Seriously asking here, because I really don't get it. It's a simple activity, yet I have a real hard time with getting into the flow of reading for more than ten minutes. Describing it as mere ''adhd'' seems reductive to me. What are the mechanics of this shit and how do I turn back the gears into a functional position again?
You're not ready to read the truth about that yet. Stay in the Matrix for now.
>>24748647social media and the internet fry your brain with constant stimulus. Reading doesn't give you that type of stim so your brain gets distracted and wants to do other things. The solution is simple. Just start with reading 5 pages everyday. Then start increasing the amount of pages. After a few weeks reading 50 pages will not be a big deal. Just make sure you're also fully comprehending everything that you read or it doesn't count.
>>24748651>Just make sure you're also fully comprehending everything that you read or it doesn't count.No one fully comprehends everything they read.
>>24748649I gots to know>>24748651Right, but how does this ''brain frying'' really work?
>>24748647Try not doing anything for 10 minutes. Sit and observe what's around you, examine details you wouldn't normally pay attention to. You might get carried away. It might sound stupid but try it. Once you can do that, reading becomes easy
brute force itin modern life you have 700 things vying for your attention at any moment ( what's going on on /lit/, what's happening on x, has youtuber uploaded anything new, am i hungry, how long til i have to go to work, etc)If you constantly give in to every tentacle that slaps you with something new to focus on you'll never be able to sit and read which demands time and attention. the only choice is to sit and read and keep doing it even when it's uncomfortable
>>24748647What I've been doing lately is walking/bussing over to the local library downtown to read. It works well for me. At home with all the distractions I can't read. At the library, I can for read for hours. Give it a try! Plus plenty of qts around working on schoolwork.
you need to better enforce time management into your own life.start by scheduling out 30 mins of reading before bed and scale as you feel like it.
Here's my issue: Most of what I like to read is only available digitally, and since I don't have an e-reader this means either reading on my phone or on my laptop, but it gets really tiresome and heavy on the eyes after a little while. Please help me make the most of this.And I know I should expand my horizons and read more than what I already care about yadda yadda. I have thousands of books on my to-read. I am a FOMO chomo chode.
>>24748647So, imagine your brain. It has the neurons which connect to other neurons (close and far from each other). The connections between the neurons get formed when you learn to do something new.Divide it into two parts: let's call them the monke brain and the human brain.The monke brain wants to do easy stuff: building new neuron connections is tough, and if it will ever build any, it will be because of adrenaline rush (in order to get more of that adrenaline rush) or dopamine release or whatever.The human brain (the technical term is prefrontal cortex), on the other hand, has to do with reason and sheer force of will.You have to jump out of the trenches to charge at the enemy: ain't no way a monke will do that (better to run away).Your human brain will force the creation of new neural pathways because you need them rationally, rather than emotionally.When you read you activate a lot of different brain regions. You need to imagine stuff you never imagined. That's tough on the brain. Not only the close neurons will have to connect to each others to new ways, because your brain imagines everything.Well, that's tough on the brain: the prefrontal cortex consumes a shit ton of energy, if you don't use it often it even deteriorates because of it. Why are old people so bold? Exactly because of this, they just don't have what it gets to control themselves. Why are chess player so skinny? Same reason.How do you make it easy? You can't have a reliable system that will turn tough and "boring" (not repetitive, just very mentally exhausting) things into the same kind of drug that is social media and competitive gaming.What you can do is to trick your monke brain into tricking your human brain into tricking the monke brain to develop new neural pathways. What do I mean by that?Let's say you really love fantasy. You wake up and you think about the witcher 3 constantly. Why not try and read the books? Hopefully they'll hook you up to the point where you'll have enough neural pathways to reach a point that tomorrow you'll be like "I really wanna know what happens next".After a while of this stuff, you'll notice that you will be kinda scared if you don't reach your daily reading quota: creating new neurological pathways produces dopamine (biological beings like the competitive edge of being smarter than the rest) and now you are addicted to books.You will be literally able to slog through any book, even something that is obviously a 1/10 or even a book so introspective that you will activate the true final boss of underdeveloped brain regions (the default mode network).And this is how women are able to read a lot more than men. They have the advantage that they get horny off of smut, enough to get addicted to literature and read a litfic or two every now and then.For you as a man, I'd recommend to get something with a similar vibe as to what you (really) like right now.
