Reading and listening to audiobooks. The same information yet it’s a different experience.
Reading has been a long-time hobby of mine for many years; in addition, it has also been a struggle since I was small child. I was a poor student throughout elementary and high school. Audiobooks enriched my learning experience. Hopefully, I can help others come to the discovery that they are helpful and not a lazy way of approaching your education. They can be a useful tool to help anyone with the same problems I battle daily. There are differences of time, memory retention, and possible health effects. How both traditional reading and listening to audiobooks may contain the same information yet differ in all three of these aspects.
The first aspect is the difference in time. Reading a physical book is much slower as opposed to listening to the same material. A person’s vision, touch, smell and attention may take moments of time to focus yet this is the reason why many can recall facts. Hearing is usually the only sense that is not actively engaged while reading although a large short coming to listening is the absence of seeing how a word is spelled, how a paragraph is constructed, or how a sentence is punctuated. Concentration is an easy thing to break and sometimes a reader has urgent matters in life to attend to such as making sure dinner doesn’t burn and remember what was happening in the book. I have chatted with many fellow students and they have told me that it takes them months to read a 300-page book leading them to listen to the same title in audio and were able to finish in a matter of days. Radio programing was used widely during the Great Depression to bring the common folk news because many were illiterate. This brings me to the next aspect; memory retention. Is there a difference?
As I mentioned before, some people struggle to retain the information they read; I am one of these people. On the other hand, others have difficulty remembering what they hear. This scenario is a double-edged sword I discovered after years of reading and listening. When studying for school, I must read the physical text in order to retain the knowledge as opposed to only having a vague idea of what the book was about when listening to the text. When combining the two however I rarely forget the subject's theme, examples given, or the details included. The Department of Education has widely advised that parents read to their children during the developmental stages of childhood. Can we speculate that audiobooks might be a new link in a learning chain? To improve brain development in early childhood or prolong plasticity of the brain in late adulthood due to failing vision or mental deuteriation? Is improvement possible for children with dyslexia? These questions tie in with my next concern.
Possible health effects of listening to audiobooks could result in an active and cleaner lifestyle because of the urge to do something with your hands. I usually reserve science fiction or adventure audiobooks for tasks that I don’t enjoy doing, for example, folding laundry or mowing the lawn. I listen to history or political science books while I walk my dog and will change direction and listen to paranormal thrillers such as a Stephen King novel while I wash dishes. With exercise and a clean-living environment, a person’s health can improve however this can lead to over exhausting oneself when you are a beginner. Traditional reading only can lead a reader down a more perilous health avenue over an extended period, for example, weight gain, depression, and high blood pressure. Falling into the pages can also cause a reader to procrastinate doing chores or find the time to exercise, making their lives unhealthier by poor sanitary practices. Headaches caused by poor lighting or poor posture are also common.
To summarize there is potential in using audiobooks to educate many different groups or to entertain the disabled. With the right tools more people can be more productive and procrastinate less while honing their auditory senses resulting in a heightened vocabulary. Incidentally a concern arises that some would start to fail to recognize the written word. The human body was made to be active as well as for thinking, finding a right balance is the challenge.
*Written in September 2019 for EH101 as a Comparison Contrast essay