terrible mental illness.
Standard pathopsychological tests, as a rule, do not confirm these fears. Everything is in order with thinking, memory and attention, but for some reason the texts are not digested. Then what’s the matter?
The trap of «clip thinking»
American sociologist Alvin Toffler, in his book The Third Wave, suggested the emergence of «clip thinking». Modern man receives much more information than his ancestors. In order to somehow cope with this avalanche, he tries to snatch the essence of information. Such an essence is difficult to analyze — it flickers like frames in a music video, and therefore is absorbed in the form of small fragments.
As a result, a person perceives the world as a kaleidoscope of disparate facts and ideas. This increases the amount of information consumed, but worsens the quality of its processing. The ability to analyze and synthesize gradually decreases.
Clip thinking is associated with a person’s need for novelty. Readers want to quickly get to the point and move on in search of interesting information. Search turns from a means into a goal: we scroll and leaf through — sites, social media feeds, instant messengers — somewhere there is “more interesting”. We get distracted by exciting headlines, navigate through links and forget why we opened the laptop.
Almost all modern people are subject to clip thinking and a senseless search for new information.
Reading long texts and books is difficult — it requires effort and focus. So it’s not surprising that we prefer exciting quests to quests that give us new pieces of the puzzle that we’re unable to put together. The result is wasted time, a feeling of an «empty» head, and the ability to read long texts, like any unused skill, deteriorates.
One way or another, almost all modern people who have access to telecommunications are subject to clip thinking and a senseless search for new information. But there is another point that affects the understanding of the text — its quality.
What are we reading?
Let’s remember what people read some thirty years ago. Textbooks, newspapers, books, some translated literature. Publishing houses and newspapers were state-owned, so professional editors and proofreaders worked on each text.
Now we mostly read books from private publishers, articles and blogs on online portals, posts on social networks. Major websites and publishers are making efforts to make the text easy to read, but in social networks, each person received his «five minutes of fame.» A sentimental post on Facebook (an extremist organization banned in Russia) can be replicated thousands of times along with all the errors.
As a result, we are all daily confronted with a huge amount of information, most of which is low-grade texts. They are full of errors, they do not care about the reader, the information is unorganized. Themes appear out of nowhere and disappear. Stamps, words-parasites. abstruseness. Confusing syntax.
We do the work of editing: discarding «verbal garbage», reading into questionable conclusions
Is it easy to read such texts? Of course not! We are trying to break through to the meaning through the difficulties that arise when reading texts written by non-professionals. We get stuck in mistakes, we fall into the gaps of logic.
In fact, we begin to do the editing work for the author: we “exfoliate” the unnecessary, discard the “verbal garbage”, and read the dubious conclusions. No wonder we get so tired. Instead of getting the right information, we re-read the text for a long time, trying to catch its essence. This is very labor intensive.
We make a series of attempts to understand low-grade text and give up, wasting time and effort. We are disappointed and worried about our health.
What to do
If you want to read easily, try to follow these simple guidelines:
- Do not rush to blame yourself if you did not understand the text. Remember that your difficulties with the assimilation of the text may arise not only because of the «clip thinking» and the availability of searching for new information, inherent in modern man. This is largely due to the low quality of the texts.
- Don’t read anything. Filter the feed. Choose resources carefully — try to read articles in major online and print publications that pay editors and proofreaders.
- When reading translated literature, remember that there is a translator between you and the author, who can also make mistakes and work poorly with the text.
- Read fiction, especially Russian classics. Take from the shelf, for example, the novel «Dubrovsky» by Pushkin to test your reading ability. Good literature is still read easily and with pleasure.