>>24748755Are any of your books on annas archive in the internet archive section?Have you tried those? They should be better than the standard pdf file.
>>24748755You can try spending the rest of your life traveling all over the world hunting for the thousands of obscure books you want to read. Or you can save up for an e-reader.
>>24748759They might be, but I don't see your point here brother>>24748762I'll get one eventually, but tell me, does it really make that much of a difference? I mean, is it true that it's 1000x easier to read on an e-reader than on a pc or a tablet even if you're a massive slacker in general?
>>24748647put your phone in another room.
>>24748771They should be less heavy on your eyes.For example, picrel.Some books have creamier pages, others darker, others more yellow.
>>24748647Awww, cute birdie. :3
>>24748647It’s extremely dependant on what you are reading, find the right books and you won’t be able to stop reading it. Try starting 4 or 5 diff books at once and see which ones you want to keep reading vs don’t, over time you will find what you like.
Internet brain. You need to slowly use social media less and less. Once you break the cycle you'll be surprised at how better your concentration is.
>>24748647You are used to being constantly stimulated by electronic devices and when you interrupt this the part of the brain the enjoys the constant stimulation rebels and overwhelms the part of the brain responsible for long term decision making and self control, which is atrophied because you rarely use it. To reset your brain a little you need to go a couple days without using any sort of electronic device. No computer/TV/phone. You will get bored and your brain will have to find novel ways to get that stimulation, which hopefully will be more healthy that doomscrolling (don't do drugs).
>>24748785Getting epubs and editing them on Calibre is preferable
>>24749233>Internet brainIt wasn't always the case. I doubt that the average internet user had his neurons dried out and neutered this hard in 2008. It's a social media thing, 4chan included
It isn't. You just do it.
>>24748758Doesn't reading easily digestible books kind of end up doing nothing at all to your brain and perpetuates the low effort hedonist cycle further?
>>24749696Obviously you need to give your children Ulysses by Joyce. You know, they might never mature from those picture books.But let's be serious. Let's also imply that you are OP and you know nothing about books. Reading easy books has a different appeal and purpose than reading difficult books.First of all, easy books are easy only if you wanna see them that way. Aesop's fables were written originally for adults. But now we tell them to our kids. If you are low IQ, you'll only see the superficial aspect of them. It's called "death of the author": you can make out what you want of what you read.Secondly, if you really think about it, there is no opposite of easy books. There are just books with a specific purpose, and how well it is implemented.A manual shouldn't be difficult, if written well. An "easily digestible" novel shouldn't be difficult, if written well.The truth is, if you feel the appeal of easily digestible books to the point that you would devote your life to them, that's because you are retarded, not because they are easy to read. Would be able to stomach Dr. Seuss stuff every day for the rest of your life? No. That's because you don't have the brain of an infant.If you are not retarded then it will be difficult to spend time reading slop.The art we consume defines us: you might aspire to be someone who can quote the Bible by heart, but if your mind goes to the Warhammer novels, then that's who you truly are. Same goes with vidyas: you might look up to the Dota fags, but if you can't go beyond League, I'm sorry, but Dota is just too much for you. And as you may know, even League has its depth, but only if you are not a superficial retard.Last but not least, classics are *just* influencial. The Count of Montecristo was written by a nigger who was paid the more he wrote. It's slop before slop was invented. The aristocrats weren't reading Dickens, who was serializing his novel and was loved by the women who had nothing to do all day. The patrician choice was to study the Greeks instead.And the Greeks were killing their philosophers, because they were grooming young men into their useless activities.Pushkin was disregarded, because the true russian complexity lied in theological treatises. In one of his books there is even the word "roastbeef".Shakespeare was stealing, like every other theatre kid of his day, and how many times is there the word "whore" in Othello?And so on and so forth.As I said, the important thing is the execution. Dumas perfected slop, for example, but you might disagree. Maybe GRRM slop is better to you. You don't need to follow the masses, anon. Find your niche, and enjoy it. Just never stop exploring new stuff.Enjoy what you enjoy, don't take criticisms about your literary taste. If anyone ever tell you that you are dumb because you don't read the classics, just know that that person peaked in high school, because that's where he gets the metric of what is good literature and what is not.
