alt Hacker NewsIf reading aloud a children story, you may notice you are able to maintain an independent unrelated train of thought. While doing so, I notice that occasionally extra mistakes can "leak" into the story telling - e.g. you read a single word incorrectly, maybe substituting a word from your other train of thought.
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The ability of the brain to do that gives me 15 min of quiet time to think about problems each evening. But you cannot follow the story in that mode, and the whole facade will collapse on a single innocent question...
> "Dad, why did he steal the biycle?!?!"
> ".... what?"
In school, our teachers made us take turns reading the textbook. When it was my turn, I focused entirely on how my voice sounded, trying to match my cadence and tone to the punctuation. The moment I finished the paragraph, I would have to quickly re-read it in silence just to understand what it actually said.
I think I still can't read a non-trivial text aloud while trying to make sense of it at the same time. I need the two streams just for one text.
I can have an internal monologue about something completely unrelated to the story while reading it out aloud, but I won't be able to follow the story. I don't think I make mistakes, but I probably fail to put the correct intonation on sentences which require higher order thinking to infer the emotions of the characters in the story.
I learned at a young age the best way for me to be a good out-loud reader was to think about something else while I'm reading aloud. If I concentrate on the words and the reading aloud I screw up but if I think about other things, even HOW I'm doing while reading or thinking about what I'm reading and going to say NEXT, then I can read aloud flawlessly.
I can do that, and i notice that i kinda stop thinking about the reading and put more "brain resources" into the independent train of thought. Then i realize i was reading all the time without putting any effort in it
Yeah it's like I suddenly realise I haven't been thinking about the reading and I'm near the bottom of the next page somehow.
Interlinked.
Well, perhaps sadly, I maintain trains of thought unrelated to my environment all the time. It's because the default state of the world is so incredibly.. bland I really, really cannot take it without something going on.
The reading task can stay largely automatic until both streams try to use the same speech-production machinery at once
or any other reading for that matter!
When I was a kid, my dad (a physicist) would often read stories to me and my brother. He would sometimes fall asleep while reading, and we could tell when that was coming because suddenly our children's story would stop making sense and get filled with all these big physics terms.