Read Every Day

The Christmas break was a good time to catch up on reading. I’m always amazed when I pick up a newspaper and find a story that parallels something I’m reading at the time. This week it appeared in the Tuesday edition of the NY Times science section – “Chimps and Monkeys Could Talk. Why Don’t They?” As it happens, I’ve just finished the chapter in Stanislaus Dehaene’s new book Reading in the Brain titled “The Reading Ape.” Dehaene, a French mathematician turned cognitive neuroscientist, cites research that indicates macaque monkeys respond to line junctions resembling some letter shapes, a first step in decoding written words. Observers have discovered that chimpanzees, apes and all their kin have distinctive sounds to communicate information. However, over the last 30 million years, as far as we know, monkeys have not spoken a single sentence.

The real point of this posting is not that monkeys apparently have the physical ability to speak and choose not to, but that the excitement of seeing parallels in what’s going on in our personal lives and what’s happening in the global community often leads us to greater understanding in both arenas. Often I even find information on the sports page that relates to study strategies, or on the cartoons page.

How does this translate to improving study skills? Frequent reflection on course material, even while strolling about campus, makes it more likely that we will make associations between what we see and hear in our everyday lives and what we study – a key element in creating long-term memories that produce quick and accurate responses to test questions.