A coworker of mine is forever sending out links to podcasts and videos on work related themes. They’re generally high quality and have good information, but for the life of me I can’t bring myself to listen/watch them. To me, the brain bandwidth just isn’t there. There’s so much filler in people yakking about things. Give me the information in writing, please. I can then scan the bits that I already know and get right to the meat.
My coworker is the complete opposite. He loves the whole listening thing.
So where are you? Would you rather watch or read info?
Reading is best for me, I can tune out most everything else when I’m reading. Trying to listen I find all kinds of things get in the way of absorbing the information.
I’m more comfortable with reading, but a good lecturer is better than a bad writer any day. I’d rather read a poorly written text than listen to an inept lecturer, though.
It depends how much I want to find out. I can’t get as much out of the spoken word because, when things get dense, I have to go back (maybe several times) until I get it. One can’t do that with something oral that’s not recorded, and the real-time cost of repeating a recording (and having to listen to the stuff I’ve already absorbed) is too great. I assume most people are that way, but I could be wrong.
If I want a quick, dumbed down overview, then I prefer radio or TV.
My recent thread Rank your influences was after similar answers, but didn’t seem to attract much attention and/or interest. Maybe I was casting too wide a net.
Anyway, the specifics of your question make it easier to focus on the main sources for me:
Factual or technical information is best gathered through reading, primarily because the reader can control the pace that the information flows from page to brain. Rereading is a much easier option than rewinding (when that’s even possible).
Information that is to some degree dependent on emotional or judgmental factors, where “the facts” are not all that’s at stake, are better received through listening where emphasis, tone of voice and other clues help to reinforce (or to offset) the raw words.
Where facial expressions, body language, gestures, visual aids and other things that would be lost in a purely audio presentation are of value, then seeing the presenter in person or on some recording would be better.
Unless option 3 really adds those missing ingredients, though, the distractions may be more of the signal than the raw data.
To summarize, I get better opinions and interpretations by listening, I get better retained facts by reading, and unless there’s a whole lot going on visually, I get very distracted otherwise. I go to sleep in church, for instance, and have thus quit going (there are other reasons, too! ).
I attribute this hierarchy to having spent my early years listening to the radio in the pre-TV era. Radio dramas were easier to fantasize than reading allowed. By the time TV replaced radio dramas, I was disappointed in how poorly the people responsible for costumes, settings, and even the looks of the actors had done their jobs in relation to my own imagination. The Lone Ranger was the worst case. And just last night I started trying to watch the Alec Baldwin The Shadow and just couldn’t hack it!
I am an auditory learner. I never forget anything I am told, or anything I hear, if I am paying a certain kind of attention. I can also replay works of music in my head; I was very old when I worked out that not everyone could and that what people mean when they say they “remember” a piece of music is not the same thing I mean when I say that.
My secondary strength is tactile; I learn second best by writing, not reading. I also solve problems and asses consistency of statements in a tactile way.
I can of course learn by reading, and am a voracious reader, but it isn’t as easy.
I vastly prefer reading. Sometimes my mind may wander if I am listening and I may not have an opportunity to go back for information I may have missed. With written/printed material I can always go back and re-read it for clarification or to review information. Unless it’s recorded information, instant re-retrieval isn’t always available.
Reading versus auditory for me by a vast margin. Forget the lectures; just give me the text to read on my own, and I’ll come back with a better grasp of the subject than anybody who sat through all the lectures.
It kind of surprises me that I like music as much as I do, and that I am a good listener, since it is so much not my preferred mode.
Reading. I think a small part of the reason I ended up studying biology is because lectures always involve pictures, which gives me a chance to remember things. If not, it all goes in one ear and out the other, no matter how captivating the lecturer is.
Featherlou, I love music too. Maybe it’s a different part of the brain
Definitely. My friend’s sister had a stroke and she can barely talk, but she can sing fine.
I can pick things up either way but I am literal-minded so even if I hear things I picture them written in my head. When I try to remember what someone said, it’s through picturing those “notes” I made in my head as they talked.
I can’t remember whether it was Nova or another PBS show or even something on one of the other “educational” channels, and it’s been a year or longer ago, but there was a program dealing with brain areas controlling various “seats of information” and housing various memories and such.
One of the subjects had been a choir director or some other music professional who had suffered some freak ailment stemming from a cold or something equally as unlikely and the ailment had destroyed his sense of time in that he was constantly scribbling on a notepad “I am now realizing this for the first time!” (over and over in an obsessive manner). His family couldn’t communicate with him and he was mostly a vegetable.
But he could still do all sorts of musical things like playing a piano, singing, directing the choir, etc.
It was quite convincing that music (and perhaps other brain storage peculiarities) was quite separate from other activities.
I wish I could remember the name of the show or the series it came from – but I have a cold.
Definitely reading. I hate that crap on CNN and other sites where they only have a story in video format. Unless they have a “Read” link as well, I won’t bother with it.
I have a semiphotographic memory in that I can visualize words on a page after I’ve read them, remember the spelling of a word or name by picturing it, and so on. (Comes in handy in my work as a copyeditor: “Oh, wait, I saw this word spelled differently about fifty pages back, about four lines from the bottom, near the right margin.”) And, like others in this thread, I’d rather read/skim an article at my own speed (usually fairly fast) than listen to some talking head dumb it down for the masses.
On the other hand, I’d rather lose my sight than my hearing, even though it would mean I couldn’t work anymore (at least not in this job) because I couldn’t live without music and being able to sing.
I retain information much better if I read it than if I listen to it. I think it’s just that my short-term memory is lousy- I have problems when I’m reading if I can’t go back and re-read, too.
Reading by a long shot. If I am listening I have to concentrate to make out what the person is saying if they have an accent, talk to fast, etc. Reading is at my own pace (generally faster than spoken language anyway) and I can stop and ponder on bits if I like.
That’s basically what I came in here to post, so of course I agree totally. It’s extremely annoying when they do that. I’m getting a fraction of the information in the minute or so of the video that I could get with a traditional newspaper article in the same time.
When I’m learning something new, I like to have all the information right there in front of me in text. I don’t care how dry or boring it might seem, I feel much more confident learning that way than being given an “easy” multimedia presentation or the like - these latter invariably miss the one thing I don’t understand and need to study in greater detail. The same goes for most online FAQ lists. I don’t care if my answer is on page 968, buried under about five headings and sub-paragraphs, just give me the damned book already - the one for grown-ups, not the five page glossy, illustrated brochure for idiots that your marketing team insisted people wanted.
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