Chetan Bhagat wrote “India’s Undereducated Young”. I don’t find anything “Indian” in it. It’s a global (pronounced “glaubal”) phenomenon.
I had written an essay a month back here, “Learning, Software Services Style”, which was, well, just contextualising the larger picture in the context of my industry. I got some pushbacks from friends. One dear friend wrote:
Gentle reader of delicate constitution, I suggest that you read Chetan Bhagat’s essay and re-calibrate your measuring scale. Don’t let your opinions of Bhagat’s paperbacks colour your view of the substance of his essay. Meanwhile, I will delve into what I see as a major source of the problem.
I refer to the problem of video-isation of our lives.
Why videos are a problem
Ever since I became a parent, I’ve been carefully observing my son’s engagement with TV. What I’ve seen has scared me. No, it’s not the TV addiction which scares me — he’s not addicted, not even to YouTube. It’s the nature of the connection between the human brain and an audio-visual input.
First, I noticed how young kids want to watch the same half dozen videos over and over and over again and again, month after month. It’s very strange — they have memorised the words by heart by then, let alone the plot of the cartoon. Why then do they want to watch it? I can only guess that familiarity gives them comfort.
Second I noticed my son’s behaviour when watching sit-coms, several years ago when he used to watch them regularly. The soundtrack would have laughter, and he would laugh, on cue. Sometimes, the soundtrack would have laughter, and he wouldn’t even laugh. It was eerie — as if the TV had such a grip on his brain that it would tell him to laugh, and he would laugh. Or it would laugh on his behalf, and he would learn, from this, where laughter is supposed to happen.
The third thing I noticed was the total absorption of his eyes when he watched TV. His eyes would not move from the TV. He would be slouching on the couch, watching, and I’d be watching him. Sometimes, he’d be pacing slowly up and down before the TV, watching. But at all times, his eyes would be totally fixed, as if hypnotised.
I then started thinking about what happens with other media.
How the brain reads
I watched myself reading a book. When reading, my brain goes through cycles, ups and downs. I’d read two paras, pause, my gaze would stray from the book, I’d think, and then I’d resume reading. This keeps happening. It needed some effort to even realise that I was doing this — it is an unconscious pattern. I do not have a photographic memory — I cannot imprint images of two dozen pages in my mind and then post-process the meaning. I think as I read, I pause and create patterns in my head. This is not just for abstruse philosophy texts — even lighter reads trigger this cycle.
It is apparent to me that learning, which is different from just reading, involves a post-processing phase where we make network connections in our brain between things we are reading and things we already know. This post-processing is a separate process altogether — it is not the same process as the reading of the words on the page. When we read, we are not reading constantly for half an hour. We are reading a few paras, pausing, and post-processing, then resuming the reading. This post-processing makes the connections, does the assimilation, integrates the new inputs with the massive thought-network in our brains. You can call it the process of “understanding”, but then when we read, say, “The Catcher In The Rye”, there is nothing to understand at the level of words. There is nothing unfamiliar or technical in the words. But we still pause, think, make connections to assimilate the images and ideas. I therefore prefer to use words like “assimilation” or “absorption”.
This does not get a chance to happen when we’re watching a video. My friend Ajay tells me that this is because of the way human brain is wired. Over some 20,000 years of evolution, our sense of sight has become wired to have such a huge priority over our brain that it wipes out all other mental processes as long as the eyes are stimulated. We are hard-wired to survive, escape predators, look for danger, with our eyes. Therefore, when the eyes are engaged with an audio-visual stream, the rest of the brain temporarily shuts down all processing. Our brain is hypnotised. With a book, the control is in our hands, so we read, we absorb, we resume reading. Our eyes look at the text, then they look away. Our brain is attentive, thoughtful, but not hypnotised. We are able to post-process.
This impacts our learning from video streams. If a video has lots of new information for us, there are new thoughts to process every 30 seconds. The brain needs to “look away”, think, and absorb what it has just been told, and then re-engage. But it simply cannot, because it is genetically programmed to be hypnotised by video.
So, I have come to the conclusion that learning a topic from a half-hour video is inherently inferior to learning by reading the same material from a 20-page chapter. The chapter will take more than half an hour to read and understand, but that understanding will be 10x superior. This applies as much to me as to the Tik-tok-saturated teenager.
Gapless, breathless
What makes modern YouTube videos worse is the modern trend of removing all gaps and pauses from videos by their editors. Have you noticed this? For instance, a photographer is explaining the features of a camera in his video, or a car enthusiast is extolling the virtues of the latest Skoda Kushaq. Look closely and you’ll see that there is literally no space between one sentence and the next at all (other than short sequences with just background music). In other words, the natural pauses when a speaker takes in his breath or pauses between sentences are all edited out. This is apparently the “better way” to make “tight” videos.
