Honest opinion: Are audiobooks superior to print? Can a person retain the same information from hearing the words as they would reading?
I want to hear the pages turn and smell that book smell, you know what I mean
Socrates and those other greek faggots would have preferred audiobooks, reading text is vulgar shit for scribes
Also: does the brain retain information if a person is doing something while listening to an audiobook? What if the person sleeps while listening?
>>7832537
For books (written to be read), print is generally superior.
When you write something, one aspect is the audience, including whether they will read or hear what's written. The piece will be written differently based on this. Writing to be heard calls for a more linear approach, for one thing. There are things that work better in print than by hearing, and listening to something meant to be read can get in the way of that.
>>7832589
I lack the knowledge to throughly interpret this image and understand if hearing is better than seeing or the opposite.
I started recently cause I have more of a commute and I have a few huge problems
1. It takes forever to get through a book, it's nearly double the time it takes to just read it normally
2. It's a huge disability not seeing how the pages are laid out, where the paragraphs are, what's italicized, so on
3. you're stuck with the narrator's interpretation of the prose
4. it's entirely linear, you can't easily go back and forward through the text
5. It turns an active activity into something passive, so it's easier to space out and miss something
6. probably irrelevant due to stuff like audible, but using CD based audiobooks are a pain in the ass with the constant switching
>>7832688
Same here. Looks like seeing and hearing are about the same but in different areas. The abstract of the study linked below said hearing produces the largest "priming" effects, followed by seeing and speaking, with thinking in last place. Not sure what that has to do with retaining information or if the brain gets distracted. This seems to be the only scientific study, everything else concerning this topic are blogs.
>>7832545
sure
listening to the thing is just not the same
Depends on the book.
I tried it with technical shit, but found it useless unless consolidating information -
Like reading the book for tables, graphs, charts or visuals
Then the audiobook to solidify and review.
I find it better with books with few main characters.
Best I listened to was American Psycho, on Audible, but the narrator goes in hard,
He almost dramatizes it, which helps.
Like different voices, for speech, and feminine ones for chicks, queer one for faggots, etc
Likewise, though, a poor narrator can kill the tone of a book.
Most of the free shit on say, Librivox,
Is done by amateur volunteers, and it shows.
I listened to Tao Te Ching from there,
And one guy sounds like a fat suicidal neckbeard.
Deleted it immediately.
>>7832575
I read that you can retain about 10-20% depending on your attention given to it,
Which is about as much as most people retain from print anyway.
And that was in an audiobook.
But the visual here would be harder to retain if comparing or tabling stats audibly.
Sleep learning, or hypnopedia, is largely a myth,
You can only consolidate small snippets,
Like short phrases in a language you are learning, etc or short quotes to remember from familiar material.
>>7832589
So this means that reading and speaking a book is superior?
I'm not a brain image scientist and am assuming that more color means better.
>>7832979
Basically this. Audiobooks are superior only when you're doing menial tasks.
>>7834273
I think it affects different areas.
>>7834273
I read that Ben Franklin (I think, may have been Abraham Lincoln) used to read while eating the words aloud.
He found he retained more content this way.
His theory was he tripled his input.
He created 3 memories (we would probably say something like neural pathways now if we wanna get scientific)
Instead of one memory of reading it,
He would create a memory of reading it, a memory of saying it, and a memory of hearing it (hearing himself say it) If this pic is correct -
>>7832589
It seems he was way ahead of the curve before brainscans and would have 3 or 4 areas of his brain activated simultaneously.
When you think about it, there is a slight delay when you recall something you read a couple of times, but it seems easier to recall what you said.
>>7836015
He wasn't ahead of the curve. People in the past used to read aloud. Somewhere along the line intellectuals became NEETs who didn't want to make a sound.
>>7836049
Yes, bit I doubt few people could explain why, and how it helps retention.
He also did it regardless of whether it bothered other people, which it sometimes did, at a time when it was not the done thing, and manners be damned.
>>7836015
>used to read while eating the words aloud.
what
>>7834263
This chart is ridiculous, I don't understand it's still posted regularly. What do you retain from “lecture”? 0%? This “laboratory” conducted an experiment that revealed people retain each way better with an exact, round 10% increase, then 25%? Seriously, it makes so less sense I can't understand there are people to believe it with no suspicion. It makes no distinction of the material studied, nor the quantity of data. Who can honnestly believe putting the informative equivalent of a book into an “audiovisual material” is time-efficient? What is “demonstating” history, geography or a painting? How can I practice history of Japanese music? Isn't “teaching” something that's possible once you already have a strong grasp of the target subject?
>>7832537
It depends on the book.
Plato is a dialogue so the audiobook is not bad while Aristotle wrote notes so it's better when read.
Poetry is good in audio since it's meant to be read outloud anyway.
Modernist novels are easy to lose attention for so they are bad as audio. But plot driven novels are good in audio.
Children of Hurin read by Christopher Lee was so amazing to hear, everyo
>>7832537
>Can a person retain the same information from hearing the words as they would reading?
For me it seems so.
The one problem is that when I listen to something I have a tendency to think about other things.
If I my mind starts to wander while reading it takes about 5 seconds to realizes it and "snap out of it," but when I'm listening to something I could go for 30 minutes before I realized I didn't take in a word of it.
I find that walking helps me stay focused on an audio book, so I do go for nice long walks while listening to something.
its harder to set your own flow. you might wanna think about things more without having to pause every 30 seconds