This is plain idiotic. It makes the video even harder for the brain to process, because the natural cadence of normal human speech is destroyed. The pauses allowed the listener too to pause and reflect. Now he gets 21 minutes of breathless word-flood.
What about audio?
What happens when we hear a podcast or audiobook?
What happens here is somewhere halfway between a video and a physical book. Unlike a video, an audiobook does not stimulate the eyes. Thus, the hypnotic effect of visual stimuli is absent, and the brain is not blanked out like it is with a video. But the brain still needs to pay attention very closely, because an audiobook or podcast does not have gaps every 30 seconds, hence the brain is not allowed the space to wander, absorb, and return. In this sense, an audiobook or podcast is not as reader-friendly as a physical book.
One can always say that a podcast or video can be paused if I want to think about what I’ve learned. In theory, this is true. But the way the mind works when we read does not allow a conscious action to be performed every minute or two. When reading, the mind goes into a zone where it keeps flipping between the text which is being read and the post-processing which is happening, at an almost unconscious level. With this deep absorption of the mind, it is infeasible to expect that it will shake itself out of its reverie every minute, press a pause button, think some thoughts, perhaps rewind (another button), re-listen, and then press “play” and proceed again. This is too distracting. With a physical book, this is instinctive and doesn’t interrupt the mind’s absorption.
Learning from video
What is video good for, when we want to learn? Answer: anything which does not require contemplation or conceptual understanding but has high visual content. Two answers from my experience: learning to cook a dish and learning to replace the button cell inside my car’s remote key.
I still read cookbooks, but learning cooking by watching Ranveer Brar or Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay demonstrate the dish on screen is 10x easier to learn from. The lesson just goes in — zzzip!
My problem with videoisation relates to the subjects taught in colleges, and to the industry I inhabit: software. They require concepts and contemplation.
Books and society
Books are exiting civilised society, specially among the younger sections. I am neck-deep in the software services sector, which is overwhelmingly an industry of young officers. I see this trend staring me in the face.
One writer wrote an article several years back, about families in his community and their relationship with books. (Wild horses will not drag from me the name of that community.) He said that when a family is travelling by train, and the kid asks the mother to buy him a packet of Lay’s Chips, the mother happily agrees. If the kid asks the mother to buy him a Chandamama or Amar Chitra Katha, the mother admonishes the kid and asks him not to waste money on books which will be tossed aside in an hour or two. The author lamented that this is the pitiful state of things in a modern educated middle-class family. I agree that this is common, but there’s probably nothing uniquely Indian about it.
I chat with teenagers who are academic achievers and are studying hard for their competitive exams in engineering or medicine. I often hear tales of how their parents pressurize them to study harder. The teenagers often say that if they pick up a storybook to read, their parents take the book away and scold them for getting distracted. But if they watch TV for an hour or two a day, their parents accept the behaviour — “After all, the kid needs to relax occasionally. No one can study all day and night, right?”
I cannot imagine what kind of perverted priority makes the parents do this. All these parents are college-educated upper-class professionals. Parents actually stop their kids reading books, but are ok with them watching TV or browsing YouTube.
When I look at awards and prizes, be they in colleges or in office performance events, I don’t see books being given. Books do not feature in birthday presents — affluent uncles give nephews Nintendo toys or PSx.
Books lie on office shelves. Some offices have libraries too. Many are management or technical books. The only books I’ve seen being picked up are reference books in CA and law firm offices, and this too is fading, now that all reference material is available online.
Students study science till Class 12 and never read any science fiction book. Some students claim to like history, but never touch, say, a William Dalrymple or even a Bill Bryson. Not even mythological fiction like an Amish Tripathi. No college student I know is excited about the eminently readable “Sapiens”. It’s not as if there are absolutely no readers in the world — thousands of books are being written and read, but what was a “normal” activity for a large percentage of college-educated adults has now shrunk to a niche preference of a tiny sub-group.
My point is not that no one reads Bill Bryson or “Sapiens”. My point is that young college graduates do not even read books in the subjects of their study, other than the bare minimum textbooks necessary. Books are no longer “normal” things which people give as gifts, borrow, talk about, or browse through — even people with college degrees.
In summary
Our brains are being saturated with video content to a degree 100 times more than what evolution has prepared the brain for. And studying any subject from a book usually gives us far deeper and longer lasting understanding than if we try watching video tutorials. Books need to come back as the currency for exchanging ideas and thoughts, and I wish we regain our ability to process a thought which extends over a dozen printed pages.
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